 |
| People's Park confrontation last summer |
The LA Times editorial board complained yesterday about the use of CEQA to block dorm construction in Berkeley's People's Park and elsewhere. So far, there has been no indication that the legislature is planning to step in and override the People's Park decision specifically, create some kind of general exemption for student housing, or even make some broad changes in CEQA for any kind of project. The legislature - which has been pressing for more undergraduate enrollment at UC did override a court decision blocking higher enrollment goals at Berkeley, as blog readers will know.
Whether the legislature will see a connection between enrollment and building dorms is unclear, although there is an obvious link.
From the editorial:
Another year and lawmakers are again faced with the thorny but necessary job of reforming the California Environmental Quality Act, the landmark law that has improved countless construction projects. But CEQA lawsuits have also too often been used to thwart progress on the state’s most pressing needs by stalling or blocking important projects.
In the latest example of CEQA run amok, a California appellate court is considering whether noisy college students are an environmental impact, akin to pollution or habitat loss, that should be addressed before UC Berkeley can build a new dormitory to ease its student housing shortage. The case involves the university’s plan to develop People’s Park, a swath of open space owned by the university and claimed by protesters in 1969, with housing for 1,100 students and supportive housing for 125 homeless people, along with a clinic, public market and landscaped open space.
Neighborhood groups sued to block the project, arguing the university violated CEQA. In a tentative ruling issued in December, the 1st District Court of Appeal in San Francisco agreed the university failed to adequately study certain impacts, including noise. The ruling said that because college kids can be loud when talking, drinking and partying, the university should have studied and sought to reduce the “social noise” from future student residents.
Berkeley’s lawyers argue that noise from humans socializing shouldn’t be considered an environmental impact, and it’s a dangerous precedent to require additional environmental analysis based on who is going to live in a housing development. Would housing for the elderly prompt the same analysis? Some CEQA experts warned the decision, if finalized, could give Not-in-My-Backyard litigants a powerful new tool to block housing and other development projects.
The tentative decision also takes aim at UC Berkeley’s plan to expand enrollment and build more dorms nearby over the next 15 years, saying the university failed to study whether the long-term growth plan could have environmental impacts by increasing gentrification and homelessness. While these are real issues in the Bay Area, they haven’t been considered environmental impacts under CEQA.
If the ruling becomes final, UC Berkeley could be penalized for not analyzing its impact on the local housing shortage and blocked from building dormitories to help address that shortage in the same decision. That’s one of the pitfalls of CEQA — the law only considers the possible negative effects from a project, without giving equal weight to its benefits or the consequences if the project isn’t built. Yes, a dorm for 1,100 college students might generate noise in the neighborhood but it will create much-needed housing in a walkable, bikeable urban area with quality public transit, which is exactly where we should be building...
Full editorial at https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-01-30/editorial-ceqa-is-too-easily-weaponized-to-block-housing-and-slow-environmental-progress.
Last summer's People's Park confrontation:
No comments:
Post a Comment