The issue was not that the environmental standards are good/needed or not/not. The issue was that the environmental standards are good but that this case was not actually related in any way to the environmental standards review envisioned by the legislature when it originally passed the underlying law that allowed this lawsuit to proceed in the first place.
The legislature simply updated the law to make it clear that these types of lawsuits (i.e., over activities which don't directly relate to construction of new buildings even though they may ultimately lead to new construction) are not intended by the original law, and this new law makes that explicitly clear. (The eventual construction of new buildings required by the enrollment increase would be covered by normal CEQA review processes.)
EDIT:
From TTOTFL itself: "This bill would delete the provision requiring the environmental effects relating to changes in enrollment levels be considered in the EIR prepared for the long-range development plan. The bill would provide that enrollment or changes in enrollment, by themselves, do not constitute a project for purposes of CEQA."
Sure, but lots of things are unnecessary and we can't get rid of them because they are politically dangerous to touch. So we chip away at the ugliness bit by bit. No purity here: you take every yard you can get. And if I have to lie and say "CEQA as it stands is great, but occasionally there are situations where it is a bad fit" just to get people to let me take a step forward, then I'll lie.
I'll share an unpopular opinion, loosely in defense of some elements of NIMBYism.
I grew up in a small Marin County town called Point Reyes. It had 350 residents when I grew up, now maybe 1,000. The main reason people live there is to feel remote and rural. It is a way of life.
Given the proximity to San Francisco, the real estate prices have skyrocketed. Almost all my blue collar friends have had to move. It is sad that we have become a neighborhood for tourists and wealthy tech owner second homes. But, the character of the town remains, which is a nice silver lining.
With recent California rules, affordable housing is being forced by the state. Any open parking lot, any church, any building not considered "fully utilized" is now being allocated for low income units. Even most low income residents in the town don't like it, as it doesn't match the character of the area whatsoever - it undermines the very reason people live here to begin with.
I'm a unicorn founder so know I'm in a very privileged position. I actually bought a place in town which I'm turning in to multiple units for working class people because I didn't want someone else to buy it and turn it into a mansion. This is very different than state mandates that override any sort of local planning. I'm trying to help solve the problem while also preserving the essence of the community.
I think it is overly simplistic to call NIMBYs evil and YIMBYs good. I like living in a small rural town. People move here because they want that. Forcing a town of <1,000 people to infill with huge apartment buildings doesn't fundamentally alter the overall housing problem, but it does impact the people that live and work in the community.
I also don't claim any moral high ground here - there is no right and wrong about this. We all have our desires about how we want the world to evolve, and I wish we could all respect the complexity of the situation vs putting people in competing good vs evil camps.
Your position is indeed unpopular. Everything changes. The population keeps growing. Without development, there isn't enough space for all the kids of all the people you grew up with to stay in Point Reyes and have kids of their own.
Also, you don't just live in some random rural town. You live on the most scenic highway in the state, at the exit to a massively popular national seashore, in a major metropolitan area that has experienced massive growth.
And nobody is "forcing" development. That's all on the property owners. They are freely choosing to follow the financial incentives. The state "mandates" are just overriding local zoning laws that would have prohibited development by the property owners, or adding to the incentives for development. If the owners of a parking lot or the church want to keep it, the state would have to eminent domain it in order for it to be "allocated" for development.
> Given the proximity to San Francisco, the real estate prices have skyrocketed. Almost all my blue collar friends have had to move. It is sad that we have become a neighborhood for tourists and wealthy tech owner second homes. But, the character of the town remains, which is a nice silver lining.
You see why it’s become that, and why your blue collar friends have had to move though, right? It’s not just that it’s close to San Francisco; it’s that being close to San Francisco means lots of people want to live there, and there aren’t enough places near San Francisco for them to live.
The idea that any town should effectively push its existing residents out in pursuit of “preserving the character of the area” just seems wrong to me. Are the aesthetics more important than the people who live there?
"The main reason people live there is to feel remote and rural. It is a way of life."
Marin County is one of the most segregated counties in the Bay Area, and by design from legacy housing policies. It's hard to ignore the fact that "preserving the essence" is the same thing as "continue to be a heavily segregated" locale.
"An inordinate number of the most segregated cities in the Bay Area are smaller cities that are more than 85 percent white in Marin County (Ross, Belvedere, Sausalito, San Anselmo, Fairfax, and Mill Valley are each in the top 10). Two of the top 10 are similarly small-sized, heavily white cities in San Mateo County (Portola Valley and Woodside)."
It's very funny that you wait until the fifth paragraph of your defense of NIMBYism to drop "now, I do possess many, many millions of dollars..."
You're a fan of NIMBYism because NIMBYism is for people like you, who have no reason to worry about the price of housing. Any tradeoff whatsoever of "character" for affordability is bad from your perspective.
Cities and towns change when more people want to live there. They either change by adding more housing, or they change by getting much more expensive and driving out people who can't afford it. If you can always afford it, and "character" to you means the buildings in the area rather than the blue-collar people who used to live there, naturally you prefer the latter.
If you want to control a given parcel of land, buy it. If you don't own it, then you shouldn't get to control it. You're telling other people what they should or should not be able to build and, in the process, are creating society-wide distortions that systematically raise the cost of living: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388. Read that carefully.
It's amazing how no one attaches numbers to these kinds of points of view: a GDP increase of more than 1/3 is a tremendous amount of money. NIMBYs make us all poorer.
Well, fine, live in one that's actually rural because it's rural, not because of NIMBY regulations keeping it in some weird artificial bubble. There are a shitload of them all over the west.
> Given the proximity to San Francisco, the real estate prices have skyrocketed. Almost all my blue collar friends have had to move. It is sad that we have become a neighborhood for tourists and wealthy tech owner second homes. But, the character of the town remains, which is a nice silver lining.
> Forcing a town of <1,000 people to infill with huge apartment buildings doesn't fundamentally alter the overall housing problem, but it does impact the people that live and work in the community.
I'm not sure what does alter the housing problem if not housing. It seems your position is "don't come here...unless you're rich" because the rich don't affect the "character" of the town.
You don't want lots of people. But your only option is to make it hard for people to move in, which constrains the supply of housing relative to demand. Which, in turn, makes prices go up. Which, in turn, forces out your blue collar resident friends. You can't have it both ways.
What you're doing with one unit honestly doesn't make much of a dent in any problem unless you're adding an order of magnitude more units. If anything, you're locking in that space to higher-but-still-very-low density. It's much easier to bulldoze a mansion than evict multiple families.
The main reason people live there is to feel remote and rural. It is a way of life.
Point Reyes and surroundings have been a popular tourism destination for decades, though. A large chunk of the people living there would not live there if it wasn't that - they benefit from it and from the proximity to a large urban center. Representing it as some sort of remote rural backwater doesn't quite capture the nature of the place.
I entirely get the desire to live in a rural environment and keep Port Reyes as it is. The problem is that this desire is in direct conflict with housing being affordable. If everyone who lives in a non-dense neighborhood forces it to stay that way, new housing cannot be built and housing prices skyrocket because the population is increasing. This is literally the story of the Bay Area housing market.
I think there is a balance between not changing the built environment too much (the NIMBY position, say) and building enough new housing to keep prices reasonable (the YIMBY position). The problem is that over the last decades public policy has been dramatically in favor of the NIMBY position. And I think what we're seeing now is a backlash against this.
This is a significant repudiation of the NIMBY point of view. When was the last time that literally every statewide elected official came together to unanimously pass a law over the span of 4 days? Californians of every party are united in the belief that Phil Bokovoy is a jerk.
Funny how the "they can't accept N students, there's not enough housing!" guy is simultaneously the "don't build any new housing" guy. And, as luck would have it, he's also the "don't increase density in existing housing structures" guy.
Whether they represent a liberal district or a conservative district, every legislator in California represents a significant number of constituents who wants their kids to go to Cal.
Good. NIMBYs are a huge problem, and any argument predicated on "preserving the character" is disingenuous at best and racist at worst. It's sad that legislation once designed to do so much good has been weaponized by such obstructionists.
> any argument predicated on "preserving the character" is disingenuous at best and racist at worst
Calling NIMBYism's "preserving the character" argument disingenuous is probably going too far. That really is the problem many NIMBYs have with proposed developments. They like their neighbourhood exactly how it is, and if they could mandate perfect stasis they would.
It may not be a persuasive argument, but in many cases it is genuine.
CEQA is just one symptom of the problem. Entrenched interests will use anything at their disposal to prevent development: zoning regulations, building codes, concerns about racial/socioeconomic equity, legal stalling tactics, etc.
Seems like an odd move to undercut the checks and balances courts are supposed to have over legislation. Enacting a law solely to undercut a court's decision seems spurious, and may blow back on both the legislation and the school.
Wouldn't this increase property values and rent too? What was the angle for NIMBY objection ? It seems like this will only increase demand but not the supply - an ideal NIMBY outcome.
It's not really stated explicitly but it mostly boils down to wanting to have the benefits of the place being a college town without too many of the inconveniences of the place being a college town.
This is a thing people often don’t get about NIMBYs. It’s almost never about property values. It’s generally about preserving things as they were at the time the NIMBY person settled down there.
Good. I wish they'd sign more such laws to deal with all the property developments across San Francisco that are stuck in years-long "environmental review" or other similar bureaucratic hurdles put forward by NIMBY groups.
That'll never happen. One of the main reasons SF even has a housing crisis is because they refuse to allow people to build multiple levels upwards bc of zoning.
The problem is there's so much money to be made by driving up prices. You also have to contend with people who got in at this high price that will be angry if they ever crash significantly.
Sadly there's too much actual capital and political capital in play.
Government protects government. This is further proof universities are above the law, so much so they get brand new law made just for them, but not for you. Remove federal funding of universities. This is a racket that must be put down for the betterment of society.
A college town that was filled with ordinary college commotion is largely silent day and night. The streets of Berkeley, California near campus are empty for more than a year now. University Avenue, a major road leading to campus is quiet day and night, it used to be filled with cars, music and daily activity. Half of restaurants and most retail have closed in the last two years; parties are hidden due to covid-19. What has replaced it in the downtown and flatlands are super-scary predatory criminal loners, hard core drug-addicted mentally ill and some of the most expensive housing in the United States. Landlords feasted on the rental income derived from "market forces" of thousands of 20-somethings working for FAANG and bio-tech. The homes in the hills are overflowing with paper income, and the covid-19 rates are among the lowest in the western US due to a combination of factors.
It is a stunning turn of events, worthy of Heinlein. The behemoth schools that are UC Berkeley continues to bring in nine-figure money with off-shore students paying high tuition, looking for their chance to strike it rich in the high tech scene, while those of ordinary means are economically crushed.
This is so far from reality I have a hard time even knowing how to respond. Just in case people who don’t live here think the Bay Area cities have become this dystopian hell hole as described, no, they absolutely have not. Life is honestly nearly back to normal. I’m going out to dinner with a friend in Berkeley tonight. The streets will not be empty or filled with drug addicts.
Yeah, the streets are so empty in Berkeley these days that when I took these photos on Saturday it was literally just tumbleweeds, not hundreds of people gathering in the streets of southside. Truly, a hell-hole.
> UC Berkeley continues to bring in nine-figure money with off-shore students paying high tuition, looking for their chance to strike it rich in the high tech scene, while those of ordinary means are economically crushed.
First of all, it's definitely much less than 9 figures.
UC Berkeley is one of the top schools not just in America, but in the world. Of course the brightest minds of the world would want to go there (or similar places like MIT/Stanford/Harvard etc).
Also, the economics eventually works out. Those high tuition is foreign money coming into the US — though probably a drop in the ocean compared to US economy as a whole — is nevertheless a good thing. Smart people from other countries coming into America is a good thing.
Would you rather prefer all those smart people go to, say Oxford UK, TU-Munich, ETH Zurich etc (which are other popular destinations of foreign students)?
Be grateful that smart people want to come in.
PS: I'm one of those "offshore students" (though not in Berkeley) who have "gone back to their country" after graduating; had a wonderful time in America :)
[+] [-] vorpalhex|4 years ago|reply
Either the environmental review standards are good and needed.. or they are not. This is post-hoc ruling and I am curious how the court will react.
The only thing the opposition needs to do here is run a few pressers with homeless students.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/13/opinion/berkeley-enrollme...
[+] [-] gamblor956|4 years ago|reply
The legislature simply updated the law to make it clear that these types of lawsuits (i.e., over activities which don't directly relate to construction of new buildings even though they may ultimately lead to new construction) are not intended by the original law, and this new law makes that explicitly clear. (The eventual construction of new buildings required by the enrollment increase would be covered by normal CEQA review processes.)
EDIT: From TTOTFL itself: "This bill would delete the provision requiring the environmental effects relating to changes in enrollment levels be considered in the EIR prepared for the long-range development plan. The bill would provide that enrollment or changes in enrollment, by themselves, do not constitute a project for purposes of CEQA."
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
[+] [-] renewiltord|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crhulls|4 years ago|reply
I grew up in a small Marin County town called Point Reyes. It had 350 residents when I grew up, now maybe 1,000. The main reason people live there is to feel remote and rural. It is a way of life.
Given the proximity to San Francisco, the real estate prices have skyrocketed. Almost all my blue collar friends have had to move. It is sad that we have become a neighborhood for tourists and wealthy tech owner second homes. But, the character of the town remains, which is a nice silver lining.
With recent California rules, affordable housing is being forced by the state. Any open parking lot, any church, any building not considered "fully utilized" is now being allocated for low income units. Even most low income residents in the town don't like it, as it doesn't match the character of the area whatsoever - it undermines the very reason people live here to begin with.
I'm a unicorn founder so know I'm in a very privileged position. I actually bought a place in town which I'm turning in to multiple units for working class people because I didn't want someone else to buy it and turn it into a mansion. This is very different than state mandates that override any sort of local planning. I'm trying to help solve the problem while also preserving the essence of the community.
I think it is overly simplistic to call NIMBYs evil and YIMBYs good. I like living in a small rural town. People move here because they want that. Forcing a town of <1,000 people to infill with huge apartment buildings doesn't fundamentally alter the overall housing problem, but it does impact the people that live and work in the community.
I also don't claim any moral high ground here - there is no right and wrong about this. We all have our desires about how we want the world to evolve, and I wish we could all respect the complexity of the situation vs putting people in competing good vs evil camps.
[+] [-] humanistbot|4 years ago|reply
Also, you don't just live in some random rural town. You live on the most scenic highway in the state, at the exit to a massively popular national seashore, in a major metropolitan area that has experienced massive growth.
And nobody is "forcing" development. That's all on the property owners. They are freely choosing to follow the financial incentives. The state "mandates" are just overriding local zoning laws that would have prohibited development by the property owners, or adding to the incentives for development. If the owners of a parking lot or the church want to keep it, the state would have to eminent domain it in order for it to be "allocated" for development.
[+] [-] ryukafalz|4 years ago|reply
You see why it’s become that, and why your blue collar friends have had to move though, right? It’s not just that it’s close to San Francisco; it’s that being close to San Francisco means lots of people want to live there, and there aren’t enough places near San Francisco for them to live.
The idea that any town should effectively push its existing residents out in pursuit of “preserving the character of the area” just seems wrong to me. Are the aesthetics more important than the people who live there?
[+] [-] xiaosun|4 years ago|reply
Marin County is one of the most segregated counties in the Bay Area, and by design from legacy housing policies. It's hard to ignore the fact that "preserving the essence" is the same thing as "continue to be a heavily segregated" locale.
"An inordinate number of the most segregated cities in the Bay Area are smaller cities that are more than 85 percent white in Marin County (Ross, Belvedere, Sausalito, San Anselmo, Fairfax, and Mill Valley are each in the top 10). Two of the top 10 are similarly small-sized, heavily white cities in San Mateo County (Portola Valley and Woodside)."
https://belonging.berkeley.edu/racial-segregation-san-franci...
[+] [-] cipheredStones|4 years ago|reply
You're a fan of NIMBYism because NIMBYism is for people like you, who have no reason to worry about the price of housing. Any tradeoff whatsoever of "character" for affordability is bad from your perspective.
Cities and towns change when more people want to live there. They either change by adding more housing, or they change by getting much more expensive and driving out people who can't afford it. If you can always afford it, and "character" to you means the buildings in the area rather than the blue-collar people who used to live there, naturally you prefer the latter.
[+] [-] vwoolf|4 years ago|reply
It's amazing how no one attaches numbers to these kinds of points of view: a GDP increase of more than 1/3 is a tremendous amount of money. NIMBYs make us all poorer.
[+] [-] davidw|4 years ago|reply
Well, fine, live in one that's actually rural because it's rural, not because of NIMBY regulations keeping it in some weird artificial bubble. There are a shitload of them all over the west.
This is a legit rural town: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakeview,_Oregon - it's never going to be a big town because it's very remote. It's quite charming in its own way.
[+] [-] bastawhiz|4 years ago|reply
> Forcing a town of <1,000 people to infill with huge apartment buildings doesn't fundamentally alter the overall housing problem, but it does impact the people that live and work in the community.
I'm not sure what does alter the housing problem if not housing. It seems your position is "don't come here...unless you're rich" because the rich don't affect the "character" of the town.
You don't want lots of people. But your only option is to make it hard for people to move in, which constrains the supply of housing relative to demand. Which, in turn, makes prices go up. Which, in turn, forces out your blue collar resident friends. You can't have it both ways.
What you're doing with one unit honestly doesn't make much of a dent in any problem unless you're adding an order of magnitude more units. If anything, you're locking in that space to higher-but-still-very-low density. It's much easier to bulldoze a mansion than evict multiple families.
[+] [-] pvg|4 years ago|reply
Point Reyes and surroundings have been a popular tourism destination for decades, though. A large chunk of the people living there would not live there if it wasn't that - they benefit from it and from the proximity to a large urban center. Representing it as some sort of remote rural backwater doesn't quite capture the nature of the place.
[+] [-] returningfory2|4 years ago|reply
I think there is a balance between not changing the built environment too much (the NIMBY position, say) and building enough new housing to keep prices reasonable (the YIMBY position). The problem is that over the last decades public policy has been dramatically in favor of the NIMBY position. And I think what we're seeing now is a backlash against this.
[+] [-] jeffbee|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] favorited|4 years ago|reply
What are the odds?
[+] [-] gyc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exogeny|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rablackburn|4 years ago|reply
Calling NIMBYism's "preserving the character" argument disingenuous is probably going too far. That really is the problem many NIMBYs have with proposed developments. They like their neighbourhood exactly how it is, and if they could mandate perfect stasis they would.
It may not be a persuasive argument, but in many cases it is genuine.
[+] [-] ketzo|4 years ago|reply
S.B. 9 [1] was a great step. This also sends a pretty stark message.
[1] https://focus.senate.ca.gov/sb9
[+] [-] jonahhorowitz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shitlord|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guelo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] outside1234|4 years ago|reply
Sort of something similar to the law we passed around ADUs but for multistory multifamily housing.
[+] [-] arrosenberg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Overtonwindow|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnicholas|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] falcolas|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bubblethink|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pvg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] genocidicbunny|4 years ago|reply
Higher property values is just a mask to hide the less palatable message of 'I want to ossify my neighborhood'.
[+] [-] 6gvONxR4sf7o|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmalynin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paxys|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edm0nd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jorblumesea|4 years ago|reply
Sadly there's too much actual capital and political capital in play.
[+] [-] nr2x|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] TedShiller|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devwastaken|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] namlem|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mistrial9|4 years ago|reply
It is a stunning turn of events, worthy of Heinlein. The behemoth schools that are UC Berkeley continues to bring in nine-figure money with off-shore students paying high tuition, looking for their chance to strike it rich in the high tech scene, while those of ordinary means are economically crushed.
[+] [-] dougmccune|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffbee|4 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/Jeffinatorator/status/150278067270801408...
[+] [-] 2143|4 years ago|reply
First of all, it's definitely much less than 9 figures.
UC Berkeley is one of the top schools not just in America, but in the world. Of course the brightest minds of the world would want to go there (or similar places like MIT/Stanford/Harvard etc).
Also, the economics eventually works out. Those high tuition is foreign money coming into the US — though probably a drop in the ocean compared to US economy as a whole — is nevertheless a good thing. Smart people from other countries coming into America is a good thing.
Would you rather prefer all those smart people go to, say Oxford UK, TU-Munich, ETH Zurich etc (which are other popular destinations of foreign students)?
Be grateful that smart people want to come in.
PS: I'm one of those "offshore students" (though not in Berkeley) who have "gone back to their country" after graduating; had a wonderful time in America :)
[+] [-] KerrAvon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xadhominemx|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sergiomattei|4 years ago|reply