Extra

I received a survey from Dr. Jasper Eshuis, Associate Professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam and a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, who is doing a community survey about People's Park. It includes questions about whether people support or oppose UC's building plans and related activism. The survey has all the elements of what we call a "push" poll, a survey designed to entrench, rather than discover, attitudes.

Somewhere in the survey it says, "It is important to me that people who are unhoused are helped, but not at the cost of less student housing." It then gave various degrees of support or opposition to that statement without offering the chance to question the question's false assumption - that there is a scarcity of places to situate housing such that we must destroy our parks to do so. 

That assumption is the essence of the false dichotomy that enabled the assault on our landmarked park, which is, thanks to community action, now on the National Register of Historic Places. Dr. Eshuis' survey doesn't mention that just east on Dwight Way sits over sixty acres of properties[1] still used for UC housing and events, or that just west on Dwight Way sits a UC parking lot available for development, to mention only three. The widespread acceptance of this scarcity falsehood has put our town unnecessarily at odds.

The University of California has spent over seventy years trying to annihilate local East Bay culture surrounding its flagship campus, which was former swampland adjacent to what was initially the town of Oceanview, a hardcore working town of small farms, breweries, vaudeville halls, brothels, race tracks, jazz clubs and the rip-snorting, uncontrollable lives of the diverse cultures who came here for work and a chance to start over. UC hated it. It wanted the campus to be an isolated, serene, protected and controlled place where it could nestle into the traditions of Ivy League schools and imitate them. The most cursory look at its initial footprint tells the story. Their terror of even putting in a community basketball court for fear the "wrong element" would use it is documented in minutes of the regents' meetings.

Our town has lost so much, and continues to lose not just square footage and historic landmarks to the endless pockets of money UC sets aside for land acquisition all over the state. UC also nurtures connections to corporations which now surface in the names and even the curricula on campus. It has taken whole departments, such as the Criminology Department, and erased them. It has taken the Public Health Library, among others, and put it completely out of reach on distant campuses. It favors and often partners with special Business Improvement Districts which shortchange all voices except those that own property.

People's Park was a garden, an anti-war statement, but also a revolt against the UC expansion which primarily targeted low-income housing it now proclaims it embraces as a goal. Even in the past year it has destroyed rent-controlled housing which was a city landmark. UC revolted against its own agreements to enrollment caps, creating homelessness and a housing shortage it now uses to destroy People's Park's critical cultural contributions and silence the communities which consistently gather at the park to expand collective thinking about respecting the earth and each other.

The survey's focus on building housing is a red herring in a town where we consistently have approximately 1,000 unhoused people and consistently over 3,000 empty housing units, some over ten years empty. We don't need to build a thing. We just need to hand out keys to what we have. We need a mayor and council that works for us, not for developers. Refurbishing existing housing, and stopping unnecessary, punitive evictions, is the greenest, cheapest, most sensible approach to making more housing available for everyone, not just students, many of whom can't afford the luxury student projects that typify what's now littering college towns nationwide and lining the pockets of out-of-state LLCs with no connection to our town except the money they pour into influential pockets. It's also the best way to preserve our landmarks for future generations. 

The survey's creators probably meant well. To them it probably looks neutral or academically pure to omit the context, the history, the trajectory of previous efforts to destroy People's Park and the provocative cultural, political questions it represents about race, class, historical landmarks, and war. But having taken the survey I can't help but imagine that the results regarding the intersection of attitudes and activism would be as well represented if the questions had included the facts of land and housing development options being plentiful, instead of riding the tired horse of land scarcity on behalf of the largest landowner in California. 

Academics have an obligation, in my view, to avoid that tilted landscape if they wish to learn, to analyze, and to teach. It is no small irony that my most solid lessons in this came from the former Criminology Department which, sadly, is now history.