Her solution was to recraft the space to provide dorms for 1,100 students and supportive housing for 125 low-income residents, along with an open green meadow and commemorative exhibits about the park’s storied history.īut the plans have been stymied by protests against construction last August, followed a day later by the appellate court’s injunction temporarily halting all work at the site. But the dual crises of an acute student housing shortage and growing numbers of unsheltered residents, many of whom lived in the park, moved her to act. In the last few months, two bodies were found in the park.Ĭhrist said the controversial land has long been a “third rail” that campus leaders avoided addressing. The space had become a community gathering space, but over the years the site deteriorated with trash, rats and crime. The park, three blocks south of the main campus, became a national symbol of people power in 1969, when hundreds of people hauled sod, trees and flowers to a scruffy lot that the university intended to build on and proclaimed it their own park.Īfter UC fenced the public out a few weeks later, thousands of protesters marched to the site and clashed violently with law enforcement. The legal brouhaha marks the latest setback for the People’s Park project, first unveiled in 2018 by UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ. “It’s UC’s own decision-making that has led to a situation where there’s a temporary delay in the building of housing in People’s Park,” he said. He also said state laws protect against housing discrimination and that the California Environmental Quality Act offered a democratic way for people to know the environmental consequences of their government’s decisions on them before they are made. He said the ruling would not stop the People’s Park project but only delay it until UC did the analyses he argued should have been done in the first place. Thomas Lippe, attorney for the two nonprofit groups that brought the lawsuit against UC, said criticism that the ruling will allow project opponents to “weaponize” CEQA to keep out people deemed undesirable was “overblown rhetoric, not based in reality.” The judges did not indicate when they would issue a final ruling. The judges asked pointed questions to both sides about whether a group’s potential behavior was fair game to assess, for instance, and the intent of legislators in including “noise” - though not explicitly “social noise” - as an environmental impact to be evaluated. The three-person panel focused heavily on the noise issue in its 80-minute hearing Thursday.
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The tentative ruling also found that UC Berkeley failed to sufficiently analyze how its long-range plan for land and infrastructure development through 2036-37 could potentially displace some city residents and cause more homelessness by increasing its campus population without providing enough housing.ĭevelopers have never before been required under the environmental law to consider a proposed project’s “indirect displacement” of residents and potential effect on gentrification and homelessness, Gordon said.Īn earlier trial court ruled that UC was not required to assess either social noise or indirect displacement, agreeing with the university that trying to predict the behavior of future students or the housing needs of future campus members was too speculative.īut the appellate court in its tentative ruling disagreed - and also found that UC had failed to adequately consider alternatives to housing in People’s Park.
UC Berkeley failed to adequately assess this potential impact, the court said in its tentative ruling. In it, the 1st District Court of Appeal in San Francisco found that the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) required developers to analyze and mitigate a project’s potential “social noise’’ - in this case the noise generated by students who may drink, yell and hold loud “unruly parties,” as some neighbors have complained in documents submitted to the court.
The tentative ruling stunned the university and drew condemnation from student leaders, lawmakers, Bay Area business executives and progressive law professors. If the tentative ruling is made final, it is likely to open controversial new paths that stand to obstruct housing developments statewide, legal experts said.
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People’s Park - among California’s most contested and colorful patches of public land and a ‘60s era symbol of free speech and community power - is again embroiled in a battle for the ages, this time involving UC Berkeley, a key environmental law and the acute student housing shortage.Ī state appellate court heard oral arguments Thursday over its tentative ruling last month that could delay UC Berkeley’s plan to build badly needed student dorms.
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