Berkeley clears encampment at Old City Hall after months-long protest

Berkeley cleared out an encampment of unhoused residents and their supporters at Old City Hall early on the morning of Dec. 10, roughly three months after the homeless advocacy group Where Do We Go Berkeley established it to protest the city’s new, more aggressive stance on clearing out encampments just like it.

The city posted notices Dec. 6 that it was shutting down the encampment. “Due to needed facilities and exterior grounds maintenance at this location, the encampment must be vacated before Dec. 10,” the notices read. A city spokesperson said staffers began overtures to campers three days before the notices were sent on Dec. 3. (See a PDF of the three-page notice at the bottom of this article.)

The city’s tactics in removing the encampment drew criticism from homeless advocates, several of whom protested the action at a City Council meeting hours later.

Andrea Henson, a co-founder of Where Do We Go Berkeley, said both city staff and advocates had been working to move about 40 of the encampment’s residents into shelters before it was cleared. That marked a shift from last month, when city crews removed another protest camp in West Berkeley without offering its residents shelter. Most of the Old City Hall camp’s residents had entered shelters by last week, and Henson said before the sweep she was optimistic that the process could become a “better model” for removing encampments in a fair and humane way.

City spokesperson Maitée Rossoukhi said 15 people who had been camping outside Old City Hall accepted beds at the shelter inside the building.

“Our Homeless Response Team’s primary objective is to guide the more than 400 people living on the streets of Berkeley on any given night toward housing and safety,” Rossoukhi said in response to an email inquiry about the Dec. 10 closure. Berkeley shelters its unhoused residents at a higher rate than the county average: 47% for Berkeley compared to 33% countywide, according to a county report.

According to Henson, residents were aware of the notice that had been posted stating the camp would be removed, but did not expect the city to act on it because about a dozen people were still awaiting shelter placements. She and others felt “betrayed,” Henson said, when bulldozers and police arrived in the pre-dawn darkness last Tuesday morning.

“This could have been done so much better,” Henson said. “I don’t know why they would come at 4 a.m.”

She and other advocates also said no mental health specialists or workers from Berkeley’s Specialized Care Unit were present during the sweep, which they contend traumatized residents who had to pack their belongings in the dark. Many have since moved just across Martin Luther King Jr. Way to camp on open sections of the lawn of Civic Center Park, outside the area that the city fenced off earlier this year.

Unhoused Berkeleyans and their advocates began pitching tents outside the city building in late September, just after the City Council ratified a new policy for camp sweeps. While city workers were formerly bound to make shelter offers to all encampment residents, under its new policy, the city can clear out camps even if no shelter beds are available under a number of conditions, including if there are health or fire safety concerns, public nuisances or encumbrances on work zones, medians, travel lanes and sidewalks. The policy was made possible by a U.S. Supreme Court decision last June that granted cities much broader authority to remove encampments without offering residents somewhere else to go.

When the Old City Hall camp was formed, its residents said they were worried about sweeps near Harrison and Eighth streets in Northwest Berkeley and Cedar and Second streets a little further south since policy documents supporting Berkeley’s new policy specifically named those areas as “the most persistent and hazardous in the city.”

In October, California allocated Berkeley $5.4 million of what the state calls “Encampment Resolution Funding” grants, which Berkeley intended to use to lease rooms at a Howard Johnson motel on University Avenue “dedicated to residents from encampments located on or near the Second Street Corridor,” as well as increasing the city’s stock of congregate shelter beds, according to an Oct. 29 memo from City Manager Paul Buddenhagen.

But at least as of Monday, the camps in Northwest Berkeley were still standing, and the city had brought its new policy to bear against other ones. Those included a small camp in a median on University Avenue in Central Berkeley, at parts of Civic Center Park now fenced off for restoration at a fountain there and at an encampment at Bancroft Way and Fourth Street. No more than a dozen residents had to relocate for any of those closures, advocates and residents said at the time.

City officials have frequently touted the results of this year’s point-in-time count of unhoused Berkeleyans, particularly the nearly 45% reduction in the number of completely unsheltered residents, from 803 to 443, from the last count in 2022. The total reduction in unhoused Berkeleyans — sheltered and unsheltered combined — was less precipitous, at just over 20%, or from 1,057 to 844. The distinction is due to a roughly 57% increase in the number of unhoused Berkeleyans now living in shelters, from 254 to 399.