People's Park Affair Could Lead to Legislation - Part 2

The Berkeley/People's Park affair has now reached the august realm of the New York Times. And the Times suggests a legislative fix is on the way: [excerpt]

How do you solve a problem like People’s Park? It all depends on whom you ask. The leaders of the University of California system want to build much-needed student housing in the famous park, just blocks from U.C. Berkeley’s campus. But moving forward with the plan hasn’t been easy. The university’s $312 million project, initially set to break ground last summer, has been repeatedly delayed by protests and lawsuits from Berkeley residents and activists who say they want to preserve the park, the center of bloody counterculture protests in the 1960s, as a historic site. In late February, a state appeals court in San Francisco sided with the opponents and indefinitely halted construction.

U.C. Berkeley officials say they will appeal the decision to the California Supreme Court. The university houses only 23 percent of its students, by far the lowest percentage in the 10-campus U.C. system — and a telling illustration of the Bay Area’s affordable housing shortage. “Our commitment to the project is unwavering,” Dan Mogulof, a U.C. Berkeley spokesman, told me. The university’s plan for the park includes building housing for 1,100 students, as well as for 125 people who are homeless, with half the park remaining open space.

However, it seems increasingly likely that obtaining permission to proceed with the redesign of People’s Park may come from somewhere other than the courts. Last year, in a somewhat analogous lawsuit, longtime Berkeley residents won a court order to freeze the university’s enrollment at 2020 levels. In their suit, they accused the university of violating the California Environmental Quality Act, known as CEQA, by essentially polluting neighborhoods by admitting more students than the city could handle. But California lawmakers headed off the freeze by passing a law tweaking CEQA that short-circuited the court order and allowed the additional students to be admitted. Similar legislative fixes are already in the works amid the People’s Park standoff...

State Representative Buffy Wicks, a Democrat whose district includes Berkeley, said she would introduce legislation this month to clarify that people’s voices couldn’t be considered an environmental impact under CEQA. Without such legislation, Wicks said, the People’s Park ruling could spawn new challenges to desperately needed housing construction across the state...

Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/13/us/peoples-park-berkeley.html.

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Note: Last summer's People's Park confrontation:

Or direct to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i67VCYsNkQ.