People's Park Student Housing Heads to State Supreme Court

The People’s Park in Berkeley, a landmark homeless encampment first occupied by hippies in the Bay Area’s 1968 “summer of love,” will continue to be a lightning rod for a simmering civil dispute.

A state appeals court in San Francisco last week overturned a lower court ruling in August that gave UC Berkeley the green light to clear the 2.8-acre park and erect a student housing campus with 1,100 student beds and 125 units set aside for homeless people who live in the park in makeshift shacks, including some Vietnam War veterans who say they’ve been there since the 1970s.

The university, which owns the property—and had already started clearing trees from the park in anticipation of construction this year—is vowing to take the case to California’s Supreme Court, with the backing of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“A few wealthy Berkeley homeowners should not be able to block desperately needed student housing for years and even decades,” Newsom said, in a statement after the appeals court ruling was announced.

Last year, the University of California said it would have to deny enrollment to 5,000 first-year and transfer students because it could not meet a set of court-ordered student housing requirements.

Community backlash began after UC Berkeley announced plans in 2021 to build two apartment buildings, one 12 stories and the other six stories, on the People’s Park site, one of the last undeveloped parcels near the campus.

Three court challenges to UC Berkeley’s project were jointly filed last year by Local 3299, a union that represents UC service workers, and two community groups, Make UC A Good Neighbor and Berkeley Citizens for a better plan.

The groups argued that environmental impact reports filed by UC failed to account for how projected student enrollment growth at the Berkeley campus over the next 15 years will negatively impact the surrounding community by increasing greenhouse gas emissions and clogging dangerous wildfire evacuation routes. The court filings also claimed that UC Berkeley failed to consider more than a dozen other sites for the student housing.

The university has been trying to relocate people who live in the park, which is bounded by Haste Street and Dwight Way about four blocks south of the UC campus, to a nearby Rodeway Inn on University Avenue.

UC Berkeley says it will preserve 1.7 acres at the park as open space, pledging to honor the history of People’s Park with a memorial walkway, murals and photo displays.

The People’s Park, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in June, was so named in 1969—when an earlier plan by the university to build student housing in the 2.8-acre park generated protests that led to the declaration of a state of emergency.

One person died in the violence that erupted during the 1969 protests, which saw thousands of demonstrators descend on the park and occupy it.  The civil unrest in 1969 was a stark contrast to the Woodstock vibe of the Bay Area’s laid back “summer of love” in 1968, when hippies established communes in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco.