After years of protests, pushback and delays, construction began this year on a UC Berkeley student housing project that will house 1,100 undergraduate students and 100 formerly homeless Berkeley residents. Construction began this June and has moved along as planned, university officials said in November. From the street view, all one may see is a towering wall made of shipping containers surrounding the 2.8-acre lot known as People’s Park, with a crane looming overhead.
On the inside, concrete covers much of what was once a hub for political activism. Pockets of landscaping and trees line the portion of the lot along Dwight Way, but much of the former park’s trees and greenery are gone. Site grading, debris removal, utility work and landscaping began this summer as part of Phase 1 of construction. UC Berkeley was permitted to move forward with its student housing plans after the state Supreme Court ruled against two groups who alleged the environmental review of the university’s proposal failed to adequately analyze noise impacts from future residents or alternative sites for the proposal.
Activists had rallied against the project – and continue to do so – for years in an attempt to save a historic community space. People’s Park was first established as an unofficial green space in the late 1960s when local activists reclaimed a site that the university took ownership of through emanate domain. What homes initially existed on the site were demolished to make way for new student housing.
Violent clashes have taken place at the park in the decades since, the first being “Bloody Thursday” in 1969. What was supposed to be a protest in which thousands marched from campus to tear down a fence the university had erected to keep out trespassers turned into a heated battle between demonstrators and hundreds of officers, ending with many injured and one dead. History repeated itself at the start of 2024. The university began staging its wall of shipping containers, protesters assembled and hundreds of police officers responded. No deaths occurred this time but at least six arrests were made. The wall still stands to this day. The university said it intends to honor the history of People’s Park and will retain 60% of the site as public open space.
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