The California Supreme Court cleared the way on Thursday for a long-delayed project to build housing for university students and homeless people at the historic People’s Park in Berkeley, ruling that a new state law pre-empted claims that the housing units would generate noise pollution in an already dense neighborhood.
The ruling caps years of protests over the fate of a landmark of the 1960s counterculture movement, and allows the University of California, Berkeley, which owns the land, to add some 1,100 units of much-needed student housing.
The $312 million project, which was originally scheduled to break ground in 2022, has been besieged with litigation and protests almost since the university proposed it. Some Berkeley residents and activists pushed aggressively to preserve the entire site as a park, and two groups sued, arguing that the project would violate state environmental regulations by inviting student parties and other noise.
In February 2023, a state appeals court in San Francisco sided with the opponents, who said that the university had failed to conduct the required environmental reviews and had not appropriately considered other possible locations. In response, state lawmakers passed a new law, signed in September by Gov. Gavin Newsom, that eliminated “social noise” pollution from the list of environmental impacts to be considered for residential projects like the one planned for the People’s Park site.
The new law set off yet another round of demonstrations, as the university appealed the case to the California Supreme Court.
In an extraordinary midnight police sweep, demonstrators and homeless people who had occupied the site were forcibly removed in January, and the site was walled off with stacked shipping containers to keep opponents out.
Along with student housing, the project plans call for building 125 housing units for people who are homeless, and reserving half of the property for open space.
In the ruling on Thursday, Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero wrote that the new law effectively eliminated potential “social noise” pollution as an obstacle to the project, and that the university’s environmental impact report was “not inadequate for having failed to study the potential noisiness of future students at U.C. Berkeley in connection with this project.”
Harvey Smith of the People’s Park Historic District Advocacy Group, an organization of project opponents, disputed that conclusion. He called the ruling and its underlying legislation “the result of a backroom deal” that the university and its allies had “pushed through the legislature” after the opponents appeared to have successfully appealed.
“We won in court and then the U.C. went to the legislature and changed the rules,” Mr. Smith said. “We’re evaluating our options, but our options are increasingly limited.”
Daniel Lopez, a spokesman for Mr. Newsom’s office, said that the governor had signed the law “to ensure that NIMBYs cannot weaponize state law to block affordable housing.”
“The court’s ruling affirms the law’s purpose: to ensure that vital housing projects are not blocked or delayed because of concerns over noise from new residents going about their daily lives,” he said.
Some 45,000 students are enrolled at the Northern California campus, but the university has provided housing for less than a quarter of them. In a statement, Dan Mogulof, a U.C. Berkeley spokesman, said the university was “pleased and relieved” by the decision, adding that the new units were “desperately needed by our students and unhoused people,” and that the preserved open space would benefit the entire community.
In 2021, an Alameda Superior Court judge ordered the university to freeze enrollment at 2020-21 levels as part of the People’s Park litigation — a decision that was upheld by the State Supreme Court. To comply, U.C. Berkeley had planned to move some undergraduates to online-only studies and defer the admissions of others by a semester.
The thought of capping enrollment at one of California’s most prestigious universities immediately alarmed parents around the state. California lawmakers responded in 2022 by changing the state’s environmental law to give public universities more flexibility, which allowed U.C. Berkeley to reopen its doors to students it had intended to admit.