As of 2021, the land is used for UC Berkeley housing, an elementary school, public fields, a community garden, and agricultural research plots.
During World War II the federal government requisitioned most of the Gill Tract, along with a larger amount of land in the City of Berkeley, for construction of housing for families of civilian defense industry workers and of U.S. Navy personnel.
Four acres of trees and grasses known as Albany Meadows, formerly University Village residential buildings, serve as part of a wildlife corridor in the East Bay.
[citation needed] On August 3, 1820 Luis María Peralta received a Spanish land grant that included the acreage at Gill Tract.
[citation needed] Source:[3] In 1943 the federal government announced to local officials its plan to requisition a portion of the Gill Tract to construct wartime housing.
CAL 4479) with the assurance that, under the Lanham Act, within two years after the end of the war emergency the land would be returned to the university in the same condition that it was received.
In the Spring of 1946 the Federal Housing Authority disassembled nine two-story fourteen-unit apartment buildings in Oregon and reassembled them in Albany on the Gill Tract near the intersections of Jackson and Buchanan Streets.
On June 28, 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed the McGregor Act, which allowed the Federal Housing Authority to relinquish its portion of Gill Tract to the University of California.
One week after this purchase the business manager for UC Berkeley, William W. Monham, recommended that the entirety of the married-student housing project be known as University Village.
[10][11] Today, small plots for urban agriculture are available exclusively to University Village residents on 6.6 acres at the western edge of the Gill Tract.
The Gill Tract has a focus on agroecological principles, agroecosystem research, food justice, political education, and other farm management activities.
In 2018, the Gill Tract began collaborating with the Sogorea Te' Land Trust in order to address land-use and rematriation (see: repatriation) processes.
In 1998, experimental land for the Center for Biological Control was drastically limited in order to accommodate epigenetic research of non-GMO corn to patent genes for the genetic modification of organisms.
[14] August 10, 2013 marked the beginning of a participatory research project between UC professor Miguel Altieri and forty participants from surrounding neighborhoods.