The questions of public land, development, and community open space remain contestable along with their historic conflicts. Land disputes in the US remain entangled with lawfare.
Non-violent direct action preparations and training
Sunday, August 7, 2022, 10 AM – 6 PM. Protect People’s Park.
Please plan to stay all day. Lunch provided by Food Not Bombs
This will be a day of preparation for being in the streets and park with your friends and probably some strangers. It’s an interactive day with a background in the history of nonviolent philosophy and practical action, the legal process, jail solidarity, affinity group formation, and consensus process decision-making.
www.peoplespark.org/...
“The appellate court has imposed a new injunction that, for now, precludes continuation of construction work, and any other activity not necessary for public health and safety. While this new injunction will add further delay and significant additional costs to the project, we are pleased the court has agreed to an expedited process. We are also satisfied with the court’s decision to allow the campus to close and secure the construction site pending the expedited ruling. The campus is now assessing options to get that done in a safe, effective way. While we are dismayed by the readiness of some individuals to engage in dangerous, violent and unlawful activity as a way of expressing their opposition to the project, our commitment to addressing an urgent student housing crisis, and to supporting unhoused members of our community, is unwavering. We have confidence in the strength of our legal position and will be exploring all feasible options to make up for lost time and open the student housing, as scheduled, in the fall of 2024.”
todaytrendingtweets.com/...
I get asked a lot how the People’s Park showdown fits within the political housing evolution of Berkeley. Its kind of irrelevant, honestly, it's a bit off the grid. I haven’t given much focus to People’s Park only because it’s University of California, Berkeley (UC) business, and it’s hard to defeat the UC when it comes to UC land. The university is proposing to build 1,100 dorms and 125 units for homeless people at the park and very low income people — among the largest student and low income housing projects ever proposed for a university where a sizable portion of it student body is housing insecure or homeless. Most homeless people accepted the housing but a few refused.
Undoubtedly, a lot of people favor People’s Park development because they see it as a form of slum clearance. The supportive comments on Berkeleyside’s article, on NextDoor, and a few I saw on Twitter makes it clear that the ordinarily stubborn NIMBYs are suddenly all down for housing development primarily because it’ll get rid of homeless people and the violent crime at the park. Most students who aren’t student activists think of the park as a place where lots of crimes and drugs take place.
I don’t have much feelings or relation to People’s Park because I grew up in West Berkeley, as far away from the park as you can get in this town. And our community is much different than Southside Campus. My grandfather who planted flowers there in ‘69 never bothered to tell me about it. Even when I took classes at UC Berkeley I wasn’t sure where the park was exactly. When I found it, I spent some time in it and it’s very much like Berkeley’s Civic Center park. It lacks amenities so it’s exclusively used by homeless people, it’s where homeless people gather and play and like any poor community it’s sometimes the site of violence — with homeless people as the victims.
But the UC is not some innocent victim. Taking advantage of the growing pro-housing attitudes of Berkeleyans after 50 years of a housing shortage, a student housing crisis and severe homelessness since the 1980s, they are finally attempting to settle their old score: People’s Park. I went over the People’s Park era in this blog but long story short:
People’s Park was originally a row of houses demolished for a temporary parking lot. At the height of the Counterculture Revolution, students and Southside local radicals occupied the lot to turn it into to park. UC ordered them to vacate and occupiers were brutalized by police officers. Since then, the park has hosted various revolutionary activities and homeless people in recent years while being owned by the reluctant UC.
The UC’s latest strategy of trying to redevelop park has been to propose one of the biggest housing packages and homeless housing ever proposed in the city. And now many Berkeleyans seem quietly supportive of the new housing at the park, and it is difficult to envision the kind of uprising happening now that happened in 1969 because that was a much different Berkeley. Berkeley in the ‘60s was a town that had a huge immigration of youths coming into it, a UC student population whose primary issue was free speech, cheap rents and a lot of housing, and this occurred during the Counterculture Revolution and anti-Vietnam War movement.
darrellowens.substack.com/…
(2021) As the project moves on to design development, the team is working out how to commemorate the park’s history while addressing the needs of the moment. A 12-story building will provide housing for 1,113 students, while another building will provide up to 125 units of supportive housing. According to Marsha Maytum, founding principal at Leddy Maytum Stacy, “There’s a lot of pressure on the site, given the number of units, to also meet the design goal of maximizing open space.”
www.architecturalrecord.com/...