In an era of upheaval and protest at People’s Park and across the country, the University of California, Berkeley admitted its first significant wave of Chicano students in response to student pressure in 1969. Even then, the university had a housing shortage, prompting a successful effort to acquire a house near campus for the Chicano student community in the early ’70s. Half a century later, Casa Joaquin Murrieta continues to provide affordable student housing for about 40 Berkeley students.
The California Environmental Quality Act, enacted soon after the house was founded, would have killed the project before it started, depriving thousands of college students of affordable, stable, proximate campus housing. We know because that’s what it’s doing today, most recently in the form of a court ruling blocking the university’s effort to build sorely needed housing in People’s Park.
Then and now, the “environmental impact” of more student housing is in fact positive: More students living near campus means less traffic. It caused no harm to the environment to increase the occupancy and improve the interior of an existing structure.
