People's Park Case to State Supreme Court

From the San Francisco Chronicle: The state Supreme Court agreed Wednesday to consider UC Berkeley’s plan to take over the historic People’s Park and build housing there for students and the homeless, setting aside a lower-court ruling that would have required the university to consider alternative housing sites. UC Berkeley now provides housing for only 23% of its students, the lowest rate in the UC system, and says the new development would help to meet that need. Its $312 million project would build housing in the park for 1,111 students in a 17-story, 148-unit building.

A separate building would contain 125 beds, with either half or all going to homeless people, depending on financing. During construction, the university says, it would provide shelter for about four dozen unhoused people who now sleep at the park. More than half of the 2.8 acres would remain open space, with a new grove of trees. But neighborhood groups want to preserve the park and say the university has less-disruptive options to build housing elsewhere. In February, the state’s First District Court of Appeal said UC Berkeley had failed to consider those options in its legally required environmental review of the project.

In a 3-0 ruling, Justice Gordon Burns said the university’s own development plan had identified several other nearby properties as potential housing locations, but the UC Regents refused to assess alternative locations or provide any “valid reason” for that decision. Burns also said the environmental report “failed to analyze potential noise impacts from loud student parties in residential areas near the campus” or propose any measures to reduce the noise. He said the court was not requiring UC Berkeley to abandon the housing project, but instead to conduct a new study and see if alternatives exist that would minimize harmful impacts.

On Wednesday, the state’s high court voted unanimously to hold a hearing on UC Berkeley’s appeal, an action that set aside the appeals court’s mandate to conduct a new review and adequately consider alternatives before going ahead with the project. The court denied review of a separate appeal by neighborhood opponents of the plan arguing that the university should also be required to consider addressing its housing shortage by limiting enrollment...

Full story at https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/supreme-court-peoples-park-housing-18105284.php.

Note: That even if UC wins at the state supreme court, it will still have to deal with the inevitable demonstrations that brought things to a halt when construction was attempted. The situation could end up comparable to the Hawaiian telescope (TMT) situation in which the project got a legal go-ahead but could not proceed because authorities did not want to remove demonstrators blocking the project.