Before Berkeley can dismantle the encampment it has fought for more than a year to close, a federal judge says city staff must first spend a day on foot — walking local streets alongside the Berkeley Homeless Union to mark out places where up to two dozen disabled campers could legally pitch a tent.

The directive, issued Thursday by U.S. District Judge Edward M. Chen, is the newest twist in Berkeley Homeless Union v. City of Berkeley (3:25-cv-01414-EMC), the federal case that has repeatedly stalled the city's push to shut down the camp at Eighth and Harrison streets. Chen cast the exercise as a minor clarification of a disability-accommodation order he issued in the spring. The city's lawyers cast it as a costly new mandate the Americans with Disabilities Act never contemplated. That gap — between a clarification and a whole new program — is now the fight.

Berkeley has legal permission to clear the Harrison Street Corridor encampment. What it does not have, a federal judge ruled Thursday, is permission to do so before helping the people it displaces find somewhere else to go.

Judge Edward M. Chen ordered the city to send staff into the neighborhood with a Homeless Union representative and identify roughly 20 to 25 possible tent locations for a list of 23 disabled campers, each with a documented tent size. The Berkeley Scanner, which watched the hearing remotely, reported the order. In the same session, Chen turned down the union's bid for a new injunction to freeze the closure — so the city keeps its authority to wind the camp down while it takes on the survey work.

The Berkeley Homeless Union sued the city last year, arguing it was displacing disabled residents without doing enough to help them. Chen's April decision↗ (external source, opens in a new tab) is the spine of the current dispute: he let the city proceed with a clearance but struck down its rule capping sidewalk possessions at a three-by-three-foot square, reasoning that a standard tent simply won't fit. He also required the city to help disabled campers move, store their property and replace gear destroyed in a sweep. A separate Courthouse News account↗ (external source, opens in a new tab) framed the ruling as allowing evictions to restart, but only within those disability guardrails.

Thursday's hearing hinged on how elastic those guardrails are. Assistant City Attorney Katrina Eiland argued that sending staff out to scout sites with campers would amount to inventing a service Berkeley does not offer — a "fundamental alteration," in her words, well beyond the ADA's requirement that existing programs be made accessible. She said the city would object strongly to any broadening of the earlier orders. Deputy City Attorney Nubyaan Scott put the practical problem bluntly, telling the court the city had neither a map nor a running list of viable spots.

Chen was unpersuaded and, at moments, plainly annoyed. He pressed the lawyers for an alternative — "How do we avert chaos?" — and warned that waiting until the day of clearance risked an explosion with dozens of people still on the street. When Eiland pointed to the city's appeals, the judge noted dryly that Berkeley had filed plenty already and could file another; he was going to issue the order regardless.

The urgency has sharpened as the closure has slipped. By the city's own count, the population at the site grew from about 37 to more than 80 while the cleanup stalled, partly under the weight of the spring requirements. Days earlier, crews extinguished an arson fire at the camp — one of dozens of blazes there this year — allegedly set by a resident enraged over a stolen scooter, who now faces arson and domestic-violence charges.

Berkeley insists its outreach has largely gone nowhere. Eiland told the court the city had approved 23 union members for oversized tent footprints, but that none had followed up with specific locations despite door-to-door contact at the camp. That silence, she suggested, was reason to doubt the accommodations were truly wanted. Chen refused to treat the point as settled, telling her his job was to order action, not to draw conclusions about the campers' intentions.

He was also careful about vocabulary. Pre-approving sites, he stressed, would not create a city-"sanctioned encampment" — he said he understood exactly what those "magic words" implied and was pointedly not using them. Berkeley's wider challenge to his rulings remains pending at the Ninth Circuit. The city did not answer the Scanner's request for comment.