Public Comment

The March 14, 2024 Daily Californian printed an editorial titled “A million a month, with no end in sight.” Although we applaud the outrage expressed over the huge expenditures by UC Berkeley on its People’s Park project, we are adamant in our criticism of the characterization of the advocates for preserving the park. The editorial repeated the disinformation about opponents of the project that UC administration has constantly repeated. We expect more from the Daily Cal, and its tradition of fact-based analysis and reporting. Since none of the so-called “NIMBY groups” were named, we will put our name forward. We are the People’s Park Historic District Advocacy Group, which developed the successful application for placing the park on the National Register of Historic Places and pursued as a plaintiff in the CEQA lawsuit against UC’s irrational and damaging project. 

UC has called us “privileged NIMBY neighbors,” but that fiction is belied by the well over 350 endorsers or supporters of our efforts from all over Berkeley, California and the U.S. They include UCB professors, three former Berkeley mayors, three former Berkeley city councilmembers, many former Berkeley commissioners, Cal alumni and students, attorneys, architects, historians and many others who value People’s Park. 

Add to that support from the country’s leading preservation organization - The National Trust for Historic Preservation, two resolutions from the ASUC opposing destruction of the park, the Berkeley Faculty Association’s questioning of the project, and the many editorials in support of the park in the Daily Cal. 

Although campus administration and the editorial point to noise complaints as central to the lawsuit, the essential issue is that the Court of Appeal clearly saw that UC did not adequately analyze alternative sites for building student housing. UC has given us a false choice of having either a park or housing when clearly we can have both and desperately need both. Standards for urban green space at the international, national, state and local level point to the need for even more open space than People’s Park in the increasingly densely populated South Campus neighborhood. 

CEQA does not stifle housing development as shown in the report “CEQA: California’s Living Environmental Law: CEQA’s Role in Housing, Environmental Justice, & Climate Change,” which “exhaustively analyzes available data and literature and demonstrates that, contrary to critics’ arguments, CEQA is not a major impediment to housing production. The number of CEQA lawsuits has remained very low over two decades, and the costs of complying with the law are relatively small. The report further shows that CEQA is critical for advancing environmental justice and combating climate change.” 

The struggle over People’s Park also shows an essential degradation of the democratic process. AB 1307 was passed and signed by the governor with absolutely no public input, a stereotypical “backroom deal," although its author was our own assemblyperson. Likewise the experience for community groups illustrates the old adage - “We have the best legal system money can buy.” We have raised money with great difficulty in order to fight the well-funded UC legal team. Contributions come from crumpled one dollar bills to at most occasional four-figure contributions. Yes, it is very true that UC as a public institution has “more pertinent holes on campus.” 

We are also critical of the false binary of YIMBY vs. NIMBY, which ignores real solutions to the California housing crisis. The rest of the industrialized world solves the crisis by increasing public, social and cooperative housing. Trickle-down economics does not work. Market rate development only enriches the already rich and does not create either accessibility or affordability of housing. 

Finally we emphasize our support for student housing on an appropriate site like the parking structure a block and a half from People’s Park. If UC had chosen such a site as we suggested several years ago, the project would be nearly complete and students would be able to move in soon. And millions of taxpayer-supported UC budget dollars would have been saved.