Even with all the shipping containers in place, there are still legal issues potentially holding up building student housing in People's Park. From the San Francisco Chronicle:
...The university’s $312 million project would build housing for about 1,100 students and for more than 100 of the homeless people who regularly camp on the 2.8-acre site south of the Berkeley campus. The court agreed last May to hear UC Berkeley’s appeal of a lower-court ruling that said UC had failed to consider alternative housing sites or the impact on neighborhood residents of noise generated by the students.
Lawyers for Gov. Gavin Newsom, who supported the appeal, had told the court last April that the case “provides an opportunity for the Court to reaffirm that CEQA (the California Environmental Quality Act) is a tool to ensure public participation, informed decision-making, and thoughtful development — but not an instrument to block necessary progress or deny to others safe, healthy, and affordable housing.”
Then in September, the governor signed AB1307 by Assembly Member Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, which exempted UC Berkeley from any previous legal requirement to consider other sites for the project, and also said noise from future residents was irrelevant to environmental reviews of a housing project. That law effectively resolved the case, the university’s lawyers contended.
AB1307 means that California’s environmental law, which requires review of the impact of state-approved construction, can no longer “consider people as pollution,” attorney Jeremy Rosen told the court, quoting Wicks’ description of her bill. Rosen urged the justices to uphold UC’s approval plan “quickly so that the construction on the urgently needed People’s Park project can resume.”
Not so fast, said Thomas Lippe, a lawyer for the neighborhood groups.
UC Berkeley has more than 45,000 students and has forecast adding 8,500 more in the next 12 years, along with 3,600 employees. While AB1307 exempts the university from considering the neighborhood impact of noise from residents of the planned People’s Park housing, Lippe wrote, state law still requires UC to find alternatives to “noise impacts throughout Berkeley’s neighborhoods caused by all of the students included in the … projected enrollment-driven population increase, whether housed in UC residential projects or not.”
“This noise will be caused, not just by UC’s residential project occupants and their guests, but by all of the persons added to Berkeley’s neighborhoods, many of whom UC will not house,” Lippe told the court.
And even though the new law means the court no longer has to decide whether UC Berkeley should have considered sites outside People’s Park for new student housing, the attorney said, “the Court should decide the issue anyway because it raises issues of broad public interest that are likely to recur.”
After granting a review, the court generally schedules a hearing only after reaching a tentative majority vote among its seven justices, as a ruling is legally required no more than 90 days later. No hearing has been scheduled, but the justices have given no indication that they plan to dismiss the neighborhood groups’ case without hearing arguments and issuing a ruling. Until then, construction of the housing is on hold.
The case is Make UC a Good Neighbor v. UC Regents, S279242.
Full story at https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/peoples-park-lawsuit-18589923.php.
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