- UC Berkeley is making an attempt to construct a brand new $312 million housing advanced on the long-lasting Folks’s Park.
- However activists have delayed its plans for months, tenting out on the location and tearing down a fence.
- On Thursday, the college resorted to a wall of delivery containers to maintain protestors out.
UC Berkeley’s needed to get artistic when coping with protestors making an attempt to cease the college from constructing a brand new housing web site.
The college on Thursday mentioned it is stacking delivery containers to create a “safe perimeter” across the historic Folks’s Park in Berkeley, California, which activists say ought to be preserved.
“Over the following few days, surrounding streets will probably be closed to site visitors whereas crews set up a safe perimeter consisting of double-stacked delivery containers,” the college mentioned in a public assertion.
The rows of containers have been arrange after a earlier effort by UC Berkeley to keep up a fence across the space was foiled by protestors in August.
The makeshift wall is round “15 to 16 ft excessive,” UC Berkeley spokesperson Kyle Gibson instructed The Related Press.
UC Berkeley’s $312 million housing advanced is ready to supply flats for college students and native folks with out lodgings on a 2.8-acre web site at Folks’s Park. Round 60% of the location will probably be left as an open park house, the college mentioned.
Protestors are opposing the redevelopment as a result of the park was central to the counterculture motion of the Nineteen Sixties. Some folks with out everlasting housing have additionally been tenting on the location, although UC Berkeley mentioned it lately supplied them lodging elsewhere.
Jason Armond / Los Angeles Instances through Getty Pictures
Activists have delayed UC Berkeley’s development plans for months. In August, folks in a mass protest pushed down a fence that UC Berkeley tried to make use of to cordon off the realm.
However the college swept by way of the location in an early Thursday morning takeover, with armed law enforcement officials reducing down bushes and clearing the realm of activists and campers.
A number of folks tried to carry out in a treehouse, however ultimately left on situation of them not being arrested, per The Guardian.
Seven folks have been arrested by the top of the takeover, per native media studies.
Jason Armond / Los Angeles Instances through Getty Pictures
Regardless of gaining management of Folks’s Park, UC Berkeley cannot begin development till the California Supreme Court docket resolves authorized efforts filed to dam the constructing try, the college mentioned.
“The positioning is being closed now to reduce the opportunity of disruption for town of Berkeley and campus communities,” learn its Thursday assertion.
The college added that its new housing advanced is “urgently wanted,” with the UC Berkeley campus internet hosting sufficient housing for less than 23% of its college students.
The empty delivery containers round Folks’s Park echo the a whole bunch of containers set as much as fill gaps on the Arizona-Mexico border in 2022. State officers had lined the highest of these containers with barbed wire.
