Community Corner

Aerial View of Potential UC-vs.-Occupiers Conflict Zone

With an expected occupation Saturday afternoon, May 11, of UC-owned property at or next to the Gill Tract in Albany by Occupy the Farm activists, UC Berkeley released an aerial photo to clarify what it termed "misinformation" about the tract.

The attached photo was distributed Friday by UC Berkeley officials to clear up what they termed "misinformation" about the university-owned Gill Tract in Albany, where urban-farming activists from Occupy the Farm have said they plan an occupation on Saturday.

The group occupied an agricultural research field at the tract for three weeks a year ago.

The photo was provided to "clarify some misinformation about the area Occupy the Farm is erroneously calling the Gill Tract," said Associate Vice Chancellor Claire Holmes.

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The group says it's planning to march into a different part of the Gill Tract, south of the cultivated portion they occupied before. The Occupy the Farm website criticizes what it calls a university plan "to pave over the Gill Tract and build another chain grocery store on the site."

An open parcel south of the actively used growing field is slated for a Sprouts Farmers Market grocery store in UC Berkeley's latest development proposal for the site.

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"This area adjacent to the Gill Tract is an area slated for mixed use redevelopment," Holmes said. "It is a site that was occupied by WWII-era barracks and has not been a farm for at least 70 years."

In a statement posted Friday on its website, Occupy the Farm quoted a woman saying the Gill Tract was a working farm 40 years ago.

"It is in the public’s interest for this land to be returned to that highest and best use as a source of local food production and agricultural education," the group's statement said.

The term "Gill Tract" is not precisely defined and has been used on some occasions to mean just to the actively cultivated growing field and on other occasions to mean a larger tract that includes the growing field.

Many years ago, it meant the entire 108-acre tract that UC purchased in 1928 from the Gill family, which operated a nursery at the site. During World War II, the site housed military barracks that were converted to graduate student family housing after the war that became known as University Village.

Gradually the war-time buildings were torn down, and University Village student families were moved to new buildings designed for university housing at the site.

The photo distributed by UC Berkeley Friday, taken in 2006 before many of the trees were removed, shows the northeast portion of the former Gill family property. Some of the University Village housing is not shown in the photo. The buildings shown directly west of the "Planned Grocery Store" site are agricultural research structures and a remaining World War II barracks.

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