You may recall that in the spring of 2022 there was a big story at Berkeley over lack of housing. California’s Supreme Court ruled in March that Berkeley could not keep admitting more and more students without providing housing for them to live in. Berkeley had grown from about 30,000 students in 2005 to over 42,000 in 2019 but the amount of housing hadn’t changed much. A lawsuit was filed and by last year Berkeley was on the verge of having to pull as many as 3,000 acceptance letters because there was no place for those kids to live. For those who were accepted, it was common for 8-10 students to have to share a small house because rents were so high.
Berkeley got the message that they needed to build more housing and they happened to have a large piece of land that would be perfect for that. That site, People’s Park, has a long history going back to the free speech…
