UC-Berkeley Walls Off Peoples Park Site for Student Housing

The University of California at Berkeley is sending strong signals that it is preparing for the final chapter of the saga over its plans to build a new 1,100-bed student housing dormitory on a site that encompasses People’s Park.

A large law enforcement task force swept through People’s Park at the beginning of the year and cleared out the people who were still living in the park, a cultural landmark that has since 1969 evolved into a homeless encampment.

The police action was followed by UC-Berkeley barricading the construction site with a wall of double-stacked shipping containers, closing off access to everyone but crews from the general contractor for the student housing project, San Francisco-based Webcor.

For more than three years, UC-Berkeley has actively planned to build a new dorm at the site, along with a facility encompassing 125 units reserved for people with low incomes or those who are homeless. About 60% of the park would be maintained as green space.

UC-Berkeley is expecting approval from the California Supreme Court to resume building the student housing project.

The university halted construction in 2022 after a high-profile protest demanded that the site be preserved as a historic landmark. The protest ended with $1.5M in damaged construction equipment and several arrests.

An appellate court issued a temporary injunction last year extending the construction pause indefinitely while several legal issues were resolved, including whether noise from the student housing development would constitute pollution under California’s strict Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).

In September, the California legislature passed a law, signed by Gov. Gavin Newson, that said residential noise could not be considered a significant environmental impact under CEQA.

UC-Berkeley expects the state’s top court to lift the injunction on construction of the new dorm.

“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,” UC-Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ said, in a release the explained the decision to restrict access to the site.

The plans for a new dorm at People’s Park actually pre-date the famous park itself: the university cleared the site in 1967 with plans to build a dorm. Two years later, local residents established a park on the vacant site that become an encampment, with occupants including several Vietnam war veterans who remained there for the next 50 years.

People’s Park was named a cultural and historic landmark by the city of Berkeley in 1984.