How We Got Here

In 2018, the City of Berkeley evicted a group of RV residents, which had assembled itself in the shadow of the recently shuttered Hs Lordships restaurant, from a vacant parking lot in the Berkeley Marina. The group—collectively known as Berkeley Friends On Wheels—ended up settling at the intersection of Eighth and Harrison streets in West Berkeley, which at the time had only one RV resident: Merced Dominguez.

Dominguez’s family had owned a house on Ninth Street for 66 years, spanning four generations, but during the subprime mortgage crisis and resulting Great Recession in 2008, the family was suddenly at risk of losing their home. As banks received bailouts to cover their predatory lending practices, working families across the country were left without recourse and received no recompense.

On his death bed, Dominguez’s father asked her to promise she would not lose the house on Ninth Street, and she tried for years. But after five years of fighting, Dominguez bought an RV—just in case. On July 11, 2014, just one day before Alameda County sheriffs were scheduled to forcibly remove her from the family’s home, she stepped off the porch one last time and unlocked the door to her RV.

Dominguez first tried parking a few blocks away next to Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, but a neighbor quickly called police to report an RV had moved into the area. Unsure of where to go next, she took the advice of a friendly person who she met while walking her dogs. They suggested Eighth and Harrison, assuring Dominguez that it was a quiet block and nobody would mess with her there. 

The informal suggestion that unhoused people move into West Berkeley was quite prominent about a decade ago. In the late 2010s, people who were living on the streets in other parts of town were advised by Berkeley police officers to move to industrial areas west of San Pablo Avenue, where law enforcement would supposedly leave them alone.

I can’t attest to what homelessness in Berkeley was like before I moved here in 1997, but I remember there being much greater numbers of people living on the streets in and around downtown. Back then, Berkeley was well known for its street scene on Shattuck and Telegraph avenues, where hippies, gutter punks, and train hoppers could be found co-existing with students, workers, and residents.

But that began to change as business improvement districts became a thing in the late 90s, and criminalization of homelessness in certain areas of town has shifted how unhoused people are functionally allowed to exist in public space. Berkeley’s downtown street scene was slowly strangled to death over the next few decades, and in 2018, as police urged unhoused residents to pack up and move west, the city passed an ordinance that made it illegal to set down objects near downtown’s newly renovated BART station.

As we were systematically forced out of where we had been for years, many of us realized that we did in fact face less criminalization in the industrial areas of West Berkeley. At first, people were pretty scattered about. Then, as people discovered places where they could set up a dwelling for themselves that they wouldn’t be told to vacate after only a short time, people started to group together and build communities.

These communities formed in several places: underneath the freeway overpass at Gilman Street, on the freeway islands near Seabreeze Market just before the Berkeley Marina, near the Ashby Shellmond south of Aquatic Park, and various places adjacent to the train tracks. For a short time, these encampments were allowed to exist in proximity to a rapidly redeveloping West Berkeley, but as new buildings went up and new industries moved in, the city moved in to clear the most visible of these sites. 

But much to the dismay of those who would like to see us “gone,” it is physically impossible for anyone to simply—poof!—disappear. With nowhere else to go, many people evicted from encampments along the city’s freeway on-ramps settled at Eighth and Harrison, and since 2022, the intersection has grown to become the city’s largest unhoused community.

Unsurprisingly, as new businesses have moved into surrounding blocks around the Eighth and Harrison encampment, the area has become ground zero for policing poverty in the streets of Berkeley. The intersection has been subject to a number of evictions over the past five years, which in some cases have been stalled by lawsuits filed on behalf of encampment residents. But in the months following the Grants Pass v. Johnson decision in 2024, the City of Berkeley—with mounting pressure from a lawsuit filed by neighboring businesses—passed a resolution that allows for encampment closures without offering alternative shelter.

Let me take a moment to say this loud and clear: There are not enough shelter beds or permanent housing units in Berkeley to solve unsheltered homelessness, and the people who don’t enter programs continue to live outside in cycles of displacement and criminalization. Without veering too far into examples of alternative solutions to shelter that have worked in the past—such as the Safe Parking And Respite Kickstart program (SPARK) at 740–742 Grayson Street, a sanctioned lot for RV residents that existed between 2021 and 2022—it is safe to say that the city’s efforts to reduce homelessness in Berkeley are now being driven by a fictional narrative: A narrative in which the hero steps in to clean up the city, restore order where there was once chaos, and all in an effort to serve a greater good. 

But the situation at Eighth and Harrison isn’t fiction. Real people live there, and they have nowhere else to go. Many residents live with disabilities and chronic illnesses that require accommodations beyond what’s on offer in our limited shelter system, and the City of Berkeley’s evictions have been stalled time and time again in federal court as a result. 

So the hero must shift its tactics, and what better way to clean up the city than to focus on something other than humans: trash.

‘A narrative in which the hero steps in to clean up the city’

For a time, the City of Berkeley was providing a single dumpster to residents at Eighth and Harrison, which was emptied somewhat regularly. Residents and advocates also scheduled community cleanup days to stave off impending encampment evictions.

This isn’t to say that trash in encampments is a non-issue, or that residents aren’t responsible for the accumulation of objects along the sidewalks—the trash certainly does pile up. Dominguez, who keeps a tidy stretch of sidewalk a couple hundred feet from the intersection, feels that the constant clutter at Eighth and Harrison is compounded by the psychological impacts of homelessness.

“People are more or less just living at wit’s end after having everything taken away from them,” Dominguez said. “If they find something of value, they take it. But then it becomes hoarding. And the more that they hoard, a lot of things that they felt had value are now just thrown to the side.” 

The situation took a drastic turn early last summer. At 6AM on June 4, 2025, the city conducted a surprise eviction at Eighth and Harrison without notice. Berkeley police roused people from their shelters with less-lethal weapons and ordered them to leave immediately, as the Department of Public Works came in behind them with tractors. A federal judge halted the operation around noon that day, stating that the city’s failure to provide notice raised “a serious due process problem,” but much of the encampment had already been razed to the ground. 

In anticipation of the June sweep, which aimed to officially close Eighth and Harrison, the city removed the encampment’s dumpster. Residents and advocates repeatedly asked for the dumpster to be replaced, along with regular, scheduled pickups, but the city never brought it back. 

As you could imagine, this resulted in trash piling up all around the encampment, and as heavy rains began to batter the East Bay late last year, pools of standing water grew around obstructions that sat in the streets. It wasn’t long before these conditions—which were avoidable, had trash service been made available—took a hazardous turn.

In November 2025, a puppy from the encampment turned up at the local animal shelter in bad shape. The puppy tested positive for leptospirosis, a bacteria transmitted through the urine of infected animals. A week later, an adult dog living at Eighth and Harrison showed up to the local emergency vet with symptoms that matched those of leptospirosis. The dog was not tested for the bacteria but was quickly euthanized.

Leptospirosis is not uncommon amongst wildlife, but is less prevalent in developed areas with access to indoor shelter, running water, and proper storage for food and garbage. Rats are a common vector for the bacteria, and county public health workers soon confirmed that rats found at Eighth and Harrison had also tested positive for leptospirosis.

Paw Fund—a local nonprofit that provides vaccinations to animals whose owners are unhoused—immediately set out to mitigate further cases among dogs living at Eighth and Harrison. On December 11, all the dogs living at the encampment received their first dose of the two-part leptospirosis vaccine, with the second dose set to be administered on January 12. 

That wasn’t the only thing scheduled for Eighth and Harrison on January 12. The city had been drafting a public health alert regarding the presence of leptospirosis at the encampment, which was released the same day that dogs received their second dose.

The alert warned all persons living in and around the encampment about the presence of leptospirosis in the area, and while it did provide some basic, general facts about the bacteria, the intended message was clear: Leptospirosis is here, now, because of the homeless encampment, and to properly respond to the outbreak, all residents would need to leave Eighth and Harrison and relocate outside of the “⅓-Mile Exclusion Zone,” which spanned from the train tracks to Cornell Avenue and from the north end of University Village to Page Street.

Beyond vacating the area, the alert stated that vehicles from Eighth and Harrison deemed to have “long-term rat infestations” would be “classified as irremediable biohazards,” and destruction of these vehicles was “recommended for public safety.” The alert also said the city would conduct outreach on January 13 to distribute information about the outbreak and offer residents vouchers for the canine leptospirosis vaccine, the day after Paw Fund had administered the second and final dose to all dogs at the encampment.

It stands to reason that the city’s negligence led to an increased likelihood of leptospirosis at Eighth and Harrison, and in turn used the outbreak as leverage to close the encampment once and for all. But as of this writing, nearly three months since the public health alert, Eighth and Harrison still stands, and not one human nor dog has contracted the bacteria since it was first detected.

With all of this knowledge under one’s belt, one can’t help but to wonder what could have happened if the city had done right by its most vulnerable population from the start. It’s easy enough to point the finger at encampment residents for the leptospirosis outbreak, but had the city not removed the dumpster and all but ceased trash collection, the rat population wouldn’t have grown so much that the risk of transmissible disease was so high. Piles of garbage did in fact lead to large puddles of standing water that made these conditions possible, but this could have been avoided had city services been available.

But at its core, this is not a matter of who’s responsible for the encampment’s conditions. This is about calling out a fiction, a narrative in which unhoused people have been involuntarily cast as villains. And like most fiction in the American canon, the plot suggests that removing the villain is integral to producing a happy ending.

For years, our unhoused communities have been moving closer to the figurative and literal margins of Berkeley’s city limits, but let’s not get lost in the fiction that this crisis will be solved by erasing people clean off the page.

The full closure of Eighth and Harrison will not bring the city any closer to reducing homelessness in Berkeley—it’s simply a demand that its residents scatter. As I said before, people don’t simply—poof!—disappear. Without access to adequate, long-term shelter or clear pathways to permanent housing, the city will continue to spend taxpayer dollars on the huge operational costs of conducting encampment sweeps.

Until Berkeley prioritizes major investments in truly affordable housing, until there’s a clear pivot from criminalization to services and programs for people experiencing poverty, disabilities, and mental health crises—we will continue to be out here on the streets. We will continue to live and work here, to survive and sustain ourselves here, and if we’re not concentrated in long-forgotten industrial sections of town, then we’ll hunker down in other pockets of Berkeley where the same story is allowed to repeat itself.

That’s the reality of our current situation down here in West Berkeley. And for unhoused people living on these streets, that reality holds much more weight than any fiction.