The University of California’s plan to add 20,000 students by 2030 has led to conflicts with some of the communities where campuses are located, with residents complaining that the university system is not doing enough to house students, and are merely shifting the housing burden to them.
This dynamic is currently playing out in Berkeley, where a group of residents challenged the university’s growth plan, saying it would have an outsize effect on traffic, noise, rental prices and the environment. On Thursday, the state Supreme Court agreed, ruling that UC Berkeley could not admit the 3,050 additional students above its 2020 enrollment that it had planned for this fall without further environmental study. (That would have been an increase of a few hundred students over this year’s enrollment.) The university currently has about 45,000 students, a big increase from the fewer than 36,000 who attended in 2010.
Neither UC Berkeley nor the residents are fully in the right. Residents say there aren’t enough dorm rooms to house thousands of new students in and around the city, and that is correct. Berkeley cherishes its low architectural profile — though there already are some high-rise dorms at the university — and is generally anti-growth.
