People's Park and the Great American Infill

"Peoples Park in Berkeley on April 1 2021" 

Back when I was a sophomore in college, I used to go up and visit a friend of mine at Berkeley to watch anime. His apartment was on the edge of People’s Park, a little one-block park near the UC Berkeley campus. I remember walking through the park past the homeless encampments and drug users, and feeling a little bit adventurous.
The origin of People’s Park reads like a fairy tale of the 1960s. The university bulldozed the site in order to turn it into student housing, but a pair of hippies, who had been using the vacant lot for their romantic affair, called for it to become a park instead. Other hippies responded and came together to build the park on their own. When the university came and fenced it off to begin housing construction, the hippies protested en masse. The cops brutally suppressed the protest, killing one bystander, but ultimately backed off. From that moment up until now, the university has intermittently tried to develop People’s Park, and every time its development plans have been foiled by protesters.
Now, after all these decades, the university may finally have its way. A new plan to turn the park into a combination of student housing and supportive housing for homeless people and veterans has been temporarily halted by a court order and is being fiercely protested by a few local leftist types, but the university has walled off the whole block with shipping containers, and earth-moving machinery has already torn up much of the park.
I am of two minds on this.
Obviously, the state of California and the city of Berkeley are in a severe housing crisis, caused by stubborn refusal to build new housing. The NIMBYism that has blocked housing again and again represents the anti-development bargain of the 1970s — the hippies’ dream of open space, and minorities’ fear of displacement, combined with affluent suburbanites’ desire to keep the poor out of their communities. Economically speaking, People’s Park will do a lot more for the homeless when there are houses on top of it. The leftist protesters who suggested that the homeless live in shipping containers instead of supportive housing sounded just as out of touch as any NIMBYs. (They also hounded a Berkeley city councilmember out of office with death threats, which was a pretty bad thing to do.)
And to be fair, the park is not really the community gathering place that the hippies originally intended. Police are called to the park about five times a day, on average, and there’s about one violent crime there every five days. In 2017, a 2-year-old playing in the park was fed methamphetamine by a woman there. There are plenty of places in Berkeley where hippies do gardening and community events; this is not one of them. I can’t blame the university for wanting to redevelop it.

And yet at the same time, it feels like something wild and untamed is going out of the world. People’s Park is — or maybe I should say, was — a little irreducible island of chaos in the middle of the orderly world of suburban streets and houses and public university buildings. Walking by it, the upper-class professionals of tomorrow and the landed homeowning gentry were forcibly reminded every day of the existence of society’s most abject castaways. As they stepped quickly and nervously past the park, the lurking presence of tents and huddled forms in the corners of their vision served as a reminder that the game they had spent their whole lives winning was one that someone had lost. And perhaps at the back of their minds, a small voice whispered: “That could have been you.”