Court rulings under the California Environmental Quality Act block sorely needed student housing by treating people and population growth as problems.
In an era of upheaval and protest at People’s Park and across the country, UC Berkeley admitted its first significant wave of Chicano students in response to student pressure in 1969. Even then, the university had a housing shortage, prompting a successful effort to acquire a house near campus for the Chicano student community in the early ’70s. Half a century later, Casa Joaquin Murrieta continues to provide affordable student housing for about 40 Berkeley students.
More recently, a series of court rulings that culminated last year nearly forced Berkeley to withhold admission of thousands of high school seniors because the state’s judges agreed with NIMBY neighborhood groups that population growth is an inherent environmental impact under CEQA. Only aNow a state court has given Berkeley’s NIMBYs another gift.
Of course, excessive noise is annoying, and it’s also illegal when it happens after hours or with amplified equipment. City and campus cops enforce nuisance ordinances, and in an earlier stage of this lawsuit, the university agreed to a city demand that it pay for stepped-up enforcement against occasionally noisy students — most of whom worked hard to get into Berkeley but are nevertheless young people living away from home for the first time in their lives.
Undergraduates without housing, especially students who are the first in their family to attend a four-year university, drop out at an alarming rate, leaving with debt and broken dreams instead of a college degree from one of the world’s premier public universities. Housing, in other words, matters. No wonder CEQA has been called the “law that swallowed California.”
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