At Berkeley’s Quality Inn, resident Kenneth Brookins can often be found beneath a canopy in the parking lot, sitting on a plastic chair.
Beside him, two other plastic chairs are an invitation for others to join him in quiet conversation. Since residents aren’t allowed into each other’s rooms, catching people on their way in and out of the inn is one of the only ways to connect, he said.
“My connection with people is when they come by,” Brookins said.
Those conversations offer a semblance of the community he once had at People’s Park before UC Berkeley closed the park on Jan. 3 to make way for student housing after a prolonged battle over its fate. When it did, the university allowed some former residents of the park and regular visitors like Brookins, who were also experiencing homelessness, to move to the Quality Inn.
With the university’s lease of the hotel expiring at the end of June, Brookins and around two dozen other residents who moved from People’s Park may soon be forced to split up, further splintering a group of people who had become accustomed to the park serving as a place to find both camaraderie and resources.
“People’s Park did a lot for me,” Brookins said. “I hate that they closed the park. They messed up a good thing.”
Like many who frequented the park, his relationship with the space was an informal one; he wasn’t a resident there but a frequent visitor. Volunteers say that’s what made the space so critical: For decades, it served as a historic landmark, open green space and gathering place for unhoused and housed residents alike to get a free meal, a fresh set of donated clothing, medical care, or even just some respite. But concerns over crime and recreational drug use at the park, along with the lack of accessible student housing around UC Berkeley’s campus, led to disputes over the space.
Earlier this month, the California Supreme Court ruled that UC Berkeley could proceed with a plan to construct a 1,100-bed dormitory at the park for students, along with 125 apartments for low-income residents — marking the end of the legal battle that capped a contentious, more than half-century-long fight over the park’s fate.
For many of the park’s visitors, including unhoused people like Brookins, volunteers, activists and neighbors, the ruling marks a turning point as each group comes to terms with the closure and seeks different ways to adapt.
At a press conference following the decision, Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín said it was important for the university to honor the park’s history while still moving forward with its plan to build housing.
“History should not stop us from progress,” he said. “And the reality is that the current state of People’s Park — with rampant crime, widespread homelessness — is unacceptable.”
Brookins has been unhoused on and off for at least three years. He said he didn’t sleep at the park regularly, preferring instead to spend some nights in shelters and other nights moving between cities within the Bay Area. But he often visited the open space when looking for a place to rest or to get free food, clothing and other resources that local nonprofits provided there.
The park’s closure has made distributing those services a lot harder, said Enrique Marisol, a volunteer who helped provide harm reduction and mutual aid services to park residents and visitors. Marisol said they, along with other volunteers, tried to look for a new location to move their operations — at Sproul Plaza and the “chess corner,” at the intersection of Telegraph Avenue and Haste Street, where people gather to play informal games — but got stymied by UC and city of Berkeley police, who told them they had to move their operations elsewhere.
The volunteers have settled on a small triangular strip of open space at the intersection of Dwight and Telegraph avenues — unofficially known as the Peace and Freedom Memorial Park — but Marisol said they continue to face police interference there, too.
