Civic Center Park now almost entirely fenced off

Berkeley has moved more than a dozen camp residents out of Civic Center Park and into housing, and fenced off the few remaining grassy areas there. Barriers now stretch all the way to the sidewalks on three sides of the downtown park, and to the alley behind city hall on the fourth.

Many Berkeley High School families and neighbors began agitating for Berkeley to clear the park of campers after a student was groped at the park in January, though it later came to light that the man suspected in the crime was not living there. Other BHS families and advocates for unhoused Berkeleyans took the opportunity to protest the city’s policies on encampments as too heavy-handed.

The city’s Homeless Response Team found housing for 16 people living in the park and moved them in, while one person left the encampment voluntarily, according to Councilmember Igor Tregub, whose district includes the park.

Andrea Henson, an attorney and co-founder of Where Do We Go Berkeley, criticized the city’s move, saying it had not provided “accessible and proper shelter” for residents of the final three tents at the park.

“Hostile architecture hurts our entire community — the high school, downtown business [and] the most marginalized residents,” Henson told Berkeleyside in an email.

The city had already fenced off most of the grassy areas at the park in October, saying the barriers were necessary for repair work, including reconstruction of the fountain there. The city later shut down a camp across Martin Luther King Jr. Way, which itself had expanded in protest of the City Council’s September vote to adopt a more aggressive policy on clearing camps of unhoused Berkeleyans.

In a newsletter Thursday, Tregub wrote that the “western part of the park needs to be temporarily fenced off to undergo needed rehabilitation.”

City spokespeople did not immediately respond to inquiries. Tregub told Berkeleyside in an email that “repairs should be completed by mid-summer and that’s when the hope is for the fencing to be removed.”