Berkeley Residents, Homeless Advocates Battle Over Fate of Ohlone Park Encampment

Clutching his morning coffee, Jeremy Wren walked across the grassy field at Ohlone Park toward the tent he’s been living in for the last two months, his large Siberian husky, Jeremiah, in tow.

“We were supposed to be out yesterday, but they came and told us that they had to wait for the court to be done,” said Wren, one of about 40 residents at the encampment located on a stretch of greenway near downtown Berkeley.

The site on Hearst Avenue, which emerged some six months ago as a protest over the city’s new encampment policy, has become the latest flashpoint in the progressive city’s perennial struggle to manage its intractable homelessness crisis.

Amid a concerted campaign by neighbors to remove the encampment, which some have called a public health and safety disaster, the city pledged to begin the process of sweeping the site this week. But that plan was postponed at the 11th hour, after the Berkeley Homeless Union, a group representing encampment residents, sued the city on Tuesday. A federal judge who had previously denied the group’s effort to block the sweep agreed to another hearing, set for June 6, over its latest request for a restraining order.

So for at least another week, the tents will remain.

For Wren, 53, who has gotten used to the site and the sense of community that has developed around it, this latest reprieve offers at least a temporary source of relief. He came to Berkeley from the Central Valley about five months ago, first staying for months at an encampment at Civic Center Park, and then moving here, along with most other residents from that encampment, after the city fenced off the site.

But he said he’s sympathetic to the concerns of people who live in houses near the park that don’t want to see a homeless encampment outside their windows.

“We’ve got a few of the bad apples. But everything’s pretty much OK,” Wren said. “We try to police ourselves and keep things cordial for the neighbors, because they have issues with people going on their front lawns and taking their lights and stuff like that,” he added. “We try to nip that in a bud.”

But many people who live near the encampment, which borders a dog park and is just a stone’s throw from several playgrounds, see things quite differently.

A group called Save Ohlone Park has demanded that Berkeley immediately remove the encampment. It recently submitted a petition with hundreds of signatures and threatened to pursue its own legal challenge against the city if it doesn’t take action soon.

“I’ve been coming to this park almost every day, multiple times a day, for about a year now, and it was a beautiful community. I felt welcomed and included,” said Nicholas Alexander, an active member of that group, who lives a few blocks from the park.

When the encampment ballooned in size a few months ago, following the closure of the Civic Center site, it dramatically changed the dynamic of the park and the surrounding neighborhood, he said.

“There are people I haven’t seen for months now,” said Alexander, as he stood in the neighboring dog park, watching his German shepherd frolic with a cluster of smaller mutts. “They refuse to come here because of the drama, because of fights, because of open drug use, because of public defecation and urination, because they’re finding needles in the public playgrounds, in the children’s sandboxes.”

As a formerly unhoused resident who spent years living and working in various encampments throughout the city, including the longstanding controversial site at People’s Park, Alexander said he is intimately familiar with the pain and uncertainty of not having a place to call one’s own. But he said encampments like this, which exist for months without any concrete rules or organization, and largely consist of people from outside the community, can quickly turn toxic.

“I’m part of a generation of homeless street kids in Berkeley,” said Alexander, 38, who exited homelessness more than a year ago after receiving one of the 32 Section 8 vouchers that were offered as part of a lottery involving about 5,000 applicants.

“I know the eventual outcome of this kind of space. It’s unmanageable,” he said. “You get so many people that there’s no mitigating the harms, and it just becomes an overflow of negativity until you have to clear it. And we have been at that overflow for weeks now.”

Alexander was among the more than 100 residents who last week packed into North Berkeley Senior Center, across the street from the encampment, for a heated community meeting about the site. During one particularly emotional moment, a man who lives near the park recounted holding his infant child as someone wearing a Spiderman mask appeared outside his house and began smoking meth. Police later apprehended the person, confiscating multiple knives, the man said.

“That is just one of the many stories, and why I feel so strongly about this,” Alexander said. “Because it has changed the entire fabric of this community.”

Berkeley Councilmember Rashi Kesarwani, whose district includes the part of the park where the encampment is located, convened the meeting after fielding a fusillade of complaints in recent months from her constituents.

“I have always said, and I want to continue to reiterate, that I believe that our parks need to be safe and welcoming recreational spaces for all, from seniors to toddlers,” she told KQED. “And the protest encampment that was established at Ohlone Park has always been in violation of park rules that ban overnight camping.”

That protest effort, Kesarwani said, is led by a group called Where Do We Go Berkeley, which began directing unhoused people to this and other encampments after the city approved its updated encampment policy last year. The policy, which Kesarwani authored, was passed in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Grant’s Pass ruling, giving cities the authority to sweep encampments and arrest people living in them, regardless of whether any shelter options are available.

Kesarwani said her policy simply clarifies that Berkeley can and should remove encampments that pose acute public health or safety hazards.

“I thought it was important to be clear that we will offer shelter whenever practicable, but in specific instances, when an encampment poses a life, safety or health risk, then we will close that encampment in an effort to protect the life of the individual who is sheltering there, as well as neighboring employees and residents,” she said, citing the longstanding encampment in West Berkeley along Harrison Street that the city has tried to close down for years amid an ongoing court battle with the same group now representing Ohlone Park residents.

“You have makeshift wooden structures with propane tanks inside. You have used syringes. You have open feces and urine. You have rotting food. You have rodents and rodent-harboring conditions,” Kesarwani said. “You have police and fire that are called to that encampment about every three days.”

That said, she added, every time the city has closed an encampment, it always offers shelter beds or hotel rooms and an array of social services.

“I want the public to know that whenever the city closes an encampment, we do so with the utmost care,” she said. “We offer shelter. We offer motel rooms. We also store people’s belongings so that they can retrieve items that are important to them at a later time.”

Wren has experienced the city’s outreach firsthand and appreciates the effort. He said he recently spent 28 days in a motel on the city’s dime, and frequently gets his meals and showers at Dorothy Day House, a nearby shelter.

“I think Berkeley’s trying, I really do,” he said. “It’s hard to deal with this, you know? So I understand [the mayor’s] situation, but I thank her for what she has done for me, because there’s a lot of resources around here.”

But despite all that, Wren said he still prefers living outside and intends to move to another encampment in the city if this one gets closed down. The shelters he’s stayed in, while helpful, have still kind of felt like “jail,” he said.

“I just don’t like the confinement, you know? I’d rather be living in the open,” he said, motioning to his tent in a shady area against a fence, next to a cardboard red Snoopy dog house with a garbage bag stuffed inside it. “I don’t wanna say I’m used to being homeless, but I kind of am.”