NIMBYism Reaches Its Apotheosis

Phil Bokovoy, a former investment banker and ardent community activist, is giving me a tour of his neighborhood, Elmwood, in Berkeley, California. It is some kind of paradise. October weather, all year round! Arts-and-crafts manses on streets lined with redwoods, succulents, and oaks! Accessibility to San Francisco in minutes and Yosemite and Tahoe in hours! Walkability, bikeability, transit, parks! One of America’s best institutions of higher education, UC Berkeley!

But Berkeley the school is putting Berkeley the city at risk, Bokovoy tells me. Students are driving up housing costs, displacing low-income families, draining city resources, and degrading the environment. To stop that from happening, the community group he leads, Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods, in 2019 filed a lawsuit under the purview of the state’s Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA—a by opponents of new development. A superior-court judge to throttle enrollment, because additional students might “result in an adverse change or alteration of the physical environment.” Short of a reprieve from the state supreme court, UC Berkeley said this month, it will have to issue roughly 5,000 additional rejection letters, slashing the size of its incoming cohort by a third.