Across California, cities are dealing with a housing crisis that has resulted in pricey-california-market-in-2021-it-got-pricier.html">dramatic increases to rent and housing prices. California’s state universities are also coping with a housing shortage.

Most recently, the lack of student housing has aggravated town-gown tensions in the city of Berkeley, California, where a group of local residents have sued the University of California, Berkeley for increasing campus enrollment, claiming that students seeking housing are now aggravating the existing shortage.

Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods sued UC Berkeley in 2018 under the California Environmental Quality Act. The lawsuit cited the university’s failure to adequately mitigate the environmental impacts of increasing enrollment. This included traffic, party noise, pricing out local residents, and diverting emergency services. Last year, Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods had a temporary win when UC Berkeley was ordered by a superior-court judge to freeze enrollment at 2020-2021 levels. An appeal on this case from UC Berkeley was rejected by the California Supreme Court earlier this month, which would have required the university to slash its admissions. But soon after, state legislators passed a bill that allowed Berkeley to move forward with its planned 2022 fall enrollment. Now UC Berkeley has 18 months after the court ruling to complete an environmental review.

We spoke with Phil Bokovoy, president of Save Berkeley’s Neighborhood and Harry La Grande, vice chancellor emeritus for student affairs at the University of California, Berkeley, and Interim Vice President of Student Experience at California Institute of the Arts.