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PRESS RELEASE – People’s Park Teach-In at UC Berkeley on February 26, 2024

For Immediate Release
Contact: Harvey Smith, peoplesparkhxdist@gmail.com, 510-684-0414

“What’s Going On?”

A Teach-In on People’s Park

7-9 p.m., Monday, February 26, 2024
Maud Fife Room – 315 Wheeler Hall, UCB

People’s Park is currently barricaded by stacked shipping containers topped with razor wire and guarded round-the-clock, following a midnight raid in early January by combined police forces from UC, CSU, Alameda County, San Francisco City and County and the California State Highway Patrol, organized by the UC Berkeley administration. Why? “The existing legal issues will inevitably be resolved, so we are taking this necessary step now to minimize the possibilities of conflict and confrontation, and of disruption for the public and our students, when we are cleared to resume construction,” said Chancellor Carol Christ (The Berkeleyan, January 16, 2024). Like others in the flood of official campus public relations communications with which students, faculty and staff have been inundated since the Chancellor’s 2017 announcement of plans to build student housing on the park, this response falls short of explaining why there is such fear of “conflict and confrontation” and such strong opposition to these plans, even from students whose interests the plans are supposed to serve.

For a broader range of perspectives on what was and is going on at People’s Park, Teach-Ins have been organized by UC Berkeley students (January 24) and by community groups (February 4). Please join us for the next one. There will be ample time for Q and A. Fiat Lux!

Presenters:

  • Harvey Smith, organizer of the People’s Park Historic District Advocacy Group and project advisor for The Living New Deal, UC Berkeley Department of Geography
  • Tom Dalzell, labor lawyer and author of The Battle for People’s Park, Berkeley 1969
  • Tony Platt, author of The Scandal of Cal: Land Grabs, White Supremacy and Miseducation at UC Berkeley and affiliated scholar at Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Law and Society
  • Steve Wasserman, publisher of Heyday Books and park activist since 1969
  • Sylvia T, recent UC Berkeley graduate, independent archival researcher and People’s Park defender
  • Sara Pech, Historic Preservation Club, a UC Berkeley student group
  • Representatives from the Suitcase Clinic, a UC Berkeley student group

Moderator:

  • Kristin Hanson, Professor of English, UC Berkeley

Please note that although masking is no longer required on campus it is much appreciated.

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Appeal Filed to Preserve People’s Park!

Make UC A Good Neighbor and the People’s Park Historic District Advocacy Group (PPHDAG) filed their joint opening brief to the appellate court this week against UC Berkeley under the California Environmental Quality Act challenging UC’s Long Range Development Plan and construction of housing on People’s Park.

We’ve said it before, but this excellent legal work needs to be supported. Please refer any and all to our DONATE NOW! page at http://www.peoplesparkhxdist.org/donate-now/

The appeal focuses on UC’s failure to analyze in its Environmental Impact Report (EIR) a lower-enrollment alternative or any alternative locations for the housing proposed at People’s Park. The lower-enrollment issue is similar to that at UC Santa Barbara, where the City of Goleta and Santa Barbara County have both sued the university for not complying with an agreement to build enough housing to keep up with its expanding student population. With the alternative location issue, UC is required to adequately assess alternative sites for student housing, which it has not done.

UC has twenty days to reply to our appeal brief. However, be assured UC Berkeley will continue its cynical and misleading public relations campaign on Housing Project #2 (People’s Park) belied by UC’s own planning documents. The goal is building 8,000 new student beds. However, UCB’s own Draft EIR includes a chart listing sixteen possible construction sites and proposed new beds provided by them. They total 13,566. The 1,100 hundred beds at the People’s Park site could easily be accommodated at these other sites.

The prime alternative site is just over a block away at the UC-owned Ellsworth Parking Structure, which UC says can provide up to 2,980 beds. Preserve a parking lot over a park’s much-needed urban recreational space? Why in the midst of extreme climate change must the trees and birds be part of a sacrifice zone? Urban planners agree that overcrowded urban areas like the Southside require more urban parks, not less, to promote human health and wellness and are needed in a time of drought, wildfires, pandemics and pending earthquakes.

Despite UCB’s claims of support, its student survey has been negatively critiqued in the Daily Cal, which has also written many well-researched articles and editorials denouncing the destruction of the park. Students were the primary participants in the recent effort to stop the fencing off the park. The Berkeley Faculty Association is also a critic of the plan to build on People’s Park.

UCB has described the housing crisis as “dire” and “acute.” We all realize that more affordable housing is needed, but most new housing is market rate and beyond the means of most students and the community. The crisis, however, can hardly be described as “acute” by UC Berkeley when it has known about its low ratio of housing per student for well over a half-century.

Campus messages portraying People’s Park as an area of frequent crime on the Southside is quickly countered by facts. A review of data from the Crimemapping website over a six-month period from January through June, 2022 for a 20-block area surrounding the park revealed that 94% of crime occurred outside of People’s Park. Crimes do occur there, but at a lower rate than the surrounding neighborhood. Keep in mind that the promoter of the image of the park as “crime-ridden” is the same institution that was fined $2.35 million in 2020 for underreporting campus crime.

The Chancellor’s message to the campus at the beginning of the semester was noteworthy in that it made absolutely no mention of People’s Park being added to the National Register of Historic Places. The value of the park as a cultural and historic site is beyond Berkeley, beyond California. It is nationally recognized and sought out by visitors from all over the world.

Now is the time for UC Berkeley to stop the delay in student housing construction by moving Project #2 to an appropriate location and to work with the community to make People’s Park a park that all can be proud of. The world is watching.

— Harvey Smith, People’s Park Historic District Advocacy Group
http://www.peoplesparkhxdist.org/donate-now/

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Response to Chancellor Carol T. Christ’s August 15 message to students about People’s Park

In the dead of night, UC moved on the park — barricading city streets, blocking access to sidewalks, and fencing the park. Protected by riot police, heavy equipment was brought in. Peaceful protesters sat in front of that equipment to keep the park open and prevent further deforestation of the trees, which UC last did in 2018. People peacefully demonstrated against the heavy machinery and destruction of the trees. They had already witnessed the changing climate in the park after much of the east side forest was demolished by UC just a few years before. Students — of UC Berkeley, local colleges, and high schools — and other community members, including Berkeley neighbors and former residents of the park were outraged by the violent closure and destruction of this community resource.

The university has presented the project as an all-or-nothing: either people will sleep in squalid conditions on the street, or they will build housing on the park. This is a false dichotomy. The park is a vibrant community center, park and recreation space — one of the few accessible and open to everybody, including the poor who suffer within a rapidly gentrifying East Bay. Hundreds of people use the park daily, gathering to play basketball or music, to share food, and community. None of these resources are preserved in the university’s plans, which would turn our park into a sterile dorm lawn. Maximo Martinez Commons is a courtyard just one block north and similar to the one proposed for People’s Park. When was the last time you or your friends used that space?

We need People’s Park to remain a community-run, user-developed and user-defined park. That is why dozens of community groups — such as the Berkeley Student Cooperative, the largest non-profit provider of affordable student housing in the city — stand with People’s Park in opposition to the university’s plans. Homeless advocacy groups such as Consider The Homeless, Berkeley Outreach Coalition, Suitcase Clinic, Berkeley Free Clinic, Berkeley Copwatch, and others stand in solidarity with the park defense.

The UC Regents actually refused Capital Strategies’ attempt to have a $53 million contingency fund available for crowd control, and unforeseen relocations of new residents, and other circumstances in the demolition of People’s Park. Those millions could instead be spent acquiring land for supportive housing sites right in Berkeley, or adding additional housing on a site recommended by the Chancellor’s Housing Commission. And what about the Ellsworth garage, equally close to campus, which has to be demolished due to earthquake danger? In their survey not long ago, 92% of undergraduates did not rank People’s Park as their top site for housing development. If building housing was the university’s top priority, they could have already begun construction on a different site equally close to campus.

Over decades, the UC has approached the park with malice and destructive intent. In spite of this, people have stewarded the land and grown more gardens, community, and lifelong relationships. For 53 years, every time the fences have gone up, they’ve come down! People’s Park is not just some empty real estate lot. People’s Park remains a user-developed park, open for everyone to gather, host events, or hang out and have lunch. Nothing has changed. Come out and see for yourself. We will rebuild once again. Help repair the park according to your own desires. Re-connect with the land!

— People’s Park Council (PeoplesPark.org)

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Opinion: Demand the impossible, defend People’s Park

By Osha Neumann, in Berkeleyside
August 12, 2022, 10:46 am

I thought it was hopeless to try to defend People’s Park. But then, on Aug. 3, in the early morning hours, park defenders tore down fences UC Berkeley erected to begin construction on student housing, reoccupied the space and sat in front of the big yellow front loaders and excavators. That evening, they held a rally and as I listened to them speak I realized: They are the ones who will determine what is hopeless and what is not.

Each person who spoke expressed the need to protect open and unpatrolled space, a place for trees to grow large, and for housed and homeless people to gather and share what they have in common. They mourned that they had not been able to prevent the university, in its first act that morning, from cutting down a grove of redwoods, some with trunks 3 feet in diameter. Homeless people, who had sheltered in their shade, spoke of them as friends they had lost.

In the 60s, we had a slogan: “Be realistic, demand the impossible.” Today’s People’s Park defenders are demanding the impossible: That the park’s 2.8 acres be recognized as “commons,” a space that no one owns or controls. That was the vision in ’69. That’s their vision now.

Read the full article in Berkeleyside