Here ye, here ye. A park will be built this Sunday between Dwight and Haste. The land is owned by the University, which tore down a lot of beautiful houses in order to build a swamp. Alright, so on April 18th, 1969, an underground newspaper called the Berkeley Barb in the City of Berkeley printed this call to action on the front page of their paper.
The land is now used as free parking space. In a year, the University will build a cement-type, expensive parking lot which will fiercely compete with the other lots for the allegiance of Berkeley's Buicks. On Sunday, we will stop this ship, bring shovels, hoses, chains, grass, paints, flowers, trees, bulldozers, topsoil, colorful smiles, laughter, and lots of sweat. We want the park to be a cultural, political, freak-out, and rap center for the Western world.
All artists should show up and make the park their magical possession. Pastel intertwining the trees and reflecting the sun, all Berkeley energy exploding on the disappearing swamp. The University has no right to create ugliness as a way of life. Nobody supervises and the trip belongs to whoever dreams.
Signed, Robin Hood's Park Commissioner. Today's story is about that park. That was never given a chance to be a park at all. We look at how a few friends getting together and planting some trees on a Sunday afternoon led to a man being shot, another blinded, the National Guard taking over the city of Berkeley and one angry governor.
We have two reporters on the story. My name is Jake Sousa, and I am a city government reporter with the Daily California. I'm Maya Karajou, and I'm a senior news reporter. So what is people's park?
Yeah, so in Brief People's Park is this 2.8 acre square plot of land. And it's bordered by a telegraph and bodage. I think for a lot of people, particularly students who come to Berkeley from other areas of the state or the country or the world. The first thing people will tell you about People's Park is that you should avoid it at night and that it's a violent place to be.
You get updates from BPD and UCPD on your phone about violent incidences taking place there. You see a bunch of unhoused folks there. And like Maya said, a lot of people are warned to kind of avoid that area at night because of this perception of danger. But People's Park is much more than that.
As we will see. I'm Toni Saharan. Let's get on with it. Okay.
Back in the late 50s, there was discussion at sort of the university level about a campus-wide expansion. And one of the places they were looking at was this piece of land where Berkeley's People's Park now sits. A lot of people don't realize that People's Park wasn't always this flat piece of land. There was actually something like 25 or 30 housing structures on the property of that time.
And the goal was to build some campus offices, some recreational areas, and also some student housing. They had their eye on this place since, like I said, the late 50s, but I guess the money and the resources to move forward with the property. The resources to move forward with the project just weren't there at the time. But then in 1967, the campus allocated a certain amount of money to acquire this plot of land so that they could begin construction.
You know, a university wants to move in and buy this entire plot of land to get rid of all these houses. And not everybody is going to just sell their property willingly outright given an offer from a corporation like the university. So what the university California ended up doing was exercising imminent domain. All right.
That made eminent domain sound very dramatic. It's actually quite simple. It refers to the power of the government to take private property and convert it into public use. That's what the university did here.
They didn't have to use it in every single case. Some people just sold their houses outright to the university without a sort of fight, but other people were very unwilling to do so. And the university ended up having to exercise that in domain on a lot of those properties. And when they did, the people who were living in them were forced to move elsewhere.
So is there a reason the university wanted this land all of a sudden? Yeah. Yeah, that's actually a very interesting point. I know something I kind of think is important to reflect on just for the purpose of this history is that talking about 1967 through 69.
It's like good evening. Dr. Martin Luther King, the apostle of non violence in the civil rights movement has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee. MLK dies during this time.
The 1968 Democratic National Convention happens where Chicago police are indiscriminately beating up, you know, hippies and parks and things like that. Like there is a certain electricity in the air and a lot of tension, especially between the sort of younger radicals in the hippie scene and the cops. In the time, on the operation of the machine becomes so obvious, make yourself sick at heart. The ground zero of the 1960s radical politics movement, right?
The Bay Area San Francisco, right across the bridge, and UC Berkeley sort of being this hub of radical political thought in a lot of ways. Telegraph was starting to become like the hub of all of this radical lefty stuff, right? And just real quick, for those who don't know, Telegraph is an iconic street in Berkeley really close to the university. And then there were the yippies, the youth international party, who were much further left, much more active politically.
And a lot of people saw Telegraph as this burgeoning sort of zone for these radical folks. And there's a lot of pressure on the Regents from the Governor's Office, Governor Reagan, who ran on a platform of cleaning up that mess in Berkeley and sort of saw these student activists as like un-American communist threats to American values. There are small minority of beatnicks, radicals and filthy speech advocates have brought shame on a great university. This is a speech Ronald Reagan gave in 1966 in San Francisco called the morality gap.
Now we've already addressed the report that was handed in by the Senate subcommittee. And it's charges that the campus has become a rallying point for coming to the Senate for sexual misconduct. This is not only a sign of the leadership gap, they're not the only sign. It began a year ago when the so-called free speech advocates who in truth have no appreciation for freedom were allowed to assault and humiliate the symbol of law and order of policemen on the campus.
And that was the moment when the ring leaders should have been taken to disrupt the neck and thrown out of the university once in full. And I think that the sort of little neighborhood that sat where People's Park is today was sort of a microcosm of that, this little plot of land where a lot of the people that the Regents were interested in sort of getting away from the campus were living at the time. In the late 50s, the stated purpose of the construction by the university was an idea about campus offices with some student housing. And then when they finally got the money to go through with it, the stated purpose was to first use the area for athletic fields and then later on down the road, take those athletic fields and build student housing on top of them.
But at the same time, and here's where the the allegedly sort of come in. There's a lot of skepticism about this today, at least I don't know about back then but it was the 60s and there wasn't a huge amount of demand for student housing. You know, according to Charles Wallenberg, who is a historian in the city of Berkeley, formerly a professor at Berkeley City College and Tom Dalzel who wrote a book about the battle for People's Park. There was a lot of vacancy in student housing at this time.
People were more interested in living in coops and on communes and things like that when they came to Calvin, they were in living in the dorm. So the question of whether or not, you know, appropriating this land, kind of taking it from people, quote unquote, taking it from people through this process of imminent domain is a little bit suspect to a lot of folks today who maintain that there was this other kind of motivation lurking under the surface. In Tom Dalzel's book, actually, he quoted one of the regions at the time who expressly stated that the regions are members of the governing body of the university. And it was a deliberate effort to get rid of the more hippie-dippy element in the South Campus neighborhood and force them into moving to another part of the city or just to get them out of their hair for one reason or another.
Apparently, the way that it was put to me by Dalzel and in the book, abruptly right in the middle of winter finals of 1968, a bunch of people were served 10 day eviction notices and told they had the vacate the premises within 10 days of receiving the notice as they were preparing to go in and take their finals during the last weeks of the semester that that year. One student in particular who had just moved from out of state moved into like a boarding house or an apartment building that sat on where people's park was and by the end of his first semester he was affected and told he had to move. Which is pretty rough. There was this like months long period after the university moves in, flattens these houses to the ground and leaves behind a lot of the debris like money ran dry or the will to continue with the construction ran out as soon as these houses were flattened to the ground.
Over those months, it's a cold rainy winter. This lot becomes sort of a mud pit. Tom Dalzel calls it an urban eyesore. People are parking cars there abandoning the cars leading them to rest.
Students moving out of the dorms or wherever they were living at the time, leaving behind couches and bunk beds and things like that. It essentially turned into sort of a junkyard and stayed that way for six months to a year of just the lot being muddy. That was my other report on the story. Fast forward a year.
We're now in 1969. The land had sat untouched for a year at this point and the community is looking at the land saying this is a perfectly good place that could benefit the people that could be a green area that could be a center for community organizing and serve a better purpose than being this informal parking lot and sort of mud puddled right in the middle of this neighborhood. So then in April of 1969, Michael Dalekor and Wendy Schlesinger got together with several other people in the sort of telegraph Avenue activist scene and talked about taking this unused piece of land that, like I said, the forehead sort of become an eyesore and turn it into this cool spot that could kind of be a little bit more. The fact is like a free speech zone somewhere that people could come and organize and utilize in other ways.
So one of the group publishes this call to action in the Berkeley Barb. Okay, so you heard this call to action in the introduction, but we have to take a quick minute to appreciate the paper it was published in. So this is the Berkeley Barb. Look at how they wrote headlines.
We willy wafted away in the rain in the raw case flex muscles. I fully missed that. It's such a big letter. You could buy drugs and like meat, you know, lovers and things like that.
A one stop shop. Literally a one stop shop. Okay, we're done. And two days later, around 200 people, according to the Daily Cal at the time, showed up to the park to to do the damn thing.
They took donations. They went and bought, sawed and unrolled these big lengths of grass over the park and just sort of spontaneously put up a park there. I asked Michael Delacore, like, what was the original purpose of the park? And he said, quote, it was springtime and it was a place people couldn't each other.
People's Park was formed. But now the university's reaction. So the university puts out this statement, basically saying we're going to build athletic fields over this park that you guys just sort of renegade middle of a Sunday afternoon came and laid down over our property. And, you know, let's not forget the maybe inconvenient fact that this belongs to us, not you.
In the really early hours of May 15, 1969, construction crews who were accompanied by local law enforcement officers showed up to the park. This is around four o'clock in the morning. They kicked out the people who were occupying the park so that they could put up a fence around it and began some of the demolition that was supposed to sort of preface the construction of these athletic fields. People had actually been occupying the park for some time after finding out that the university had put out this statement, which is to say, you know, I want to be there when the bulldozers come so that I can do everything that's in my power to stop them from tearing down this park.
So those people are kicked out of the park and defenses put up. Later that day, there's a rally on campus that is about the conflict in the Middle East, but the conversation soon turns to what happened at People's Park that morning. People were not happy about it. The president of the ASUC at the time.
Associated students of the University of California, basically student government. Dan Siegel had started making a speech related to what had happened at People's Park that morning. I have a suggestion. Let's go down to the People's Park.
And said what is now sort of a historic phrase, which was, let's take the park. And as soon as he said that, the microphones at the rally were cut. The sound was turned off and it was sort of abruptly ended so that no one else could speak. He was actually not meant to be the final speaker of the day.
There were supposed to be other people who went on to speak about the park after Siegel. But as soon as he said the phrase, take the park, the mics were cut. At that point, I guess everyone at this rally had started making their way toward the park. From what I learned from Tom D'Aulzela doesn't sound like they ever actually made it all the way to the park and were instead sort of headed off by Berkeley Police officers and Alameda County Sheriffs who were called in actually by the Reagan administration.
The officers were sort of given the green light to use a substantial amount of force on these protesters. Throughout the clash, dozens and dozens of people were seriously injured, whether by tear gas or billy clubs or from birdshot. Shotgun pellets. Well, I want to say first of all, the police have a very difficult role.
I think that every doubt should be resolved in their favor. This is a Berkeley spokesman giving an interview that day. At the same time, as a citizen, if you throw a rock at me, I have no right to use a gun back at you. It's this escalation of force that we've got to stop.
President Nixon has said that we've got to lower our voices. What I find is that Governor Reagan and some of the police activity. Not all of it. Most of it is excellent.
But some of it is escalating. As I've said before, that instead of throwing water in these situations and quieting them down, I find certain individuals in our public life are throwing kerosene and making the situation worse. We're going to get somebody killed and stop. I recently did an article where I spoke to some former Daily Cal staffers who worked for the paper in the early 70s.
A couple of years after this happened, all of them knew the names Alan Blanchard and James Rechter. James Rechter was a bystander during the events that kind of unfolded that day. He was on a roof nearby the park where everything was kind of going down off of telegraph and was shot by a law enforcement officer and ended up dying from his injuries later on. Alan Blanchard was watching from another roof and was shot in the face and ended up being blinded for life following the riot.
Another really notable injury that took place and that was that of Donovan Rundold who was actually a Cal freshman at the time. He was younger than your average freshman because he graduated high school early and was accepted to Cal. And not part of the riot that was taking place. He was on his way back to his dorm, presumably just having found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And he was shot in the stomach at someone close enough range that he sustained incredibly serious injuries and was lucky to escape with his life. Hello, I'm Donovan. Tom Daltzel found Donovan Rundold living in Oxford, California. And this is a clip of a speech he made at a People's Park event in 2019.
You can read the rest of my story in Tom's book. I hope you will. I don't want to go in there too much of that. I was basically just a kid.
I worked hard to get to Cal. I wanted to have my four years didn't get him. Got a couple of colostomies and spent my 17th summer learning to empty and change a colostomy bag. I think there were a lot of people hurt.
I would just like to take a few moments to reflect on our common humanity. Whatever divisions we may have, gender or politics, race, nationality, we are all human beings. And that's the true order. That's the first thing about us before we go into these different divisions.
I thought that I had a free speech. I learned otherwise. I tried to express my feelings in a peaceful whimsical way to this deputy when his pepper fog machine ran out of pepper fog or whatever CS gas. And I simply applauded.
And when he was drawing a bead on me, I was raised with knowledge of firearms. And my last thought was, doesn't he know? You never point a gun at someone. I had seen violence at Century Plaza because I'd been against the war.
I was a young man. I didn't want to go. I had studied. I was a scholar.
I knew the history of the French and Vietnam and people trying to get self-determination there. So of course I went to a demonstration with my beloved sister there who's sitting in front of Rwanda, Drovis, and we protested. And the police rioted and we saw bad, bad things there. Nothing like People's Park, but we saw some nasty, nasty baton, wielding insane men who had been reduced to a state of depraved ignorance.
And I didn't want to be involved with that anymore. So when I did go down to the park and I saw what was going to happen, so I went back to North Campus area and was just reading that until I got quiet. And then I thought I could make it home to my dorm, but I never did. Except to clean out some things.
And I never got my Berkeley experience because when I did come back, my attorneys told me, you know, you have to get out of town, you're under surveillance. They're going to try to slanderize you the slander. You're the way they did James rector and you have to get out of town. I think in a way it was reminiscent of I think it was Gandhi who said, be the change you want to see in the world.
And I'm just going to leave it at that. This next voice is Tom Gossel. Now there's a small detail about Donovan's shooting. He was shot, I think on Chilton, a low telegraph.
And Lawrence Richie who shot him was the sheriff who had shot fatally James rector. And he was about two months out from Vietnam. He'd been a machine gun and a helicopter there. And he was driven with post-traumatic stress disorder.
And he locked and loaded for a second shot. And a bystander knelt down with Donovan as he was bleeding. Got between him and Richie. And Richie didn't shoot.
And that bystander was Mario Savio. You can hear by the reaction of the crowd what a riveting fact that is that in case you don't know Mario Savio is considered by many the leader of Berkley's 60s for speech movement. This event we just talked about went down in Berkley's history books as Bloody Thursday. Now continuing on with Story Jake.
So following the events of Bloody Thursday, then Governor Ronald Reagan actually called a state of emergency in Berkeley. Once the dogs of war are unleashed. This is a conversation between Governor Reagan and various UC Berkeley faculty at the time right after the events of Bloody Thursday when Reagan called in for the National Guard. You must expect that things will happen and people being human will make mistakes on both sides.
But this violence was precipitated. And I would like to say one more thing for this. I would like to propose that the issue is that on the campus is you who are adults. You who are entrusted with those young people and their guidance have a responsibility to make it claim to them from the very beginning that you yourselves do not tolerate the kind of conduct that has led to the burden of the virus.
That has led to the burning of Wheeler Hall. We are making it for my political speech. But we have made it clear over and over again, and I think you know if you stop talking politics, that the overwhelming majority of the faculty and students are against violence have done more of their violence than you. I think violence escalates precisely because every time they're at a regions meeting the chanceless of all nine campuses have to scurry around and see if they can put an end to negotiations so the governor doesn't come to the regions meeting and get them fired as he was already done before.
You've created an atmosphere. Listen. Listen. You are a liar.
If you see my heart and mind and charge me with going and trying to fire chancellors, I have fought to keep politics out of that board of regions and out of the running on the university and will continue to do it. If you would allow yourself to listen, you would have a lot of people who would be showing some compassion, some interest in non-violence, some interest in water, if you would speak out against the use of firearms and bookshot and say if you will that this, if you would say so that would be moved, if you would say that for example, to have a lot of discrimination, you can have a lot of discrimination. When did any of you appear before the students? When did any of you stand up at Sproul Hall on Thursday and they can not go down there?
Over and over again, we've called for non-violence and you can read the Daily Cal with people don't mean they don't adapt to this. These arguments go on and on and on. No resolution is reached and Reagan ends with this. All of it began the first time some of you who know better and are old enough to know better.
Let young people think that they had the right to choose the laws they would obey as long as they were doing it in the name of social protest. Back to the story. And for something like, I think it was over two weeks, the National Guard occupied the city of Berkeley, broke up public gatherings of more than a few people, guarded the park, instituted a curfew. For over two weeks, students were walking home from classes and having to pass through National Guard barricades to get back to their apartments and dorms.
It was that day where those of us in the guards, those of us who didn't want to go to Vietnam, were in the guards. This is Robert Thompson. He was actually in the National Guard during this time. We retired.
We retired of the whole thing. We though stood up to our officers. There's a parking garage across the street somewhere there. I'm taking my wife there one time to shore.
And Ronald Reagan really wanted to gas you guys. And it was our platoon, our guys sat there and we were mostly college educated or going through college. And so we had some brains. And we spoke to our officers.
They asked us, can you guys handle this? And we said we could. And so they did not gas all the spokes. It was a couple of thousand people.
It was five. It was huge. We were all wedding our pants. The day that we arrived, we got out of our trucks.
And we got into our V4 mission, which we had trained over and over and over for. Never thinking we would use it. And all you guys. He keeps in you because he's talking to people's park advocates.
And this speech was actually also given in 2019 at the same event that Donovan Rundle was at. Yeah, I saw you. You were coming at us pretty hard. I was 22 at the time.
I was from San Jose. I had no idea what I was doing there, except standing in a V4 mission would might be in it. But then after 17 days, it gets kind of a blur. One of the times where this is why I can relate to some of the things that go on today with some people who are trained in the military.
There are moments where you get turned, your brain sort of adjusting a different way. And we were clearing the Sproulle Plaza area, right? I say to gait. And I got separated.
This is on Channel 4, by the way. If you want to watch it, I'm sure they have a film of it. I got separated off to the right. But that day, being separated from my group, I was alone.
And I chased down some folks going through the tree, a little group of trees there to the right. You probably know those. And for some reason, Bandette attached. I swung around the train wise.
And this fellow who was probably a football player. And I swung around and just out of train, I hit him with a butt of my rifle on his elbow. And he did not like that. And he turned.
And my Bandette swerved around right at his neck. Now people don't realize that we also had rounds. It's never discussed. We were locked and loaded.
Now Kent State could have happened right then and there. The kids came around me and circled me. And I started to come in for what they would thought could have been a kill. And I grabbed my rifle.
And I started swinging it, then at first. And the only I said there that day was, all I want to do is go home. And I kept saying it over and over. Sort of out of my mind, I would never do something like that again today.
But again, training does that. The people that are coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, joining the police, going and being on Border Patrol, these folks have been changed. They're easily retargeted on their objects. This is a concern I have for my grandchildren, grandchildren, kids, and all of y'all.
And that kind of wraps up like the big giant first month of People's Park, which is kind of crazy to reflect. Just thinking about, you know, it's April 20th. Someone says, I got a bright idea. Let's build a public park in that muddy lot.
A month later, a guy died. Another guy was blinded. Hundreds of people wounded. The city is under siege by the National Guard.
And Reagan is really, really mad. Another really crazy thing to notice that, following all of that, the university didn't plow ahead with their plans to develop People's Park. It just sat there exactly like it sat there before for a long time. Nothing happened.
And I was really curious to kind of find out why, because it seems to me that after all of that, you know, the next indicated step would be for the university to say, OK, let's get some dump trucks and bulldozers and whatever the heck else it takes to build an athletic field and let's go do it. But the park sat vacant and with a fence around it all the way for multiple years. During this time, there were attempts to take down the fence. The first one was in 1971 when the Daily Californian actually published an editorial.
Basically calling for a gathering, commemorating the second anniversary of Bloody Thursday. That at some points was very mild. And at other points was a little bit more suggestive. At one point, it alluded to perhaps someone will bring a pair of wire cutters.
Who knows? And it reiterated that language that was used by Dan Segal the day of Bloody Thursday, two years before, by saying let's go down and take the park again, which was what? I think the headline it ran under was. People caught wind of it.
It started getting to the point where it seemed like something pretty big was going to go down. A lot of people were sort of divided over the issue. Some were really supportive of the editorial. Others were, as you can imagine, not so supportive.
And the party was set to take place. People showed up. Daily Cal staffers were there just begging folks to keep cool. You know, one of the people at the Daily Cal was passing out cookies, hoping that it would like mellow everybody out.
And before too long, people started yanking on the fence. Yet another conflict over the park had kind of broken up. It spilled out onto Telegraph Avenue. And culminated on the UC Berkeley campus.
There were reports of Berkeley PD officers throwing tear gas canisters into the elevators of Echelon Hall and hitting the button for the fourth floor, which was actually where the Daily Cal's headquarters were at the time. Over 40 people were arrested that day. But the fence stayed up after that. It wasn't until 1972 when a pretty significant rally that took place and culminated at People's Park.
That's when the folks ripped down the fence and actually stayed down. So that was part one of the story. Now we move on to Maya, who's going to tell us what's been happening ever since then, up until now. 1974, the People's Park Project was formed by undergraduates at Berkeley and it started as a student-initiated organic garden course.
This People's Park project later turned into the People's Park Committee, which is the central committee for all things people's park related. The group came to an agreement with the campus administration in 1978 that the university would consult them before basically doing things at the park, bulldozing things, making plans, et cetera. And that agreement came about because they had come in cut down trees. So the person who's telling me about all this is Lisa T.
At least with People's Park. OK, so Lisa is one of the members of the People's Park Committee and has been for a few years. And over the years, the park and the University administration faced a lot of clashes. So the first example of that was in 1979.
The stage was built. And the original agreement was that there would be 12 performances per year. Oh, yeah. Did we mention that People's Park has concerts?
A lot more keyboard. One more. See anything? Yeah.
It takes out that this number, the number of performances that they can feasibly hold every year, has decreased because the university's added requirements that you need to get permits to hold events. Like you need to apply further in advance. And you can't have the same person applied two times in a row. So things like that.
I just need it harder for them to hold performances as often. Also in 1979, part of the park was an informal parking lot. And Campus Head plans to turn that bit of the unofficial asphalt parking area into a student fee parking lot. Park residents and activists were against this.
They went to the park and dug up all the asphalt and planted trees and turned it into a garden. And so that's where the community gardens today. In 1984, the park put up some playground equipment and campus tore that down as well. And Teague told me that that was another one of those cycles that continued for a couple of years, where the park would put up the playground equipment and the UC would tear it down.
Then the People's Cafe? Yeah. So with the People's Cafe, which was towed into the park on May 9, 1989, Teague told me that some activists just towed this little house trailer into the park in the middle of the night and started serving free food. And that ran for a couple of months.
And the Daily Cal reported on it at the time and described it as like a light blue building with maroon awnings, a wooden deck and picnic tables outside. And these tables could see 80 people. And then on the first day, the cafe served breakfast to 100 people. So it was a pretty big operation.
The other interesting thing I think about this time is that in 1991, Food Not Bombs began serving food. And that's an organization that now still serves food at the park today. They have been doing so for 30 years. And they come several days a week to the park and feed people.
Then in 1991, the campus had plans to build volleyball courts on the park. And Teague told me that the plans involved tearing up the stage, which had been called the free speech stage and putting a restroom there. Of course, huge opposition to this. The rides began on July 31, 1991, lasted for several days.
By the end, over 97 people had been arrested, according to old Dilly Calcubridge. And the police during these rides had also on multiple days, fired wood and rubber bullets into the crowd. At the end of all these rides, despite all of that, the courts were built and they stayed there until 1997. Anyways, also Teague said that there were sand pits at the court and sometimes people brought their cats there to poop in the sand pits as protest of the existence of them, which I think is a really good way to protest it for going to do a protest.
So 1997, the UC finally removes the volleyball courts. And the street spirit said that the UC removed its volleyball court because of quote, total non-use and constant protest, which is a great quote. Anyways, once the courts removed, the stage was returned. In 1992.
There was an activist for the park named Rosebud Denovo, who had been an activist in the park for a while. She was 20 years old. And one night, she in August, she broke into the Chancellor's Mansion with a machete and triggered a silent alarm. And UCPD came and shot her in the back.
At the time of her death, Rosebud Denovo was carrying a note that partially read, I quote, we are willing to die for this piece of land. Are you? For further reading on this, the author Claire Birch actually wrote a book called What Really Killed Rosebud. In the following years, more clashes between the university and the park took place, one of which was about a box.
So there's always been a box at the park for donations, like closed or whatever you want to donate. Apparently, the university has been pretty against the box and has taken it down on several occasions. And the park activists have rebuilt it, sometimes making it a metal, sometimes making multiple of them. And so that's been a bit of a back and forth between the university and the park as well.
And there isn't one today because the last one was built on the 50th anniversary of the park in 2019 and then was destroyed a week later. And now kind of the entire reason we're here, we are going to 2021 to the present day. The university has created plans to develop the park and to build student housing on the park. In January, at the Regents meeting, we're taking People's Park to the Regents.
That is moving ahead. This is Carol Chris, current chancellor. And the planning, and I think you all know, it's going to be about quarter of the site will use for permanent supportive housing for the homeless, a quarter of it for a commemorative park, our own Walter Hood, who just recently won in MacArthur Genius Award. It's going to be doing the park design and about half of it for housing.
The plans involve a student housing building with, I believe, around 1,000 beds, and then also a separate building with supportive housing for very low income or formal homeless individuals. And that building is planned to have around 100 beds. And these plans also involve preserving. Maya Kedoff here, but she was going to say preserving the park.
They were fencing up for testing the different parts of the soil around the park. Students came to the park in a protest, which ended in the fences being torn out of the ground. A bunch of activists and students have been staying there for quite a while now. I think we have to think, so why is it that this park is where they want to build?
And they're going to tell you because it's convenient or because it's walkable. Because the land is here and it's right for disruption. But the fact is, this land and this park have always stood in contrast to the university. That audio is from a meeting at People's Park earlier this year.
I think a lot of people are viewing it from the perspective of there is an extreme housing shortage in Berkeley. And UC Berkeley has the least student housing of any UC I'm pretty sure. So there's definitely a need to build student housing. But then the opposite side of the argument is, look at all of this history that we've been laying out and the importance of this area to the community.
Both historically and presently, there are a lot of resources at the park today. Food not bombs again comes in several days a week. It's definitely like a hub for at least some sort of community among unhoused people. If you are elsewhere in Berkeley, the chances of you finding a public restroom are slim to none and there is one available at the park.
I've had conversations with folks before who said that, not having a place to kind of centralize with their peers made them have to drop out of college courses because they didn't have other people near them who were willing to watch all of their possessions for them when they went to school every day. And without public open spaces like that, when they're so few and especially in like a highly dense area like the South Campus neighborhood on Telegraph, people's park is nearly the only one. Before the pandemic, UCPD would enforce a curfew for the park. So anyone who was staying in the park during the day had to leave after a certain time of night and that often meant going back to another part of the city, another area.
And it's actually against the law to occupy a sidewalk in Berkeley as far as I know. I talked to someone who is a resident of the park and they said that like there is quite a benefit to staying at a park rather than on a sidewalk. People file complaints over people's possessions being left obstructing a walkway, things like that. And a park is simply a wide open space that people are invited to enjoy and make use of.
Because you just don't have that constant interruption of cars and pedestrians at all hours of the day. And I think a lot of people turn to people's park during the day as an area that they could bring their possessions and be without being asked to leave. So how did we get here? That was a lot to do with the fact that number one, there was a time in the 80s where funding for mental health institutions was pretty much cut.
And a lot of people were simply let out onto the streets after being in institutions for a significant amount of time. Another element is just the simple fact that there is a colossal housing crisis going on throughout the state and especially in the Bay Area. So there is this shortage of housing. There's a shortage of resources for unhoused folks.
People can't afford to live and end up on the street. And the population of people who are living on the street today is probably greater than it's ever been in history. So it makes sense that if there is a open space somewhere that they can stay, they will be there. But some people can see the significant population of unhoused people living in people's park.
As being cause for concern, they feel like a student housing complex that includes what could be approximately 100 beds for very low income or formerly unhoused folks could be an at-positive and is worth pursuing if it means helping mitigate this problem and provide a place for a lot of these folks to live that would be indoors. Because people look at the park where folks have been sleeping outside for the better part of the pandemic. And the best thing to do would be to allow for the development to go forward. I think another important thing to know, just for people who don't know what the development is, and what's going on is that the university is partnering with a nonprofit to build a supportive housing group.
And one critique that comes up a lot of the supportive housing is that it won't necessarily be people's park residents who are housed there. The funding that the nonprofit gets for the building that is more of what determines who can get housing at that location. So if there's a lot of county funding, the county has their list of people that have priority. It's state funding, the state has list.
At least that's what Ari-Newlight told me. And Ari-Newlight is the outreach coordinator for people's park. You can also frame supporting the housing as you're gaining supporting housing units. You can also frame keeping and preserving the park as you're keeping this community of residents.
Either side can argue that they're doing the best thing for the on-house community. Something that was interesting that Charles Wallenberg talked to me about was sort of the way that People's Park has never really been given the opportunity to be People's Park, because it was sort of put up in this renegade fashion. And it's never fully received the blessing of the university who owns the land and never been able to sort of see the vision of what People's Park could be and was kind of founded with this vision in mind, come to fruition. It was never fully able to actualize as this People's Park as people kind of saw it because it was not theirs.
It belonged to the university and the university pushed back against these things. So there's this sort of push and pull dynamic where it's not necessarily a park because a park has things like a playground, a parking area, a well-maintained restroom like other amenities that People see and they go, that's a park and they say, maybe I shouldn't do this there or maybe this is a place I bring my kids on the weekends or whatever and People's Park just hasn't had the opportunity to become that. And it sort of ended up in this purgatory where it's neither fully able to be utilized as the park that it was sort of planned to be or be developed into something useful by the university because it holds so much history for so many people in the city of Berkeley. So it kind of lives in this in-between zone where it can't fulfill either of the purposes that these different groups have for it.
This episode was produced by me, Tony Sahara. It was reported by Jake Sousa in Maya Okuraju, original music by Econ Shugger Wall and Madison Chan. That clip you heard at the beginning was read by Krub Bittner for further reading on People's Park, Tom Delz Elgroyd a book, as you know, The Battle for People's Park, 1969. And this song you're hearing right now is a cover by the National Super Pickers.