Gov. Newsom signs law to stop UC Berkeley enrollment cuts
latimes.com
latimes.com
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.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/13/opinion/berkeley-enrollme...
That process slows/stops things you hate, but also things you like.
https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...
I'm a 'Montreal' guy, and you sound like one too from your comment, but everyone has different tastes.
Walkable cities with well integrated public transit and mixed retail, restaurants/cafes and residential, so that you don't need a car to go and do your grocery shopping, get a coffee or even most regular purchases.
Many (most?) European cities are like this to a greater or lesser degree - you still get deliveries, but you can walk, or ride a bike, or catch a bus/tram/metro to most places you want to go. You don't eliminate cars, but driving a car isn't the default option because it's more convenient not to. But if you need a car for something, well, that's still an option.
Yes! Where we lived in Padova, Italy, transportation was a 'right tool for the job' situation. We did have a car, and used it from time to time, but we also walked, biked and took transit, depending on what we needed to do.
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...
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.
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.
Arable land running low go vertical, hydroponic farming is capable of growing far more in the same footprint. water running low is easy to fix instead of wasting thousands of gallons of water spraying a whole field, drip feed individual plants, where that is not feasable wind and solar powered desalination is a option. also fix water consumption laws tax heavy water users rather than home consumption.
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?
For example, I have a caretaker on my property who lives in a trailer and even he doesn't want the plans to go through - he wants the town to stay rural.
I'm also on the village association and while almost everyone agrees there should be more affordable housing, we are almost all opposed to the broad brush stroke way it is being done. Huge apartment buildings in a small town is very different than doing things like limiting vacation rentals and allowing ADUs.
I suppose my main point is that there is a lot of nuance involved - it isnt as simple as NIMBY bad YIMBY good.
Municipalities have resisted doing what they have needed to do for too long, shirking their responsibility to residents current and future, that an intervention is required. And lots of folks will kick and scream about the character of their neighborhoods.
I live in a legendarily NIMBY community. I want to convince my wife to move to a red state and retire as we cash out of CA.
Looking at the top line numbers of the Regional Housing Needs Allocation plan - the Bay Area needs to make space for an additional 440k homes in the next 9 years. Presuming that gets allocated evenly based on population, Point Reyes Station with 1,000 people needs to build about 6 homes per year for the next decade.
Even one huge apartment building would massively overshoot the needs for Point Reyes Station. But I suppose the requirements would be more sensibly met with townhouses or small apartments or some kind of senior housing.
Am I missing some numbers, or maybe there's another program or changes that I'm not aware of?
I generally agree that our low density places should stay low density. Point Reyes is not a job center, not a sensible commuting destination, and a difficult and expensive place to build basic infrastructure like power, water, sewer - so it doesn't make sense to build a lot of housing there.
The county, based on state mandate, is requiring unincorporated Marin to build in the thousands of housing units. The various districts are each expected to shoulder their burden. The number of housing units the county proposed, via out of town consultants, puts hundreds of units in Point Reyes and Inverness. This is not a conspiracy theory - it is all out there for anyone to see.
And yes, it really doesn't make sense for rural small towns to be housing or job centers. It seems like this is being driven by a misguided sense of equity (e.g. it isn't fair only rich people can live in this nice area).
I doubt that Marin County is very interested in trying to provide public health and other county services for a bunch of low-income folks moving way out to rural coastal communities. Seems likely that most of the housing going into unincorporated Marin will be smushed right up near 101.
But what about local low-income folks in West Marin like your friends, or the service workers in tourism, hospitality, etc...? Has anybody in your village association talked about what it would take to preserve local control but with a serious commitment for Point Reyes Station to provide housing to meet the needs of local low-income folks?
History has shown that basically once a community exists in California, residents start using local control to blockade housing - with the result being that new housing is mostly built in exurban sprawl by developers who pave over and then subdivide wild lands. These big hammers coming down from the state are basically a self-inflicted wound on the part of supporters of local control.
To provide some personal context: I grew up in the Russian River area. Housing is silly expensive and yet basically nothing gets built, so the towns are turning into retirement/vacation communities. There's roughly no housing that's accessible to people working local jobs, unless you inherited property from your family. I don't think those communities should be sopping up the housing demand for people working in San Francisco, but something's got to push them to build housing for the people who work right there.
My experience with such community organizations in my area is that they skew much older, wealthier, and whiter than the rest of the population in the area. I don’t know whether or not this is true there, but consider that the views of your village organization’s members may not be representative of the whole community.
Even if they were, though, the housing crisis is bigger than just your town. It’s not just those who live there now that matter; it’s also those nearby who need a place to live, who may have been priced out of their own communities too. It’s a big problem, and I don’t think just limiting vacation rentals and allowing ADUs is sufficient to fix it at this point.
The policies you advocate are the ones that raise the cost of housing by limiting supply. Your own preferred policies force people to move, who can't afford the rent.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
If vacation rentals are actually a meaningful problem, have the city ban them. It's really that easy. Airbnb isn't a new phenomenon, and if anyone actually cared about the people being displaced instead of the buildings, they'd already be banned.
The character of a town is more than just the buildings, it's the people who live there, too. It's obvious where the priorities are.
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 know the reason I like being here is because it is remote and rural and I have a sense of comfort living in a place that doesn't change much.
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.
The prior affordable housing has also backfired. They did a development 20 years ago that was meant to provide local housing. But, because it had federal backing, it meant anyone could apply. A large number of people who live in the project are people on section 8 and disability with no ties to the region whatsoever. They don't work in or contribute to the community, but rather just get free apartments.
To add insult to injury, many of the homes that were made under the original development became vacation rentals about 10 years after they were built (some expiration on deed restrictions or something).
Here is an example: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/19192461?guests=1&adults=1&s=67...
Clearly this is not what was intended. There has to be a better way.
No ties besides… living in said community. How is the disability status of residents relevant to your classification of the project as a failure? Are you advocating for federal housing aid to come with requirements like “locals only” and “non-disabled residents only”?
So, if someone from out of town who can't work moves in, it undermines the point of the project. In that sense, the disability status is relevant.
I think housing that does require you to work in the community is fair and logical. Otherwise do we just build projects in high end places that essentially just become a lottery for people on government assistance?
Besides, even disabled need a place to live, and they are probably contributing to the region by purchasing goods.
While I feel for those who "own" not wanting things to change, I feel more for those relegated to go around a board that's entirely owned (at least the parts worth owning).
The current housing crisis is a demographic phenomenon created by longevity and birth rates 40 years ago. Those facts require the provision of a lot of new housing somewhere.
The statewide legislation is a very blunt instrument. It doesn't work well for small towns.
Edit: er, that was the previous 8 years. The next 8 years calls for 3569 new dwellings.
I think the middle ground is that you have to be careful about what zoning and planning codes do and don't allow. In my view, a property owner like you should have pretty broad discretion about how a place gets developed. A lot of very nice-looking town centers developed in the late 1800s/early 1900s (North America) without zoning. It got done because it worked, more expensive/taller/nicer buildings near the middle of the city (on more valuable land) and less-expensive, "lower" uses toward the periphery. It's simple market incentives. The trouble comes when the tax code, zoning, or other policies discourage the natural, higher-intensity development from creating more housing on higher-value land. You're just looking at the incentives and being a good businessperson. People (blue collar) want a place to live. You're giving it to them at a price they can afford. This should be celebrated, not vilified.
I also own (market rate) low-income housing. In the neighborhood where I grew up, there are a bunch of lots with older houses sitting vacant. I own an apartment there and would love to convert some of the existing (empty) houses into duplexes/four-plexes, but can't out of a misguided sense of it being a "single-family neighborhood". This makes no sense. I'm turning something people don't want, into something they do. The zoning completely ignores market forces out of a misguided attempt for neighbors to force their view onto other property owners.
It's well-intentioned but, as other posters have said, carries a huge cost we need to talk about more openly.
What is a "town"? Is it comprised of 350 people living in a few houses and all the land which surrounds them? Do they get to decide how this common land should be used? Do they get to decide how private land next to them should be used, whether it belongs to a current resident or not? If person #351 wants to move in, should all existing residents get a vote?
It’s like HOAs. You are free to do what you want on private land. Except, an HOA is a contract wherein residents mutually agree to limits on that freedom.
Buying property in an HOA or in an incorporated town is buying into that established mutual agreement.
Force a discussion. If we have to build, where should we build, and where should we leave alone?
What are the odds?
Also the "parks on the street for free" guy.
What a surprise.
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.
Y'know, if a community wants to have _perfect_ stasis like that, it should be allowed. Which of course also means that when you sell your property, any gains in land value should also be taxed away and the property's max rent should also be locked in at purchase time. This would of course, even more preserve the character of the neighborhood. Otherwise it is too convenient for NIMBYs that their policy preference also happens to align with their economic interests.
(/s obviously, though a land value tax would be excellent)
S.B. 9 [1] was a great step. This also sends a pretty stark message.
https://bendyimby.com/2022/01/08/hacking-land-use-laws-for-e...
They will literally grasp at anything that lets them stop homes from being built.
Sort of something similar to the law we passed around ADUs but for multistory multifamily housing.
Problem is that legislature has (in general) stopped doing their job so the "functional" court system is forced to re-interpret older and older laws; increasing their power relative to the other branches.
Real people suffer real harms from the unintended consequences of poorly written laws. Our courts should help serve as a last line of defense against that, when appropriate.
I agree. I was more talking about the kinds of cases where a law is pragmatically unenforceable. Eg: where you could never make a reasonable case that a thing happened, or that the penalties have given the courts leeway to bring basically no consequence to an action. Perhaps the part that could have been more clear was "enforce" to which I more meant "enact"? I didn't mean apply costly consequences so much as "go through the motions".
There also is another subcase where I didnt bring up before, such as police not bothering due to effort:outcome ratio -- forexample police don't bother to go after bicycle thieves in san francisco
Remember that (at least in the US) the three branches of government are supposed to be co-equal. Both the executive and legislative branches have a ton of power in deciding how law is created and applied.
Lastly, judges usually can't be voted out at the federal level, but there are often local elections for judges.
Congress has the ability to remove judges that are problematic.
The fact that Congress buys into it and sells the merch because it is made up of people who don’t want to actually do their job is just another of a long list of disappointments that Congress churns out on the regular, but to put this in perspective: by the letter of the Constitution only Congress can impeach and remove from office members of the other two branches. They are not co-equal, they are supreme and are the Article I branch for a good reason.
Whereas the President can issue sweeping policy changes via executive order and veto non-supermajority legislation (a ONE person decision), Congress requires a majority in one chamber to initiate impeachment and a super-majority in the other to convict.
Look at Trump. Every reason in the world to impeach, and even that failed. So much for supremacy, it seems.
Any power they have given, they can also strip away. Any office they have instituted, they can also remove. Any cabinet position they created can also be removed. Any Presidential appointment including Article III judges and justices can be impeached and removed.
Executive orders only go as far as the President’s authority either over his branch (the entire Executive power) or through laws which he is charged to enforce. The reason he has a lot of discretion is precisely because Congress gives a lot of discretion, and they really don’t have to.
But, somehow we have managed to for a while now elect mostly mooks that don’t particularly want their power. The framers imagined branches of government which would jealously guard the powers they did have, but that doesn’t really work if a branch is not jealously guarding its own power. Open primaries were probably a mistake, because it leaves legislators vulnerable to primary challengers backed by Presidents and other powerful Government Officers.
This appears to be politicians attempting to have their cake and eat it too. Environmental review laws are passed specifically because of the concerns raised by the citizens they represent. Whenever citizens then used those laws, the politicians step in and prevented that. It appears that they are attempting to appease two groups of constituents at the same time.
If anyone did this other than a politician it would be called breach of contract or possibly fraud. But yet, you call it "the process".
To protect the environment, we must allow increased urban density so people are not forced into further suburban sprawl. Doing it in a place like Berkeley with limited heating/cooling energy needs is a no-brainer.
The fatal flaw of CEQA is it doesn’t contemplate the environmental impact of not building the project. Ultimately, the earth suffers as more damaging development occurs in less-regulated places.
So the legislature changed the law to make it explicitly clear that these types of lawsuits were never intended by the law.
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...
> Environmental effects relating to changes in enrollment levels shall be considered for each campus or medical center of public higher education in the environmental impact report prepared for the long range development plan for the campus or medical center.
This already doesn't say that enrollment levels require their own reviews; it says they have to be considered in the university's long-range development plan, which it must file for other reasons. (The bill also amends all instances of "long range development plan" to "long-range development plan". Not sure why.)
There are also two provisions being added. The one that looks good is:
> Enrollment or changes in enrollment, by themselves, do not constitute a project as defined in Section 21065.
Here's the other one:
> If a court determines that increases in campus population exceed the projections adopted in the most recent long-range development plan and analyzed in the supporting environmental impact report, and those increases result in significant environmental impacts, the court may order the campus or medical center to prepare a new, supplemental, or subsequent environmental impact report. Only if a new, supplemental, or subsequent environmental impact report has not been certified within 18 months of that order, the court may, pursuant to Sections 525 and 526 of the Code of Civil Procedure, enjoin increases in campus population that exceed the projections adopted in the most recent long-range development plan and analyzed in the supporting environmental impact report.
This pretty clearly requires the university's long-range development plan to consider the environmental impact of projected enrollment levels. What did we gain by moving that requirement from subsection (b) to subsection (e)?
That is literally how the legislature is supposed to act when it feels that the court has erred in interpreting legislation.
The court's power is to interpret what is written. The legislature's power is to write the words. If the legislature doesn't like how the court interpreted the statute they're meant to rewrite it so that the intention is clearer.
1. Determining whether an executive action is consistent with legislated law.
2. Determining whether a piece of legislature is consistent with a more important piece of legislature (Constitutionality.)
3. Determining how two contradictory pieces of legislature are to be interpreted in practice. (A superset of #2.)
A court rules on the current state of law. Based on that ruling, the legislature can change the law as it sees fit, within the constraints that it operates under.
They are not a back-door way for people to subvert the power of legislature to draft laws those people don't like. If they were, they would be utterly absurd, because without the power to draft legislature, nobody would have a check or balance over the courts.
The judiciary rules on laws as written. And the legislature can then pass new laws to alter existing ones.
The Court's job is to interpret the law of its jurisdiction. If the legislature doesn't like the Court's ruling on some statutory law, it would then go through the process of amending the law. If the legislature doesn't like the Court's ruling on some constitutional matter, it would then go through the process of amending the Constitution. The latter process usually requires sufficiently more political will that sometimes a Court's ruling on a Constitutional matter is "final" from a practical standpoint.
Higher property values is just a mask to hide the less palatable message of 'I want to ossify my neighborhood'.
The trouble is, this is akin to trying to stop the ocean from breaking waves on the beach. The change is going to happen. You can stand against it, or you can work with it to get a mutually beneficial outcome. If you choose to stand against it, don't be surprised when the world either rolls you over or goes around you.
Couldn't the Gov. sign another law stopping that as well? Similar to the legislation around single family housing lots?
SF is considering allowing any property have a 4-plex (6 if at a corner), which may be used as a poison pill to continue to restrict development [1].
[0] https://www.latimes.com/homeless-housing/story/2022-02-24/la...
[1] https://reason.com/2022/03/09/san-franciscos-efforts-to-bloc...
The duplexes would be like 30% stairs, right? This seems like a $5M+ investment to end up with 4 500 sqft 1-window studios (at best) that would be absurdly cashflow negative, and none of them would sell for $1M... SB 9 economically does not seem to work out for almost every lot in SF proper.
So if SF doesn't want anything to happen - wouldn't the best thing be to just keep things as they are?
The SF proposal similarly seems like garbage. The vast majority of homes cannot just magically become quadplexes. There's not enough stairs to pass fire code. And, importantly, it's impossible to build enough.
On another note - isn't part of SB 9 that lots cannot be joined? If you want to build a practical multifamily that actually adds density - in SF - isn't it basically necessary to join AT LEAST 3 lots?
LA has bigger lots - so there has been tons of 3-storey tri-plexes that are quite livable being built. The economics are there.
Unless building codes change - how does SF do anything like this?
The real solution seems like to massively incentivize 5 over 1 mixed use complexes. Then you end up with cities closer to Berlin & Paris & Madrid which are all substantially denser than almost all US cities AND more livable.
It's still really hard to do in SF, but sometimes you see parking lots or old small buildings replaced with 4-6 story buildings [0].
As for the four-plex argument, it seems very far fetched to me. The status quo does a lot to restrict housing, but SB9 changes the rules and NIMBY's need to be more creative to continue to restrict housing.
Related, today the AG issued Pasadena on notice for their poor housing policies [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1 [1] https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bont...
IIUC, you need 6 ft of space on each side of the lot for fire code. That takes away the majority of available floor space. You could build something 4-storeys, but after stairs, you'd be left with half as much leasable floor space...
Yes
Sadly there's too much actual capital and political capital in play.
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 a place that has big issues, no matter how much you manage to ignore them on your way to the nice restaurant for dinner with your friends.
All I was trying to do was push back on the bleak vision of boarded up commerce-less, restaurant-less, people-less streets being roamed by criminals, addicts, and the mentally ill. Yes, we have all sorts of issues, but the scene outside is much more like pre-pandemic life than the Walking Dead.
https://twitter.com/Jeffinatorator/status/150278067270801408...
As someone that now lives far from Berkeley, I was just asking for better indication of activity than a knowingly ephemeral group passing through. It's silly evidence.
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 :)