BERKELEY — How much stuff can fit in a 3-by-3 foot square outlined in neon pink spray paint on a city sidewalk?
For the handful of people swept off two blocks of the city’s Harrison Street encampment early Tuesday morning, the answer was “not much.”
Six hours after backhoes started scooping up scores of pillows, water jugs, clothing and other personal property that didn’t fit and tossing them into dump trucks, Clarence Galtney was one of the last residents sorting through his things.
For the 65-year-old, who has lived for nearly a decade along the Harrison Corridor where the Gilman District’s industrial hub and residential neighborhoods collide in Northwest Berkeley, deciding which things to pack and which things to leave behind was simple.
“I’m just trying to grab the most valuable stuff and go,” Galtney said, eying the public works crews power-washing and fencing in the sidewalk, slowly inching closer to his camp that’s been swept before.
But it wasn’t easy. While he continues to wait for his transitional housing paperwork to process, Galtney said Tuesday morning’s displacement “feels like they’re taking another chunk out of me. The city’s hurting me real bad.”
This week, the city’s public works staff and police officers began closing the longstanding encampment along Seventh and Eighth streets in a three-day “imminent health hazard and emergency abatement,” which was first ordered in August to tackle concerns like rat infestations, structure fires and mounting garbage. Two people were arrested at the start of Tuesday’s sweep.
Following a 72-hour notice, any belongings — besides tents and other “cushioning material” — that were not consolidated within the 9-square-foot boundary were either put into temporary storage or discarded, in line with the “shared sidewalk policy” that Berkeley councilors passed five years ago.
The controversial rule — approved within an October 2018 ordinance largely drafted by Mayor Jesse Arreguín and Councilmember Sophie Hahn — is only being strictly enforced after months of outreach eventually fizzled into failed initiatives and recurrent hazards, according to Berkeley officials.
Arreguín was unavailable for comment, but in a statement provided by his assistant Stefan Elgstrand, the mayor sought to assure residents that the city is leading a “compassionate and effective response to lifting people out of homelessness with dignity while providing them housing while protecting the health and safety of our entire community.”
Elgstrand also emphasized that Berkeley “provides assistance for storage and access of personal belongings,” and said that along with biohazards and used needles, nearly 30 “fire-related incidents” broke out at the encampment during the first eight months of 2023, including one on Friday.
Neighbors and nearby businesses, including Berkeley Repertory Theatre facilities staff, said they have coexisted with the unhoused community living along Harrison Street for more than seven years, but the issues became untenable after the pandemic. They said they had left many in the Gilman District frustrated and fed up with witnessing jarring scenes of human suffering without many options to help, let alone address their own navigation and safety concerns.
But unhoused residents like Yesica Prado, a photojournalist at the San Francisco Public Press, are also up in arms, feeling like these kinds of city rules are used as the groundwork to target people sleeping on sidewalks, seize their property and push them out.
Prado has lived at Eighth and Harrison since 2018, when she and other RV dwellers were displaced from the Berkeley Marina, following a city council vote. She said this week’s attempt to implement the city’s 9-square-foot allowance is “just ridiculous, and honestly doesn’t make any sense.” It’s so small, she pointed out, that common items like wheelchairs and bicycles take up almost the entire footprint, if legally stored.
After a 12-hour sweep last October, Prado was one of the four encampment residents who successfully delayed a similar sweep at the start of September, when a judge granted a temporary restraining order because the city failed to provide adequate accommodations while many storage and housing services were closed over the Labor Day weekend.
But that delay expired on Sept. 27, and residents along Seventh and Eighth streets were given three days’ notice to start packing up before Tuesday.
Peter Radu, who leads the Berkeley’s Homeless Response Team, said he uses discretion with sidewalk policies and doesn’t regularly enforce the 9-square-foot footprint. However, he said encampments along Harrison Street have become untenable, and this week’s sweep will finally allow the city to address “long overdue” infrastructure projects there.
“I can understand the spirit of whether or not you’re being a good neighbor, which is what we tried to do,” Radu said, referring to months of outreach with unhoused residents, and new guidelines that are still being decided by the city. “Our general approach is to be more concerned with the spirit of compliance with that (3×3) law, rather than the strict letter of the law.”
But Aidan Hill, the former vice-chair of Berkeley’s Homeless Commission, said the so-called “3×3” rule embodies cruel and unusual punishment. Hill said these kinds of limitations on public spaces wouldn’t need to be enforced if city workers did a better job of helping communities keep encampments clean — saying it acts as almost “planned obsolescence or failure by design.”
And as the city continues to uproot unhoused residents with limited places to go, they said these kinds of sweeps are complicating the exact problem they’re trying to address.
“People might consider it hoarding, but it’s really a survival mechanism that says, ‘My things and my dignity have been taken from me so many times, I’m going to latch onto whatever I have left,’” Hill said. “That’s the psychology of what is happening.”
