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The California State Historical Resources Commission voted unanimously on Friday to recommend that Berkeley’s People’s Park be listed on the National Register of Historical Places. The nomination now moves to the Keeper of the Register for final approval within the next 45 days.

Harvey Smith, President of the People’s Park Historic District Advocacy Group (PPHDAG) said, “We were very happy that the commissioners understood the important historical and cultural legacy of the Park and acknowledged the loss of life during the struggle for the Park. The commission recognized the park's importance in the great social and political movements of the 1960s and Berkeley's extraordinary role in the history of that decade."

Last month the UC Regents approved a plan to build a massively out of scale and out of context 12 story student dormitory. Several historic preservation experts submitted comments that the project would seriously degrade the Park’s historic and cultural values and the cultural values of the surrounding historic environment, which includes famous buildings by Bernard Maybeck, Julia Morgan and Walter Ratcliff. The adjacent Anna Head School was Berkeley’s very first brown shingle structure, and it would be overshadowed by the project 

Make UC a Good Neighbor and PPHDAG filed suit against the UC Regents the day before, on Thursday, 28 October, alleging that the plan failed to meet the requirements of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), including appropriate examination of historical resource impacts, growth of student population, displacement of existing Berkeley residents, and severe noise impacts. 

The two groups previously filed suit against the Regents after they adopted an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the Berkeley campus Long Range Development Plan (LRDP) in July of 2021. The groups allege that the LRDP EIR insufficiently analyzes the environmental impact of UC’s proposal for massive growth in students, staff and buildings. 

The two groups filed the second suit on Thursday after proposing reasonable settlement terms to UC in order to mitigate the impact of its growth on the local community. Proposed terms included maintaining People’s Park as a much-needed open space, a cap on student enrollment at 43,000, the level of 2020-21, a binding legal commitment to construct at least 9,000 beds in order to house the 11,000 additional students added over the past 12 years, siting undergraduate housing away from existing residential neighborhoods, and committing to build only on UC owned property. 

The two groups also asked for the establishment of a community process for ensuring that there is cultural, historical and aesthetic compatibility of all new UC construction undertaken off the Campus Park. Many of the settlement terms have been implemented at other campuses, but UC Berkeley refused each and every one. 

Smith added, “CEQA requires that UC mitigate the impacts of its massive growth on the community. It is unfortunate that UC continues to dismiss community concerns, leaving us no recourse but to file these lawsuits.”