Tags: berkeley  garage  parking  protest  student  underhill  
Channel: Nonprofits & Activism
Uploaded: December 31, 1969 at 6:59 pm
Author: WheelsOfChange
Length: 01:12
Rating: 5.00
Views: 55
A valiant student-led movement to create housing for people rather than cars at the Underhill Lot in Berkeley was only partly successful, resulting in quasi-green buildings but an enormous greenhouse gas bomb of a monstrosity that just keeps on giving the gasses to the masses.The new garage is situated at the intersection of two bicycle boulevards and along the main transit routes which are already impacted by congestion.The garage was pushed through for an optimistically estimated $40M at a time when an ASUC survey found that over 3,000 students were couch surfing thanks to the dot com boom combined with greatly compromised tenant protections (often attributed to former mayor Shirley Dean, who campaigned for the end of rent control).The protest movement was spirited and diverse and lasted over a period of years. At one point Rick Young, the "Julia Butterfly of the Underhill lot," camped there for over a month simply trying to get then Chancellor Berdahl to converse in good faith about the University's role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.The Chancellor's response was to ban bicycles from campus on the primary southern gateway (there's no alternate route), resulting in hundreds of citations and arrests of bicyclists and reduced bicycling to campus. The ban was put in place despite a history of zero injuries between bicyclists and pedestrians. The ban is still in place and doing damage close to a decade later, and the police are refusing to lift in in case they could be sued for removing the restriction if someone does someday get hurt (this despite the fact that the entire campus was off limits to bikes in the early 1990's, and that ban was entirely lifted).UC Berkeley is far from okay.

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