People's Park Bill Gliding Through the Legislature - Part 2 (help from unexpected source)

Our previous post on the bill to drop "noise" from required environmental reviews indicated that the bill was moving through the legislature in response to the problem UC-Berkeley has had in building student housing in People's Park.

The bill just got an assist from a USC-related project. From CalMatters:

...Earlier this year, a state appellate court blocked a proposed housing development for some 1,100 UC Berkeley students, partly on the grounds that the state’s marquee environmental protection law requires the university to study and mitigate the potential “noise impacts from loud student parties.” That was a new interpretation, and an expansion, of the California Environmental Quality Act, also known as CEQA.

Now, that logic is being applied to a second housing development, this one in Los Angeles, creating a fresh clash between defenders of the environmental law and housing advocates who see it as an impediment in battling California’s severe housing shortage. The Los Angeles case may also put new pressure on state lawmakers, who are considering a bill to override the UC Berkeley “people as pollution” ruling.

“It’s infuriating,” the bill’s author Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat, said of the latest court opinion out of Los Angeles, in a phone interview. “We have so many hurdles to building housing in California. We don’t need yet another one in the form of ‘human noises.’”

In the recent ruling, California’s Second District Court of Appeal swatted down a City of Los Angeles decision to fast-track the construction of a private developer’s housing project with 100 5-bedroom units near the University of Southern California; the project is unaffiliated with the school. The court sided with neighborhood groups who argued that the student tenants they expect to occupy the project would likely party on the rooftop decks, creating  “significant noise impacts” and thus required careful study under the state’s signature environmental law...

Full story at https://calmatters.org/housing/2023/08/ceqa-noise-pollution/.