BERKELEY, Calif – It appears even the famously hippy-dippy friendly administration at UC-Berkeley has had enough with the homelessness, drug use and petty street crime in a so-called “People’s Park,” which has finally been slated to be repurposed for student housing.
“This city has moved on well beyond its stereotype, well beyond the 1960s,” Dan Mogulof, a spokesperson for UC-Berkeley, told Fox News. “People understand that the current status quo serves no one’s interest, least of all the homeless people who occasionally use the park.”
For decades, People’s Park stood to some as a symbol of the free love, anti-war and anti-authoritarian movement that swept this northern California college town in the 1960s. From the “Bloody Thursday” protest of 1969 to 2011’s “tree-sits” against plans to develop more student housing, the park has long been a place of protest and controversy.
But in recent years it has also become, as the San Francisco Chronicle recently described it, “a forlorn and somewhat menacing hub for drug users and the homeless” – and a place most Berkeley residents and students tend to avoid.
In May 2018, UC-Berkeley reported campus police had been called 1,585 times to People’s Park in the previous year. Between 2012 and 2017, there had been an astonishing 10,102 criminal incidents reported in the park. – READ MORE
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