People's Park Residents, Fighting for the Place They Call Home, Gain Reprieve After Court Ruling

Smoke rose from a sizzling grill. Racks of ribs, steaks and pork chops filled large aluminum foil pans sitting on white plastic folding tables.

Nicholas Alexander, master chef of People’s Park, wore a white apron with the six-pack abs of a bodybuilder on the front. Alexander, who had his blond hair in a ponytail, shuffled around the grill in scuffed Nike Blazers as sweat dripped from his brow. Barbecues are a cornerstone of the community that have made People’s Park their home, but on a sunny afternoon in September it felt like the Last Supper.

The slice of land in South Berkeley that has been a refuge for those with nowhere else to go is marked for development. Most of the trees that provided daytime shade were cut down in August when UC Berkeley attempted to start construction on student housing. Protesters cut holes in the chain-link fence, stopping the construction.

Only about a dozen tents — dots of blue and red scattered across the 3-acre lot — remain. Many longtime residents have relocated, but a dozen or so people spend most of their time at home in the park.

The trunks of fruit, redwood and oak trees, some massive, were dragged by People’s Park residents into a semicircle around the base of one of the last trees standing. It’s a place to sit, eat barbecue and reminisce about what the park used to be.

“We hadn’t had one in a long time, and one of our community members ended up donating their food stamps — there’s something around like $800 on it,” Alexander said about the barbecue. “Oftentimes, the most resources I get to do my barbecues or do what I’m doing here are coming from those that have the least. And they’re doing that because we’re family.”

The park is four blocks from UC Berkeley’s campus. The university, which warns incoming students to avoid the park, needs 8,000 units to alleviate a housing crisis that has left some students unhoused and many others scraping by to live in Berkeley where, according to Zillow, the median rent is $2,950, roughly $1,000 more than the national median.

Construction on a 1,100-bed project was halted by a state appellate court in August. In December, the court released a “tentative decision” that sided with park advocates. According to the court, the university, which has said the project will also include supportive housing units, failed to consider other sites. The court also said that the development plan could run afoul of the California Environmental Quality Act.

On Friday, the state appellate court ruled that the project must stop. In the decision, though, the court said the university does not need to abandon it, but “must return to the trial court and fix the errors” in the environmental impact report.

The ruling stems from a 2021 lawsuit (PDF) filed by neighbors and activists concerned about the influx of student residents adversely affecting the neighborhood and seeking to preserve People’s Park as a historic landmark of student protest and a residence and resource site for unhoused residents.

The last park residents standing have a reprieve — for now.

For years, People’s Park has had an active community with its own rules and problems. It is a destination maligned by clashes with police and a reputation for drugs and crime, whether deserved or not. For people like Alexander, the park space is worth preserving — and occupying.

Residents care for each other because they share a common bond: being unable to afford a place to live in one of the most expensive regions in the country. They share resources, from a magnifying glass to help with bad eyesight to first-aid supplies, paintbrushes and fresh pillowcases. They look after each other’s pets. They share their food and food stamps. Some have shared tents.

Erik Morales, a longtime People’s Park resident, said he moved to Berkeley from Guatemala when he was 15. He heard about the peace and love movement in Berkeley, which inspired him in Central America.

“We didn’t have the right to speak, to say what our feelings were,” he said.

Morales frequently cooked breakfast for the park’s residents. The kitchen is where Morales explored his Latin roots, he said.

“Coffee and scrambled eggs — you know, scrambled eggs with tortillas, with some cheese. They love it,” he said. “I’ve made different things, and I always combine some Latino flavor — add a little amount of our cheese or add some of our sausage or something. And then when it’s done I go around yelling, ‘Good morning, mother flower,’ waking everyone up to eat.”

A perception of violence

One of the few public green spaces in Berkeley, People’s Park is off Telegraph Avenue, between Haste Street and Dwight Way. It’s near where students gather at Romeo’s Coffee, Mezzo and Moe’s Books. To live in Southside Berkeley is to know People’s Park.

A symbol of counterculture, the park became a community gathering spot in the 1960s. Over the decades, it has hosted concerts, stand-up comedy, dance performances and circuses. The university acquired the land through eminent domain in 1967 with the intention of turning it into student housing, according to Picture This, California Perspectives on American History (PDF), an educational resource from the Oakland Museum of California.

There was not enough funding to complete the housing project, and the land became a muddy, garbage-filled dumping ground according to Picture This. Community members cleaned the park and attempted to turn it into a community space, but after a month of work they were stopped by bulldozers and police officers sent by the university and the city. This launched a months-long protest.

On May 15, 1969, a date known as Bloody Thursday, California Highway Patrol officers surrounded the park. The officers waited for about 3,000 students to march there after a protest at Sproul Plaza on UC Berkeley’s campus. The students were pelted with bird shot and blasts of tear gas. One person died, and 110 people were injured. The National Guard was summoned by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan to end the chaos.

The decades-long battle for who has rights to the park continues. On Aug. 3, construction was disrupted by dozens of protesters who ignored police orders and tore down the security fencing and attempted to physically block construction vehicles. The California 1st District Court of Appeal placed an injunction on the project.

Students’ perceptions of the park tend to be shaped by stories disseminated by the university: Freshmen arrive in Berkeley armed with warnings from their parents’ Facebook groups that share tales about drugs and crime in the park. Orientation leaders for the university supply tips on how to stay safe when passing the park at night. And notifications from UC Berkeley WarnMe, an emergency notification system, flood phones with emails and text messages, often advising students to avoid the area because of “dangerous activity.”

“They [orientation leaders] told us to use BearWalk or the night shuttle and to always be aware of our surroundings when we’re in this area,” said UC Berkeley freshman Charlotte Palmer, referring to the night safety services offered by the university.

Berkeleyside compiled shooting reports from the last few years to document the increase in gun violence. On Oct. 8, there was a fatal shooting on Telegraph Avenue, the third person slain in Berkeley in 2022 compared to zero in 2021. Park residents said the violence isn’t coming from within their community. Rather, violence in the city bleeds into the park.

“I think there is a lot of violence, but ultimately there is a lot more violence that happens around Berkeley and South Berkeley,” Alexander said.

He equated the conflicts that erupt inside the park to the types of fights any family has.

“When you’re unhoused, when you don’t have that much stuff, when you’re dealing with not getting enough sleep, when you might be using and then someone happens to steal the little that you have left, I would probably snap, too,” Alexander said. “I think that’s what a lot of people miss. They just see the violence and they think of people here as horrible, not worthy of society.

“A lot of this violence can be blamed on the society we find ourselves in.”

Understanding the needs of unhoused people

The 2022 point-in-time count of unhoused people in Alameda County by EveryOne Home, an organization that works to end homelessness, reported 9,747 unhoused people in the county. Just over 1,000 live in Berkeley.

During the pandemic, People’s Park residents were offered rooms at Rodeway Inn, the rectangular, off-white building on University Avenue. The inn operated under Project Roomkey, a state-funded program that created transitional facilities. Around 40 of the 64 park residents chose to move there. Other residents had housing alternatives or were in the process of transitioning to another housing facility.

Peter Radu, an assistant to Berkeley’s city manager and the city’s homeless services coordinator, said the city is funding housing navigators and landlord liaison services, and helping residents with “getting their documents in order, getting their applications together, getting their proof of income together — all the things that you need to be ready to sign a lease.”

He continued, “And then on the landlord side, searching for landlords who are wanting to partner with us, advocating on behalf of the clients to those landlords.”

Ari Neulight, UC Berkeley’s homeless outreach coordinator who works closely with the unhoused community around the university, including People’s Park, said most of the original Rodeway Inn residents moved to other permanent housing options.

Rodeway Inn provided temporary housing and food, but it did not offer mental health services. Neulight said the two goals for the project were based on park resident feedback: They wanted a place to sleep that wouldn’t be interrupted by the police and somewhere to congregate during the day.

After just a few months of living there, some inn residents felt like their needs were not being met. Morales, the longtime resident of People’s Park, said the staff treated residents like they were still unhoused. They weren’t given keys to their rooms, and staff members locked and unlocked the doors. Many of the residents left their doors open during the day to maintain independence.

“They’re looking at us like we’re just homeless people, and they don’t have to care about us,” said Morales, who lived at the inn. “We are people, too. We aren’t here to fight with anyone. We’re here to move forward.”

Jennifer Wolch, professor at UC Berkeley’s Department of City and Regional Planning who has researched urban homelessness, said it is important that unhoused people not feel like they are at the whim of the city.

“One of the things that I found when talking to folks that may be living in their cars or living in an encampment is they will often say, ‘This is my choice,’ or, ‘This is what I want,’ as a way of asserting individual autonomy,” Wolch said. “Most people understand that it’s not because they literally would rather be on the street than in a nice apartment, but it says to whoever is talking to them, ‘I’m a person, and I have respect for myself, and I have autonomy.’”

Morales said he graduated from City College of San Francisco in 2021, where he studied psychology and social work. He has volunteered in community outreach for years, but after interacting with the staff at Rodeway Inn, which is managed by Abode Services, a Fremont-based nonprofit, he sees a potential career path where he could combine his passion for community and his life experience.

“A professional guy with a diploma from a university or whatever can implement whatever he learned from the stupid books, but he can’t understand us, the people,” Morales said. “If he’s not capable of doing his job, then he can go find another job because I can do (the job). I graduated from the same field. I can do paperwork, I can do outreach and I can be a housing coordinator.”

Each resident at Rodeway Inn was offered a single or shared room with a bed, table and small bathroom. The beige walls provided less of a creative outlet and self-expression than the residents had in the park.

“To give it a real analysis, what they call transitional housing means transition people from the street back to the street,” said former park resident Lisa Teague, who now lives next to the park in a Satellite Affordable Housing Associates housing complex. “Providing housing doesn’t solve the problem. They seem to think that the sort of jail-like atmosphere is important to somehow cause people to adjust.”

The People’s Park community felt like they were being divided by the city and the university. According to Wolch, this loss of community could impact mental and physical health.

“It’s important to understand that when people are living essentially unsheltered — in either communities on the sidewalk or in tent communities or under a freeway or [in a] vehicle community — they survive in no small part because they have relationships with other people,” she said. “But people, if they’ve been in that kind of community and understand the way it has been central to their ability to navigate this kind of extreme situation, then being completely torn away from that community may make people say, ‘No, I’m not going to a housing situation.’”

A vision for the park

Alexander recognizes that community support matters whether you’re living outside or under a roof. He developed a connection to the park long before he was a resident: When he was 17, Alexander took a bus from a commune in Oregon to Berkeley, where he soon found the park.

“I’ve never lived in this park perpetually, but for months on end I used to be the hammock person,” Alexander, now 35, said. “I would put hammocks up in trees and the cops would literally kick people out from under me.”

As a teenager, his “family” was a group of wandering souls. Some were members of the foster youth community; others had run away.

“We were all along Telegraph, all along Shattuck,” Alexander fondly recalled. “It was really those folks that introduced me to street life in Berkeley and kind of welcomed me as family. And we are family.”

Alexander lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Oakland, which he calls his vacation home. He wants to transfer his Section 8 housing voucher to Berkeley. He maintains a built, domed structure in the park. He said he will move out of the park once the university abandons construction plans or if he is physically removed.

“There were a lot of tears, a lot of community members crying everywhere, and going through their own personal grief,” said Alexander, who was arrested for his role in the protest that blocked construction in August. “Seeing so many trees cut down, so many memories, so many stories that will now only be in memory, that’s a true tragedy.”

Inside a fenced-in circle with only one entrance and exit, residents store first-aid supplies and food donations. They sit on stray couches and logs.

The kitchen is at the center of Alexander’s dome, which is camouflaged by planks of plywood that have been painted by residents. There are rebellious messages to the university and supportive words for the people occupying the park. At the very top of this dome, a hammock swayed in the breeze.

On either side of the hammock, Alexander stores old riot gear: gas masks, black bandanas and a shield with the transgender rights flag and the words “We are People’s Park” on the front. There is a trapdoor in the structure, perfect for a quick escape.

Alexander maintains he has a vision for the park’s future.

“My ultimate goal, maybe even where the kitchen is, would be a little community center here with social workers and resource workers that would essentially change some of the dynamics of the park that have more problematic behavior,” he said. “Really honoring the legacy of People’s Park, not trying to sanitize it.”

The tongs he used to flip the ribs were in his hand as he spoke wistfully of his plans for renovating the dome. He wants to add a second floor, an even higher platform to fly his Rebel Alliance flag from Star Wars, a symbol of resistance as the remaining residents of People’s Park persist in making a stand.