Project `held hostage' by noise pollution regulations Newsom, others blast ruling that halted housing
In case you forgot, your new noisy neighbors still are considered a source of harmful pollution in California.
Earlier this year, a state appellate court blocked a proposed housing development for some 1,100 UC Berkeley students, partly on the grounds that the state’s marquee environmental protection law requires the university to study and mitigate the potential “noise impacts from loud student parties.”
That was a new interpretation, and an expansion, of the California Environmental Quality Act, also known as CEQA.
Now that logic is being applied to a second housing development, this one in Los Angeles, creating a fresh clash between defenders of the environmental law and housing advocates who see it as an impediment in battling California’s severe housing shortage
The Los Angeles case also may put new pressure on state lawmakers, who are considering a bill to override the UC Berkeley “people as pollution” ruling.
“It’s infuriating,” the bill’s author, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat, said of the latest court opinion out of Los Angeles, in a phone interview. “We have so many hurdles to building housing in California. We don’t need yet another one in the form of ‘human noises.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom in February lambasted the UC Berkeley ruling, saying it allowed affordable student housing to be “held hostage” by groups opposed to more housing near them and called for sweeping changes to CEQA. His administration filed a legal brief in April arguing that the court ruling would limit housing development in California.
Meanwhile, the California Supreme Court agreed in May to take up UC Berkeley’s appeal of the February decision, though judges on the high court haven’t heard oral arguments yet.
But whether Wicks’ bill, if signed into law, would allow UC Berkeley to build its planned dorms is still an open question. That’s because the state Supreme Court could declare that UC Berkeley’s case must proceed anyway, said Dan Mogulof, a senior spokesperson for UC Berkeley, in a phone interview Wednesday.
The latest case
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