Court ruling halts UC Berkeley from building student housing at People’s Park

A state appellate court on Friday evening issued a final ruling that stops UC Berkeley from building badly needed student housing on People’s Park and opens controversial new paths to stop development using the state’s environmental law.

UC Berkeley said it would appeal the ruling and reiterated its commitment to reshape the park into a space for student dorms and supportive housing for low-income residents. The plan also includes the creation of a commemorative display honoring the park’s iconic legacy for free speech and civil rights and an open space with landscaping and trees.

Two nonprofits, however, filed a lawsuit to stop the plan, saying it would rob neighbors of green space, damage the park’s historic value and bring more noise and other disruptions to the area.

The 1st District Court of Appeal in San Francisco ruled that the California Environmental Quality Act, known as CEQA, required developers to analyze and mitigate a project’s potential 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.

Though the law requires an analysis of potential noise generated by a stadium project, for instance, the ruling marked the first time a court held that the behavior of a particular group of people whom a housing development might bring into a neighborhood must be assessed, according to University of California attorneys.

UC Berkeley “failed to assess potential noise impacts from loud student parties in residential neighborhoods near the campus, a longstanding problem that the [environmental review] improperly dismissed as speculative,” the final ruling said.

The appellate court also ruled that the campus failed to justify its decision not to consider alternative locations to the People’s Park project. University of California attorneys had argued that because the project’s aim was to repurpose the park itself, no alternative would suffice.

The court said the decision did not require UC regents to abandon the People’s Park project but to return to the trial court and “fix the errors” in the environmental review.

UC Berkeley denounced the ruling.

“The campus is dismayed by this unprecedented and dangerous decision to dramatically expand CEQA, and the campus will ask the California Supreme Court to overturn it,” the school said in a statement.

“Left in place, this decision will indefinitely delay all of UC Berkeley’s planned student housing, which is desperately needed by our students and fully supported by the City of Berkeley’s mayor and other elected representatives,” the statement said. “This decision has the potential to prevent colleges and universities across the State of California from providing students with the housing they need and deserve.”

The campus also said the ruling “bestows new privileges and power to the privileged and powerful by arming NIMBY neighbors with additional weapons to obstruct the development of all new urban housing, impeding the construction of housing not just for students but also for the unhoused and low-income families.”

Thomas Lippe, attorney for the two nonprofit groups that brought the lawsuit against UC, could not be immediately reached for comment.

Earlier this year, he told The Times that criticism that the ruling will allow project opponents to “weaponize” CEQA to keep out people deemed undesirable was “overblown rhetoric, not based in reality.”