‘You can’t say we didn’t clean up’

A new documentary spotlights community organizing at Eighth and Harrison streets

If you walk down to Eighth and Harrison streets in Berkeley today, you’ll find an intersection dotted with tents and RVs. A dumpster and port-a-potties have been installed for resident use. On one corner, broken-down Teslas line the curbs outside the company’s local repair center. Just down the road, a long tent structure built from plywood and chain-link fence lines the sidewalk. Known colloquially as “the Hovel”, the structure was built by long-time encampment resident Erin Spencer, who constructed it to house anyone who comes to the encampment in need of a place to settle.

Eighth and Harrison made headlines last September after nearby businesses filed a lawsuit against the City of Berkeley, alleging failures to address conditions at the encampment. But coverage of the story missed something far more complex, and it was happening right in front of the community’s eyes: residents had started organizing. 

In February, we walked into the Hovel to speak with Spencer about filming a short documentary at the encampment. He welcomed us inside, showing off how he constructed the shelter and describing how it served people who didn’t have other options. “We need community to survive,” he emphasized. But our conversation focused mostly on life, the state of the world, politics, and art. As we walked the streets introducing ourselves, this happened over and over again. 

This was the premise of our film: to bring the residents into the documentary process by letting them speak for themselves. The film, to be called Eighth and Harrison, shines a light on the work of Berkeley Homeless Union (BHU) co-founders Yesica Prado and Gordon Gilmore who, alongside the residents of Eighth and Harrison, have built and organized a community there to survive. 

Prado, an alumni of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, has lived at the encampment for years after purchasing an RV to be able to afford tuition. She, Gilmore, and others formed the BHU last summer in response to the impending threat of eviction by the city over what inspectors deemed to be health and safety hazards. By January 2025, the city had posted formal notices to vacate, and the BHU got ready to fight. They took surveys and held meetings, consulted with attorneys, and prepared to make the case that the majority of the residents report having disabilities, or are seniors, and would be harmed by the removal.

As a journalist, Prado has spent years covering the same questions we were asking ourselves as filmmakers: What might happen if those of us who already have houses and apartments were to take housing and service solutions seriously? In lieu of adequate shelter, where are people supposed to go? How do we collaborate with the people who understand the experience of unsheltered homelessness best? 

There is an undercurrent of defiance at Eighth and Harrison. It exists not in protest of the surrounding community, but in residents’ refusal to not be recognized as part of it. During our time filming Eighth and Harrison, we learned that meeting encampment residents where they’re at promoted both collaboration and a willingness to improve conditions for everyone. The community welcomed us and our cameras with open arms, and were proud to tell the world their own version of the story. 

In an effort to prevent the city from moving forward with the eviction, we followed a week-long community effort of encampment residents and volunteers as they cleared entire blocks of trash and debris. Spencer, who has lived through numerous sweeps and is reluctant to give away items people might need, also joined in to work with everyone as a team. The residents understood the stakes. Eighth and Harrison is one of the last remaining encampments in Berkeley where people can park RVs or pitch a tent in community with one another. Once it’s gone, there’s nowhere else to go.

The community cleanup effort also ensured that neighbors who were physically unable to contribute were supported and provided with needed resources. On one freezing night, we filmed Prado and other residents as they cleaned the camp of a disabled resident who uses a wheelchair and cannot walk. City officials had deemed their camp a health risk, and refused to assist in cleanup efforts. To protect their neighbor from losing all of their possessions in a sweep, the community spent hours working with the resident to organize the camp’s contents, dismantling and replacing their tent, and reconstructing their living space to a healthy, habitable state.

Perhaps the most impressive effort during our time with the residents of Eighth and Harrison was watching them successfully obtain a temporary restraining order against the city from a federal judge, which pushed back the potential for eviction until April 29. During our filming process, we quickly realized that the sheer intensity of the organizing that goes into collecting testimony and filing a lawsuit against the City of Berkeley was something that people needed to understand through our camera’s lens. Why would people exert this much effort to remain living on the streets? 

For those who haven’t spent much time in the Bay Area’s encampment communities, this concept can be hard to grasp. But to see how an encampment functions, how residents support each other, how the preservation of community ties keeps people alive—just to bear witness to community action can be powerful.

Our time with Berkeley’s unsheltered residents also offers a clear—and often grim—view into the realities of the larger homelessness crisis: cities are evicting unhoused people from their shelters and dwellings while openly acknowledging that there are not enough shelter beds or housing placements available for those who they displace. Furthermore, the shelter options that do exist frequently fall short of providing people with the resources to meet their most basic needs. In turn, housed residents often complain that encampments persist despite the billions of dollars allocated for housing and homeless services, so cities continue to sweep them, pushing people who have already been forced to the margins further from our sight. 

The people of Eighth and Harrsion aren’t so different from those of us who live in legal dwellings. Some, like one RV resident, have lived in this same neighborhood in Northwest Berkeley their entire lives. Our film argues that 56 years of community investment is not something to sweep, evict, or discard. 

The residents of Eighth and Harrison do not question or have trouble recognizing their value, both as individuals and as members of a community. Walking down the street, it’s clear that this is a home, a neighborhood inside a neighborhood. Some residents have astroturf, patio furniture, and grills. American flags hang on tents. Wheelchairs and walkers are parked outside. People fix bikes, recycle, and cook meals on self-constructed stovetops. Music plays on speakers. Down the block, a woman shows off her beloved dog’s new puppies to friends. What we realized in making this film is that the larger preconceptions of homelessness in the Bay Area are rooted in a deep misunderstanding, a dismissal or disregard of unhoused people’s ability to create and participate in community.  

It turns out, as many residents echoed to us, that when you give people a chance to show you who they really are, they deliver. And like everyone else in Berkeley, the people of Eighth and Harrison want to live in a clean, dignified space where they have agency over their own lives. 

As Prado says, watching the city pick up trash from the heaping pile the encampment residents had collected from the streets, “You can’t say we didn’t clean up!”

We are currently in post-production and expect to have a completed film by the end of the summer.

Eighth and Harrison is expected for release this summer. Street Spirit will publish a link when the film is made available.