Traffic barricades have been removed and the perimeter of People’s Park in Berkeley has reopened as of Wednesday amid controversial plans to add housing there.

Cars, bikes and pedestrians can again use Haste Street, Dwight Way and Bowditch Street, but the view has substantially changed. 

An architectural rendering shows the proposed redesign of People’s Park surrounded by student housing for the nearby UC Berkeley campus. (Image by LMS Architects/Hood Design Studio courtesy of University of California at Berkeley)

According to University of California, Berkeley, which owns the site, university police will be in place at the site 24 hours a day until construction on a 1,100-bed student housing complex is constructed. 

The park, which began in 1967 as the spontaneous beautification of a vacant industrial lot by thousands of volunteer activists, is now unrecognizable.

About 160 double-stacked cargo containers rim the park, with openings sealed by steel plates. The giant wall will remain until construction is completed on the new housing project.

A developer will build units for very-low income and formerly unhoused people on a portion of the site, the university said. Plans include the preservation of more than 60 percent of the site for public green space and a historic memorial.

The decision to surround the park with containers brought protesters and led to several arrests at the site last week.

Double stacked 10-foot steel plates or welded onto stacked cargo containers to barricade the perimeter of People’s Park on Jan. 5, 2024. (Ruth Dusseault/BCN)

“We wanted an approach that prioritized public safety; the need to minimize the potential for confrontation and disruption; the need to safely and completely close the site so it would not revert to being a locus of crime and peril for the unhoused people there, and for the surrounding community; and the ability to start construction as quickly as possible after the legal issues are settled,” said university spokesperson Dan Mogulof.

A lawsuit was filed by neighborhood groups concerned about the local impacts of the housing project. It is still pending in the state Supreme Court, but the university said it has the legal right to close off the construction zone while the case is litigated.

Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.