Berkeley’s Individuals’s Park, for half a century a logo of Bay Space protest and counterculture and for years the house of quite a few unhoused individuals, is one step nearer to turning into pupil dorms and housing for low-income neighborhood members after a choose tentatively dominated Friday that development can begin.
Alameda County Choose Choose Frank Roesch, in a choice that gained’t turn out to be official till it's issued in writing, in all probability subsequent week, dominated that UC Berkeley can start clearing the historic park and beginning web site work as a result of the college’s plan doesn't violate the California Environmental High quality Act.
UC Berkeley and the town of Berkeley proposed redeveloping the park in 2018, calling it a first-in-the-nation plan to construct long-term supportive housing for homeless individuals on college land. The college would additionally construct 1,100 models of badly wanted pupil housing and retain a number of the park as open inexperienced area, whereas additionally erecting a monument to its storied historical past.
However two organizations — the Individuals’s Park Historic District Advocacy Group and Make UC a Good Neighbor — collectively filed a lawsuit, arguing, amongst different issues, that the college had different choices for growing housing and had not adequately studied them, as required by state regulation. Two different teams filed their very own challenges, which will likely be consolidated into the choose’s determination.
UC spokesperson Dan Mogulof stated college officers are “happy with the choose’s determination and stay up for the courtroom making it official early subsequent week, simply as we stay up for beginning development someday this summer season.”
However Harvey Smith, president of the Individuals’s Park Historic District Advisory Group, stated Friday that it plans to attraction the choice and ask for a keep stopping the college from launching work till a state appeals courtroom weighs in.
Because the authorized points wended their method by the courts, all the homeless individuals within the park have been supplied transitional housing for as much as a yr and a half, in addition to meals and social providers. Few, if any, unhoused individuals stay within the park.
Metropolis and college officers have hailed the plan as a mannequin for different universities and a landmark resolution to each California’s homeless disaster and the housing scarcity at UC Berkeley and different UC campuses.
“It begins with partnership,” UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ stated earlier this spring. “And it additionally begins with the college’s accepting that that is our duty to deal with the tragedy of homelessness in our midst.”
However nobody acquainted with the park or its historical past thinks change will come simply.
Individuals’s Park was born in 1969, when the college introduced a plan to develop the land, which is about 4 blocks south of the Berkeley campus simply east of Telegraph Avenue.
Livid on the proposed growth, lots of of individuals dragged sod, bushes and flowers to the empty lot and proclaimed it the Individuals’s Park. In response, UC erected a fence. The scholar physique president-elect urged a crowd on campus to “take again the park” and greater than 6000 individuals marched down Telegraph to do exactly that. A violent conflict ensued, leaving one pupil useless and scores injured.
The park has remained ever since, a Berkeley establishment. It’s additionally, in keeping with some, a magnet for crime. In Could, the park was added to the Nationwide Register of Historic Locations.
Garrison reported from Sacramento, Leavenworth from Berkeley.
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