During an overnight cleanup, police in Berkeley remove protesters from People’s Park

An uphill battle to build long-sought student housing in the legendary People’s Park in Berkeley, California, took an extraordinary turn early Thursday as hundreds of law enforcement officers surrounded the site and removed several dozen activists and homeless campers in preparation for construction. of a wall of shipping containers around the perimeter of the park.

The midnight operation, carried out while most students at the nearby University of California, Berkeley, were still away for winter break, was the latest attempt to proceed with a $312 million construction project originally scheduled to break ground in 2022 to go. It underscored the growing tensions surrounding California’s acute housing shortage, especially in college towns.

Law enforcement officers far outnumbered activists at the site who had been tipped off about the operation and who greeted the show of force from trees and tents set up in the darkness.

“We try to get people to leave, but if they refuse, they are arrested,” university spokesman Dan Mogulof said by phone from the police zone around 2 a.m. “Everyone was offered shelter. A few took us along. But some activists are still on the site. Right now I’m looking at a couple sitting on the roof of the park bathroom and a couple in a tree fort.

About two hours later, authorities said the site had been cleared and construction crews were preparing to double-stack about 160 empty shipping containers to cordon off the park grounds.

By dawn, seven activists had been arrested on charges of trespassing and failure to disperse, and had been cited and released, the university said.

Of the eight homeless people who were in the park when authorities arrived, Mr. Mogulof said, three accepted offers of temporary housing and the rest left voluntarily.

The university provides housing for only 23 percent of its students, by far the lowest percentage in the ten-campus University of California system. A plan to build 1,100 new units of student housing and 125 units of supportive housing for the homeless on part of the university-owned park site has been repeatedly postponed since last summer.

A small contingent of Berkeley residents and activists have aggressively pushed to preserve the entire park, which was the center of bloody counterculture protests in the 1960s. In late February last year, a San Francisco appeals court sided with opponents of the development plan, who argued that the university had failed to conduct environmental reviews required by state law. An appeal is pending before the California Supreme Court.

The university has struggled to cordon off the site, which is littered with litter and graffiti, and deter encampments. When the university tried to fence off the site in August 2022, large protests broke out and the crowd tore down the fence.

Since then, Mr. Mogulof said, the city and university have spent more than $6 million to rent motel space and move homeless people occupying the park into shelters and supportive housing, including an initiative in November when most of the roughly 20 people those in the park, who were still camping on the property, were moved to a local motel.

University officials acknowledged that construction could not begin until the environmental review issue was resolved by the courts, but they said the site’s legal status as a closed construction zone had been “repeatedly reaffirmed” and that the park’s fencing was crucial importance was to prevent a revival. crime and new encampments on the property.

“Given that the existing legal issues will inevitably be resolved, we have decided to take this necessary step now, to minimize disruption to the public and our students when we are ultimately cleared to resume construction,” says UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ. , according to a prepared statement.

“Unfortunately, our planning and actions must take into account the fact that some opponents of the project have previously resorted to violence and vandalism,” she said, “despite strong support for the project on the part of students, members of the community, advocates for the unhoused, the elected leadership of the City of Berkeley, as well as the Legislature and Governor of the State of California.”