A state appellate court docket on Friday night issued a remaining ruling that stops UC Berkeley from constructing badly wanted pupil housing on Individuals’s Park and opens controversial new paths to cease improvement utilizing the state’s environmental regulation.
UC Berkeley mentioned it might attraction the ruling and reiterated its dedication to reshape the park into an area for pupil dorms and supportive housing for low-income residents. The plan additionally contains the creation of a commemorative show honoring the park’s iconic legacy without spending a dime speech and civil rights and an open area with landscaping and timber.
Two nonprofits, nevertheless, filed a lawsuit to cease the plan, saying it might rob neighbors of inexperienced area, harm the park’s historic worth and produce extra noise and different disruptions to the world.
The first District Court docket of Enchantment in San Francisco dominated that the California Environmental High quality Act, often called CEQA, required builders to research and mitigate a undertaking’s potential noise — on this case the noise generated by college students who could drink, yell and maintain loud “unruly events,” as some neighbors have complained in paperwork submitted to the court docket.
Although the regulation requires an evaluation of potential noise generated by a stadium undertaking, as an example, the ruling marked the primary time a court docket held that the habits of a specific group of individuals whom a housing improvement would possibly carry right into a neighborhood should be assessed, based on College of California attorneys.
UC Berkeley “did not assess potential noise impacts from loud pupil events in residential neighborhoods close to the campus, a longstanding drawback that the [environmental review] improperly dismissed as speculative,” the ultimate ruling mentioned.
The appellate court docket additionally dominated that the campus did not justify its resolution to not contemplate various places to the Individuals’s Park undertaking. College of California attorneys had argued that as a result of the undertaking’s purpose was to repurpose the park itself, no various would suffice.
The court docket mentioned the choice didn’t require UC regents to desert the Individuals’s Park undertaking however to return to the trial court docket and “repair the errors” within the environmental evaluate.
UC Berkeley denounced the ruling.
“The campus is dismayed by this unprecedented and harmful resolution to dramatically broaden CEQA, and the campus will ask the California Supreme Court docket to overturn it,” the college mentioned in an announcement.
“Left in place, this resolution will indefinitely delay all of UC Berkeley’s deliberate pupil housing, which is desperately wanted by our college students and totally supported by the Metropolis of Berkeley’s mayor and different elected representatives,” the assertion mentioned. “This resolution has the potential to forestall faculties and universities throughout the State of California from offering college students with the housing they want and deserve.”
The campus additionally mentioned the ruling “bestows new privileges and energy to the privileged and highly effective by arming NIMBY neighbors with further weapons to impede the event of all new city housing, impeding the development of housing not only for college students but additionally for the unhoused and low-income households.”
Thomas Lippe, legal professional for the 2 nonprofit teams that introduced the lawsuit towards UC, couldn’t be instantly reached for remark.
Earlier this yr, he advised The Occasions that criticism that the ruling will enable undertaking opponents to “weaponize” CEQA to maintain out individuals deemed undesirable was “overblown rhetoric, not based mostly in actuality.”
