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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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