Graduate-level NIMBYism: What the UC Berkeley enrollment freeze says about California

The intergenerational theft inherent in NIMBYism often hides behind arcane debates about zoning ordinances, parking allowances and neighborhood “character.” The litigation that could cancel the education of thousands at California’s premier public university makes it more plain: Young people’s aspirations must be sacrificed for the comfort and capital of older, whiter, richer people who already have theirs.

Tensions between incumbents and newcomers are not novel. But the high-water mark of Berkeley property owners’ war on Berkeley students underscores the extent to which a supposedly progressive state is still designed for and ruled by those who would deny others the educational, economic and social benefits they have already enjoyed in abundance.

“Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods,” the organization behind a lawsuit that could force the University of California’s flagship campus to cut its enrollment, is an accretion of the sort of neighborhood groups counted on to oppose every attempt to expand housing in the state’s cities and suburbs by any means available. Such groups can frequently be found leveraging our overgrown environmental laws for the perverse purpose of preventing more people from living in the metropolises best equipped to accommodate them with the least repercussions for the state’s natural resources.

With the help of the California courts, however, this neighborhood supergroup has taken green-washed NIMBYism to the next level. Now the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), one of the state’s most misused statutes, is being employed to prevent not just the housing of the state’s younger generations but also their education.

Thus a city of more than 100,000 souls in the heart of one of the nation’s largest metropolises — known to the federal government, by the way, as the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley metropolitan statistical area — is recast as a pristine wilderness in need of preservation from the ravages of civilization. And so the California NIMBY could graduate from blocking buildings to smothering hopes.

Ruling on a lawsuit by Berkeley’s self-appointed neighborhood saviors last summer, Alameda County Judge Brad Seligman ordered the university to freeze enrollment on the grounds that it had not sufficiently studied the environmental impact of a few thousand college students on one of the Bay Area’s most populous cities. Because Seligman found enrollment should be capped at the 2020 level, when admissions were depressed by the onset of the pandemic, his ruling would require the university to shrink its current student body by admitting far fewer freshmen and transfers next fall.

The university appealed the ruling and asked that it be stayed while the case is argued. Last week, however, a state appellate court denied the request just as students were to begin receiving offers of admission, forcing the university to prepare to cut the incoming class. It was the same appeals court that opened the door to treating the campus’ moderate enrollment increases as an environmental menace with a 2020 decision overruling a lower court that correctly threw out the notion.

Unless the California Supreme Court steps in — which it certainly should — UC Berkeley expects to offer admission to over 5,000 fewer students as a result, a reduction of about a quarter, and slash next year’s entering class by more than 3,000, about a third. The university, which already accepts less than 15% of applicants, distributed a letter warning prospective students of the development while promising to “continue to fight for everyone ... who worked for, and earned, a seat at UC Berkeley.” Beyond the human repercussions of “negatively altering the course of thousands of high school students’ lives,” as the university put it, the cut is expected to blow a $57 million hole in the school’s finances.

The longtime resident behind Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods, Phil Bokovoy, claims he just wants the university to “build housing for our young people.” But it won’t surprise anyone who’s been paying attention that he has also opposed local efforts to, well, build housing for our young people.

A few years ago, Bokovoy joined residents opposing an apartment development a few blocks from the campus, calling the proposed six-story building “really out of scale.” The court-ordered enrollment freeze is related to his group’s litigation against a university project that would create hundreds of units of housing — to the detriment, the group frets, of the “historic character of the neighborhood.” UC Berkeley was recently rated the world’s best public higher education institution, but In the course of fighting that project, an affiliated group called it “one of the nation’s most dangerous universities.”

Bokovoy outlined his preferred solution in a statement this week, and it wasn’t more dorms. He noted that the university could “easily accommodate” the ordered enrollment cut by denying admission to out-of-state and foreign students.

That is, California NIMBYs don’t want more housing, more preservation or more environmental consciousness. They want fewer students, fewer Californians and fewer humans.

It’s not difficult to find similarly disposed people throughout the Bay Area and beyond advancing the argument that California does not have a housing shortage — which it does when compared with nearly every other state. According to their pinched reckoning, however, it has a surplus of jobs and, more to the Dickensian point, population.

Berkeley is the cradle of the California NIMBY, having invented single-family zoning as a means of racial segregation and choked off most housing development for decades. Only in recent years have the city’s leaders begun to reform such practices and retreat from the continuing litigation against the university and its students. But the lawsuit’s success without them shows the extent to which NIMBYism remains California’s de facto governing ideology. CEQA abuse has been epidemic for decades, but the Legislature has done little to stem it besides writing spot exemptions for stadiums and other pet megaprojects.

Echoing the broader obstructionism that has driven Bay Area residents into Sacramento and other regions, Berkeley’s neighborhoodies have helpfully proposed that the University of California “shift students to lower-cost housing markets like ... Davis,” almost as if the cost of housing had nothing to do with their determined opposition to it. But Berkeley is only an extreme example of the resistance to housing in college communities across the state, which is rife enough to have motivated lawmakers and campuses to accommodate students sleeping in their cars.

For what do the state’s most fortunate impose such misfortunes on its children? For their “neighborhoods” — Californiese for themselves.

This story was originally published February 17, 2022 at 11:30 AM.