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The origins of People's Park are a little more complicated than you imply. The area was originally obtained by the university by eminent domain, forcing homeowners to sell against their will after which the university bulldozed the houses and then left the site vacant for more than a year (see here). I think those original homeowners at least had a legitimate reason to be pissed off at the university.
That said, I find myself deeply irritated by the actions of local protestors in the decades since. I see no reason why the university has an obligation to maintain a homeless camp which was involuntarily forced on it in the first place, especially when there is an acute shortage of housing for students (the actual paying customers of the university). Some context is useful here: for many years the university has had a severe lack of housing for students. Most undergraduates live off-campus after their first year and even then, the university has trouble accommodating just the freshmen and transfer students who are guaranteed a spot in the dorms. A few years ago they were housing some students at Mills College about 10 miles away and at times have also housed students in the lounges of the dorms (which were not intended as bedrooms). By the way, the increase in enrollment that led the student housing situation to get this extreme was not unilateral action on the part of the university, but rather part of a University of California system-wide deal with the state to freeze tuition and enroll more in-state students in return for an increase in funding (see here for example).
I'm also annoyed by protestor complaints that the university should has plenty of alternative sites to People's Park and should use one of the those. Not only are some of those alternate sites much smaller than People's Park, most of them are already in use by the university (unlike People's Park) and developing them would likely face neighborhood anti-development activism of its own. Moreover, why can't the university develop multiple sites at once? The student housing shortage is so severe that even adding another 1000 beds (which the People's Park development is expected to do) would not come close to fixing it.
On another topic, I'm really skeptical about the university's plan to put a homeless shelter right next to a student dorm in the proposed People's Park development. I imagine most students would prefer not to live next to a homeless shelter, many parents would be freaked out by the idea and it would likely create a chronic source of problems for the university, especially if there are any altercations between homeless people living in the shelter and students in the dorm. Perhaps the university is simply planning to build the dorm first and then drop the homeless shelter idea once the dorm is already fait accompli.
Thank you for providing context; I really should have included the depth of housing problems at Berkeley (see page 10 and following). About a tenth of students were homeless at some point, though this mostly took the form of couchsurfing. (This matches up with how homelessness works; it's mostly temporary, and people only wind up on the street when they've exhausted their social networks.)
I'd also point out that the University predates the city; the city is there because of the University, which makes claims that the University is ruining the City, in a way, confused.
On the one hand, the homeless people are there in the area around the University already; they're just outdoors. On the other, I absolutely see what you mean. This is a hell of a compromise; more than half of the space will still be a park (an actual park, this time), and there will be more homeless/formerly-homeless people living on the site after the project is complete. It's a testament to just how ideologically committed the left-NIMBYs are that none of these concessions even registered. The maximalist position, I think, would have been an enormous mega-dorm covering the entire footprint of the site, and that's nowhere on the radar.
I don't think they're insincere, but ironically, the level of protesting has made this outcome considerably more likely. Supportive housing development, like any publicly-funded housing, involves a "layer cake" of various overlapping funding sources and deadlines, a byzantine array of mutually near-contradictory requirements, and so on. (Previously discussed here.) Any disruption or delay can trash the whole process.
Just wanted to mention that the stats on homelessness of Berkeley students and postdocs at the link you included seem somewhat misleading to me. The definition of "homeless" being used seems to include things like "living in an airbnb for a month while looking for long-term housing." They claim that around 20% off postdocs have experienced homelessness which seems crazy at first (postdocs aren't wealthy, but their salaries aren't that bad) until you notice that more than half the postdocs who say they've been homeless were living in an airbnb or motel during their period of homelessness. And 95% of them were homeless for under 2 months, which really seems to fit the pattern of living in a short term place while looking for a long term rental because you just arrived in town and didn't have a chance to visit and look for housing beforehand.
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Thanks for your original post and your reply to my comment. I think we agree on a lot and your take on the situation is perceptive.
Great point.
Yeah, but having homeless people in the area is a bit different from literally living next door to a homeless shelter. None of the existing dorms is as close to People's Park as the proposed dorm would be to the proposed shelter and that's bound to make some students and parents nervous. I did notice that the proposed development is apartment style housing for students so it probably wouldn't be freshmen living there, which might help.
To be fair to the activists, there are plenty of homeless people who for one reason or another prefer to live in an unregulated homeless camp than in a shelter. So if your position is "you should never say no to homeless people" then it makes sense to be upset about the development of People's Park and the concession offered by the university might not look very appealing. But I agree that from the perspective of the university, this is a massive concession.
I'm not sure. Carol Christ and the other high level administrators of Berkeley are not dummies and they must realize that (1) having a homeless shelter next to a dorm is bound to be a source of headaches and (2) there's a chance that the housing gets built but the shelter does not (maybe for the reasons you cite). Perhaps they are not explicitly planning on only building the housing but I suspect they wouldn't mind at all if that was the final outcome.
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To add a bit to the comment about alternatives to People's Park: some of the alternative sites are currently serving as parking lots. It should surprise nobody that there is a notable parking shortage around the university (albeit not as severe as the housing shortage) and so I imagine the university is wary of getting rid of those lots, especially if there is a chance that between destroying them and building new dorms, their development plans may get stuck in years of lawsuits, leaving them with less parking and no extra student housing in exchange.
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