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.”

As California’s housing crisis spiraled out of control in the 2010s, with homelessness rapidly rising and even affluent families struggling to purchase homes in the Bay Area, a pro-housing movement was born.

The state legislature has since passed a slew of new laws aimed at removing construction barriers and making housing more affordable, including statewide rent control and the dismantling of zoning laws for single-family homes. Last year, the state’s housing supply grew by 0.85 percentthe highest rate in more than a decade.

Of course, this living trend has its opponents. You’ve probably heard of NIMBYs, those who say “not in my backyard” to new projects, and their detractors, YIMBYs, who firmly say “yes” instead.

In his recent article for the California issue of The New York Times Magazine, Daniel Duane explored this housing debate in a nuanced way that reflected the humanity on both sides.

Daniel wrote about his parents, who raised him in Berkeley in the 1960s and 1970s and now worry that new apartment buildings and other developments could change the character of the neighborhoods they nurture. His mom and dad have long nurtured an old left-wing distrust of real estate developers deeply rooted in the Bay Area, dating back to when real estate development was seen as destroying nature and enabling racist housing practices.

But he also explored his own concerns about the state’s out-of-control housing market: that his school-age daughters may never be able to afford to live in the region where they grew up, and may be forced to live far from home. move almost everyone. They know.

“I was really raised and deeply sympathetic to the view that real estate development is always wrong, always speculative, always corruptible,” Daniel told me. “So when I started following the YIMBY arguments, I became interested in what was a political and ideological reversal, at this really important point, of the values ​​I had grown up with.”

He said writing the article was an important way “for me to simultaneously keep my heart open to what it all really meant for my parents and their neighbors, while remaining aware of what’s at stake for me and my children, and for all others.” children – and the nature of the society we build, or don’t build.

For more:

Where we travel

Today’s tip comes from Jo Baldwin:

“One of our favorite places to stop when traveling from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara is Ventura. A wonderful vibrant place with peace and walks and serenity, but also bustle and arcades and great eateries. The canals there are a delight to drink in and walk around, choosing the house we would live in. Super friendly and easy to park. The last time we were there was a crazy fair with people dressed in all sorts of gear you can think of, great fun for kids big and small.

Tell us about your favorite places to visit in California. Email your suggestions to CAtoday@nytimes.com. We will share more in upcoming editions of the newsletter.

Tell us

We are almost half way through 2023! What are the best things that have happened to you this year so far? What have your victories been? Or your unexpected joys, big or small?

Let me know at CAToday@nytimes.com. Please include your full name and the city where you live.

And before you go, good news

As a young child some 75 years ago, Brenda Kennedy saw elephants at a circus in Los Angeles and fell in love with the creatures. In the decades that followed, she always headed for the elephants when she visited a zoo.

“God made us all different, and He made them different too” Kennedy told The Mercury News. “You stand one and say, ‘My God, it’s different from this guy.'”

But it was only recently that Kennedy, now 83, was able to see elephants up close and in a more natural setting. The Elderly Wish Foundation, based in the Bay Area, arranged a trip for her last month to see the animals at a sanctuary in Gold Country.

“It was an absolutely fantastic day,” Kennedy told The Mercury News.

Thank you for reading. I’ll be back tomorrow. — Soumja

PS Here it is today’s mini crossword.

Briana Scalia and Johnna Margalotti contributed to California Today. You can reach the team at CAtoday@nytimes.com.

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BERKELEY, Calif. — To kick off homecoming weekend last fall, the University of California, Berkeley, held a groundbreaking ceremony for its new data sciences building, known as the Gateway. Costing more than half a billion dollars, the 35,000-square-foot building, with “extensive sightlines and natural-light-filled corridors,” is being billed as a hub for research in artificial intelligence, data analytics, and machine learning.

That may represent the future, but the past is just a short walk across campus in the stacks of the anthropology library. For decades, the repository has served generations of scholars in a space as humble as the Gateway is grand: a 150-square-foot corner on the second floor of the Anthropology Department building, featuring a cozy reading nook with armchairs and computer terminals along one wall. .

The library has been a scene of occupation for days. Students have filled it with tents, sleeping bags and air mattresses in a last-ditch effort to save the 67-year-old institution dedicated to anthropology, which encompasses the study of humanity, societies and cultures. The university is preparing to move its collections of archaeological field notes and books—about 80,000 books in total, covering topics as diverse as folktales, black culture, and Mexican-American social movements—to a nearby warehouse and the main library, saving $400,000 annually .

For the student occupiers, the battle is as much a battle for a library as it is for the humanities and social sciences at a time when the world is obsessed with technology and eager to replace the physical world with virtual experiences powered by AI

“It’s about fundamentally writing a different story about what education is, what the university is for,” says Jesús Gutiérrez, a graduate student who works at the library and is writing a dissertation on folk art forms of the African diaspora.

In the past five years alone, the number of Berkeley undergraduate students choosing anthropology as their major has fallen by about a quarter, part of a generation that struggled to pay student loans and streamed into science and engineering in the lucrative shadows from Silicon Valley.

Faculty members say they are impressed by the intensity of the young students protesting to save the anthropology library, a cause that otherwise depended on the support of Ralph Nader, the liberal activist and sometime third presidential candidate, and Jerry Brown, the former governor of California who majored in classics at UC Berkeley more than half a century ago.

As a third-year anthropology student, Ian Molloy, one of the protest organizers, has heard the giggles of science and engineering classmates, describing his subject choice as “Oh, you don’t want to make money.” He called the library, where he has found titles on taming animals vital to his research, the “backbone” of the department and central to rebuilding the community after the isolation of the pandemic.

Despite the outcry, the administration says it won’t budge, explaining that the cuts are necessary as they face a Budget deficit of $82 million. In March, Carol Christ, Berkeley’s chancellor, pointed to increases the UC system had agreed to pay graduate student instructors and support staff as one of the drivers of new costs.

The university has said it will save about $1.5 million by doing so closing not just the anthropology library, but also the math and physics libraries, and other cutbacks in hours and services. The other closures have not evoked the intense opposition that the closure of the anthropology library has.

“We are aware of the protest and are monitoring the situation,” the university said in a statement. “As for the closure of the anthropology library, we also wish that the library could remain open, but that is not an option at the moment.”

At 93, Laura Nader remains a prolific scholar and teacher, decades after becoming the first woman in the anthropology department to be tenured in 1960. “But I couldn’t have done it without the library,” Dr. said Nader’s sister. She worries that students interested in anthropology will instead prefer other universities with dedicated anthropology libraries.

Dr. Nader sees the planned library closure as another step in the decline of the humanities and social sciences in general – and anthropology in particular.

“So all of a sudden it becomes a job application,” she said. “You don’t need anthropology.”

Under the administration’s plan, some of the materials in the library, founded in 1956 and later named after George and Mary Foster, two prominent Berkeley anthropologists, will be moved to a storage facility in nearby Richmond, California. Other parts of the collection will be distributed throughout the university’s main library.

Alexander Parra, who studies computer science and Chicano studies and who has occupied the library, said one of the things that would be lost if the library closed was the possibility of serendipity — finding a book you didn’t know. Searched for. When students staged an occupation earlier this year after the university announced closure plans in February, Mr. Parra happened upon a title about Mexican-American youth organizations, a topic he was researching.

“That’s me,” he said. “That’s me in that book.”

Some students and professors also see the struggle as a matter of equity. Of those studying anthropology, 43 percent of students belong to underrepresented minority groups, compared to 5 percent for computer science. The library also serves students majoring in Chicano Studies and African American Studies, disciplines that also have a higher proportion of unrepresented minority students.

Mr. Brown, who once taught a course in Berkeley’s anthropology department, has contacted members of the University of California Board of Regents, urging them to spare the library.

“Great and spacious minds have graced that building,” he wrote in an email to the chairman of the board. “To replace it now, even partially, with a mere warehouse in Richmond is unthinkable.”

Charles Hirschkind, the chair of the anthropology department, said that since 2004 the university has reduced the number of graduate students it accepts in anthropology by just over half, due, he said, to the “weaker financial situation” of the department and the increase in costs to support graduate students.

“When we talk about budget constraints, we are also talking about priorities and where people decide to invest,” he said. “And I think the university feels little incentive to invest in the social sciences and humanities.”

Dr. Hirschkind said some faculty members were pleasantly surprised to see the younger generation fighting for the library, after assuming that students who grew up in the digital age might have less appreciation for physical books or the joys of a library. And the library’s occupation is reminiscent to some of an earlier Berkeley activist era.

“There’s a strong sense of communitas in the air — it’s not like identity politics at all — we need a new word for it,” Nancy Scheper-Hughes, anthropology professor, wrote in an email to Mr. Brown. “They want to read. They want to be with open communities of people with very different ideas.”

The students have been living in the library for more than a week now, studying for final exams, playing board games and having breakfast with croissants and granola. The students worry that the university is trying to run the clock down until summer break and then dismantle the library, saying they will stay as long as necessary.

“They can give us the library tomorrow,” Mr. Molloy said, “and then we’ll all be happy to go home.”