UCLA Faculty Association: People's Park Is Back - Part 2 (and in time for the Regents)

We have noted that the legislature is pushing UC to increase enrollment. Part of adding students is adding places for them to live. As blog readers will know, the endless battle over People's Park - which UC-Berkeley wants to convert in part to student housing - led to a confrontation over the summer that halted construction. Then there was a court decision that temporarily blocked further work. And now there appears to be a court decision that would require an environmental report concerning noisy students. From the LA Times:

People’s Park — among California’s most contested and colorful patches of public land and a ‘60s era symbol of free speech and community power — is again embroiled in a battle for the ages, this time involving UC Berkeley, a key environmental law and the acute student housing shortage.

A state appellate court heard oral arguments Thursday over its tentative ruling last month that could delay UC Berkeley’s plan to build badly needed student dorms. If the tentative ruling is made final, it is likely to open controversial new paths that stand to obstruct housing developments statewide, legal experts said.

The tentative ruling stunned the university and drew condemnation from student leaders, lawmakers, Bay Area business executives and progressive law professors. In it, the 1st District Court of Appeal in San Francisco found that the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) required developers to analyze and mitigate a project’s potential “social noise’’ — in this case the noise generated by students who may drink, yell and hold loud “unruly parties,” as some neighbors have complained in documents submitted to the court. UC Berkeley failed to adequately assess this potential impact, the court said in its tentative ruling.

Though the law requires an analysis of potential noise generated by a stadium project, for instance, the ruling marked the first time a court held that the behavior of a particular group of people whom a housing development might bring into a neighborhood must be assessed, according to University of California attorneys.

“This would make CEQA a dangerous and powerful tool for any neighbor that does not like the social habits and customs of potential new residents,” Nicole Gordon of the Sohagi Law Group, which is representing UC, argued in a Jan. 3 letter to the court. “It is unfortunately easy to imagine this new ‘CEQA impact’ being applied to perpetuate prejudice and stereotypes...”

Full story at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-01-12/berkeley-peoples-park-uc-student-housing-tentative-court-ruling.

As we have also noted there is some possibility of legislative action to reverse the court decision if it ultimately goes against the university. Added enrollment and added student housing are not the same thing, of course. But the legislature - and the governor - has been on a tear to add housing more generally despite resistance from so-called NIMBY groups. On the other hand, organized labor - a powerful political force in Sacramento - likes having the environmental issue as an indirect tool for unionizing major projects. (Unions file objections to nonunion projects, causing delays until the employers agree to unionization.) What has resulted is special legislation for a particular project rather than wholesale changes in the law. Something like that could emerge - or not. We will see. In any case, the issue is sure to come up at the upcoming Regents meetings. It is already on the agenda for a closed door session and there will likely be public comments on the subject.

===

Video of the summer confrontation: