Public Comment

These three "Scenarios" for developing People's Park were displayed at UC Berkeley Capital Strategies' "open house" on March 4. It's a safe guess why UC hasn't revealed them on its project Website: The only "choice" UC is offering the community is between massive high-rise dorms topping out at 16 stories, versus 15 stories. 

It's an equally safe guess that no one has ever been fond of the "Units 1–3" high-rise student warehouses that UC cheaply built across Southside in the 1950s and '60s. But even those eyesores are only nine stories high. To obliterate People's Park, UC is planning something more like Unit 666: a wildly out-of-scale tower that will loom over, and shadow, the adjacent residential neighborhood. Maybe they'll call it the Minas Morgul Campus. 

This is all bitterly ironic, for two reasons. 

First, directly north of People's Park is the 424-unit "Anna Head West" dorm complex that UC built in the last decade. This was a rare instance where UC erected something sensitive to Southside's historic character and scale. Its 4–6-story buildings have an Arts and Crafts vibe, with brown-shingled facades and peaked roofs. 

They reflect the adjacent, landmarked Anna Head School buildings, and the circa-1920s houses on the opposite side of People's Park. And they almost bring back the ghost of the moderate-density housing that UC wastefully destroyed in 1968, when it seized the People's Park block under eminent domain. That idiotic act of arrogant expansion had lethal consequences a year later. 

But rather than replicate its recent success just a block north, UC is scheming to revert to its 1950s and '60s mentality of packing and stacking blocky institutional towers. Unfortunately, this prestigious university doesn't seem to be exactly a "learning organization." 

The second irony is that at this March 4 open house, UC's hired architects were smart enough to display building models that could offer genuine alternatives to high-rise hell. One model, called "2.8 Spoke," looked like it could accommodate a comparable number of student housing units, in a web of interconnected lower-rise buildings – much like the adjacent Anna Head complex. 

The trade-off with this approach is that it would preserve even less open space on what used to be a park. But realistically, none of UC's schemes for this block will leave behind much of the spirit or footprint of People's Park. 

Community members who don't want to see UC repeat its grand-scale mistakes from the now-reviled Urban Renewal era might want to watch UC's project Website. That predicts an "Open House #3," on some TBA date in April or May, that's supposed to be about "Feedback on the refined [sic] site plan."