City swept West Berkeley homeless camp without shelter offers, attorney says

The homeless advocacy group Where Do We Go Berkeley set up what it calls a “protest encampment” at the intersection of Fourth Street and Bancroft Way in October. City workers removed the encampment last week. Credit: Ximena Natera, Berkeleyside/CatchLight Local

City workers cleared a West Berkeley homeless encampment last week, acting on the broadened authority the City Council granted them earlier this year to sweep camps.

The 10 people living in tents at the intersection of Fourth Street and Bancroft Way were not offered shelter before the encampment was removed early on the morning of Nov. 20, according to Andrea Henson, an attorney and co-founder of the group Where Do We Go Berkeley, which organized the camp. City workers also removed several unattended tents and items from two other camps the homeless advocacy organization has set up around Berkeley.

The sweep at Fourth and Bancroft left encampment residents without shelters and other belongings as a powerful multi-day rain storm arrived to drench the Bay Area, Henson said, and advocates are still waiting to hear whether the city will return those items.

“Almost everything was taken,” she said. “They left them in the rain, literally.”

The City Council approved the new policy in September allowing Berkeley staff to remove homeless encampments without making shelter offers if the camps meet certain criteria, such as those that block traffic, are at the site of a permitted project or have been declared health hazards.

The policy followed a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that expanded local governments’ power to remove encampments by striking down a lower court decision declaring those sweeps unconstitutional if there was nowhere else for unhoused people to go. Berkeley’s embrace of the authority granted by the high court’s conservative majority has drawn national attention, with Henson and other critics charging the city’s new policy is a betrayal of its progressive values. Erin Spencer, a homeless veteran living in Berkeley, was quoted in Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent to the ruling.

Supporters of the new policy stressed that it calls for the city to continue to make shelter offers “whenever practicable,” but argued Berkeley needs the flexibility to act in the most severe cases to remove encampments that are dangerous both for their residents and the neighborhoods around them. Central to their case were conditions at two large encampments in Northwest Berkeley, around Harrison and Eighth streets and Cedar and Second streets. City officials say police and firefighters are routinely called to the camps, while nearby residents and businesses complain about a litany of crime and quality of life concerns stemming from them.

Berkeley has received a $5.4 million grant from the state to lease the Howard Johnson motel at 1512 University Ave. for the next four years, with plans to turn it into a 27-room shelter for residents of the Cedar encampment. The lease is set to begin in January.

With homeless outreach staff focused on plans for the Harrison and Cedar camps, City Manager Paul Buddenhagen wrote in a memo to the council in October that they planned to “deprioritize” work to remove encampments elsewhere in the city.

It’s unclear whether the sweep at the Bancroft camp means that focus has changed: Berkeleyside sent a list of detailed questions to the city’s media relations office this week about the action at the camp, seeking more information about what prompted the sweep and whether residents were offered shelter. City spokesperson Maitée Rossoukhi, who declined an interview request for this story, also declined to respond to those questions beyond confirming that the encampment was removed.

Instead, Rossoukhi referred to a brief statement that read in part, “We are performing outreach and routine encampment clean-ups of abandoned/unattended property throughout the City of Berkeley.”

Protest camps have spread around Berkeley

The group Where Do We Go Berkeley set up what it calls a “protest encampment” near Berkeley Bowl West after the city removed another encampment at Fourth Street and Bancroft Way. Credit: Ximena Natera, Berkeleyside/CatchLight Local

Where Do We Go set up what it calls a “protest encampment” outside Old City Hall shortly after the policy was adopted as a rallying point for opposition to the change. Over the ensuing weeks the group established three more camps: at Ohlone Park, along Bancroft Way outside the city’s Corporation Yard and at Fourth and Bancroft. That site, next to a large vacant lot in an industrial area, was chosen in hopes of minimizing conflicts with neighbors, Henson said.

But the vacant lot is the planned site of a 250,000-square-foot life sciences development, which Henson said was the city’s rationale under its new policy for allowing staff to clear the encampment. Berkeleyside reported this week that the project is on hold as commercial developers struggle to lease the glut of new biotech space that has been built in West Berkeley.

City staff posted a notice directing campers to leave the site by Nov. 18. But unlike with past encampment sweeps, Henson said, the city did not specify when workers would arrive to remove their tents. On the morning of Nov. 20, Henson said, “They woke everybody up and said, ‘You have a few minutes to leave.'”

Residents have since moved to other encampments, she said, with some setting up a new camp outside Berkeley Bowl West and others going to the camps at Harrison Street and Old City Hall.

Workers also posted notices at the other three Where Do We Go camps earlier this month telling residents they were violating ordinances and needed to move. But in a legal filing, Berkeley homeless services coordinator Peter Radu wrote that the city “has no imminent plans” to evict residents from those camps. As of Wednesday, tents continue to occupy Ohlone Park, the Corporation Yard and the lawn outside Old City Hall, where advocates are working to organize a Thanksgiving meal.

Meanwhile, city officials have not said when they plan to take action at the Harrison and Cedar encampments. Buddenhagen wrote in another October memo to the City Council, “Because encampments are comprised of human beings, each with different needs and mental states, effectuating this process requires a case-by-case approach and is not subject to predictable timelines.”

But according to Henson, the lack of information about when the city will remove those camps has fueled widespread uncertainty and fear for their residents, many of whom have been through encampment sweeps before, and worry about losing their shelters and personal belongings again.

“Everyone is very scared,” Henson said. “It’s horrible for people living on the street because they don’t know — they don’t know what’s coming.”