Public Comment
An Open Letter to Berkeley Mayor Arreguin Re City Support for UC's People's Park Plans
At the March 21, 2023 City Council meeting you lashed out at People’s Park supporters, claiming that, as plaintiffs in the CEQA lawsuit against UC’s Housing Project #2, we caused Resources for Community Development to lose $25M.
Your condemnation contained more emotion than fact. Our lawsuit (RG21110142) is under CEQA, a state law. The law regulating HUD funding for the supportive housing at the park is a federal law, the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA). The only reason Resources for Community Development, the developer of the supportive housing on People’s Park, lost their HUD vouchers is because that federal law was violated (Stanley.W.Toal@hud.gov, Environmental Enforcement Officer, 10/25/2022 email). UC violated that federal law when they began construction (tree cutting) on the supportive housing site on August 3rd, before completing the environmental review process required by NHPA. The loss of HUD vouchers had nothing to do with our lawsuit!
The Rose Foundation Report documents that there are only, on average, 195 projects each year that require an EIR and only 2% of those go through any litigation. Not really the numbers that could support your and the Governor’s contention that People’s Park advocates are holding housing hostage in CA.
And that report is conclusive in its finding that CEQA can not be correlated to any significant housing shortage or any negative effect of California’s economic growth.
In the appeals court decision (A165451) the justices underscore that in no way was the intent of the Legislature to have CEQA’s regulations used as a redlining tool. Nevertheless you, Mayor Arreguin, choose to focus great attention on the pretext that park supporters are promoting redlining. Redlining was based on racist prejudice towards African-Americans. Today we all know that those prejudices were always without merit. The nearly two full pages (35 - 36) in the decision describing the recognition by the city of Berkeley, the University of California, and community groups, of the noise problems that have plagued Southside for so many years, reduce any inference of our prejudice against students to a level rather distinct from redlining. Your use of such hyperbole just to discredit our fair argument about noise impacts is the essence of slander, i.e. intentional mischaracterization to hurt others.
In May 2018 when Chancellor Christ so daringly announced that People’s Park would the first site on which she was going to begin her housing initiative, she made it clear that she knew that such an undertaking was going to be fraught with problems. Her first attempt at circumventing those obstacles was to offer any developer who would take on Housing Project #2 at People’s Park a Master Developer contract on all 7 or 8 other UC building projects.
What a deal. The bait was that developer would have to develop People’s Park first. Doesn’t that reveal something about the chancellor’s over zealousness about destroying the park? Yet no developer took the bait. They knew what lay ahead.
Finally please hear this: We are not asking for the continuation of the status quo at People’s Park! We have offered a vision for a safer and better maintained park that is welcoming to all. Your insistence that Berkeley has to choose between student housing or the park as it is today only makes a true win/win solution less possible. We can have student housing and a replanted, rebuilt People’s Park so long as UC does not insist on building on this National Register of Historic Places site (a distinction for Berkeley that you refuse to acknowledge).
