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Melissa Harris-Perry: Hi, everybody. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and this is The Takeaway. Across California, cities are dealing with a housing crisis. It's resulting in dramatic increases in 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 raising campus enrollment, claiming that students seeking housing are now aggravating the existing housing shortage.

Phil Bokovoy: My name is Phil Bokovoy, and I'm the president of Save Berkeley's Neighborhoods. Save Berkeley's Neighborhoods is a coalition of almost 100 neighborhood groups in Berkeley who have been working hard to try to hold the University of California accountable for its growth here in Berkeley.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now last year, UC Berkeley enrolled 45,000 students. Housing is only provided for around 20% of them. That is the lowest within the University of California system. This means that roughly 35,000 students are left searching for housing.

Phil Bokovoy: Landlords who used to like to rent to long-term renters had decided that it was much better for them to rent to students because students move out every year or two. When students move out, they could bring the rents on those apartments up to market. In addition, we saw a lot of former long-time family homes being sold and turned into what we call mini dorms. Those were moving into neighborhoods where students historically had not lived. We approached the university and we said, "Hey, you need to increase housing here before you increase enrollment because you're having a really severe impact on our city."

Melissa Harris-Perry: 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 effects of increasing enrollment. This included traffic, party noise, pricing out local residents, and diverting emergency services. Now, some who studied this issue have referred to the lawsuit as nimbyism, that's not in my backyard. They've said that these are not residents of a impoverished inner-city who are challenging a big, bad landowner, these are folks who already knew they were going to be living in a college town.

Phil Bokovoy: Our coalition includes a lot of long-term renters as well as homeowners. We like living in a university town for a lot of reasons. What's really happened here is we have a large state institution that's not subject to local zoning regulations that has imposed huge costs on the community without working with the community to mitigate those.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, this question of working with the community. Now the university says it's working with residents of the city, but Bokovoy has a different perspective. According to Bokovoy, his coalition has suggested solutions for how to expand student housing.

Phil Bokovoy: There's this arrogance at the administrative level at the university that says that, "Well, the neighbors have no right to complain because we're Berkeley and we're fantastic and you should just do what we want you to do." There's been really an inability to work with the university. The community has, for example, suggested several housing sites which are primarily on surface parking lots or decrepit parking decks for student housing, and university has rejected all of those because they don't know how they're going to replace the parking.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The city of Berkeley also sued the university in 2019 for its failure to study the effect rising enrollment had on local services. Both parties settled last summer for a payment of 82 million to the city over 16 years. According to the office of Berkeley's current mayor, it was "one of the largest financial settlements any UC campus has provided a host city".

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've 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 you see, Berkeley has 18 months after the court ruling to complete an environmental review. Despite that, Save Berkeley's Neighborhoods intends to continue fighting the growing student population.

Phil Bokovoy: I think from the very beginning, the thing that we've asked for is that they not increase enrollment unless they increase the housing for the students who they are enrolling. The legislature is, I think, finally paying attention. There's a proposal for a $5 billion fund for all of the higher education institutions in California to build housing, but Berkeley is so far behind that it's hard to see how they can dig themselves out of the hole, say, in a three to five year period.

What we'd like to see is for them to have pause on increasing enrollment until they can catch up with some of the housing so that we don't continue to have displacement, but anecdotally, we know we have long-term residents, many of whom worked for the university, work for the university who tell us that their apartment buildings have largely turned over from being long-term residents to students.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I just want to note here, these kinds of challenges, they rarely fit neatly into a good guy-bad guy scenario. State universities are serving multiple constituencies, their own students, faculty and staff, the state lawmakers who govern them, and the local communities where they're located. Neighbors, of course, are seeking to protect housing values and, of course, their own understanding of what their community is and should be.

Students, let's not stereotype them either. They're not a single population. Some truly are low-income. Others, quite a bit wealthier. The issue here in part are all of these different constituencies and how to balance them in ways that are genuinely fair and just. While Bokovoy and his fellow organizers believe that the university is harming the city of Berkeley, current and former administration officials have much different perspective.

Harry Le Grande: My name is Harry Le Grande, Vice Chancellor Emeritus for Student Affairs, University of California, Berkeley.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Le Grande worked for 36 years at UC Berkeley, including 10 years as a Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs before departing in 2016. He told us that the university is essential to the city of Berkeley.

Harry Le Grande: I think we are an economic engine. I often thought if the University of California Berkeley wasn't in Berkeley, what would Berkeley be? Probably just Oakland North. I think the fact that when you've got 40,000 to 50,000 people traversing that campus, they're using the restaurants, they're using the businesses, students are using all those things, staff are using all those things, faculty are using all those things.

I know Berkeley, in the past, has done economic impact studies that show really the economic impact that they actually have on the city of Berkeley. Many times, universities, in order to mitigate some of those things around taxes, especially if you're a state and you're not subject to local taxes, they do something that's called the lieu of tax, which in some cases, maybe we bought a fire truck for the city of Berkeley, or we bought some other thing to mitigate the impact that we might have on that local community.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Le Grande also thinks that cutting off growth makes it harder for UC Berkeley to serve California students.

Harry Le Grande: I do think that universities try to be a good partner, but many times, I think we're caught between a rock and a hard spot because on the one hand, people don't want us to grow, but then you've got the legislative constituents saying not enough Californians are getting into Berkeley so you're shutting off the opportunities for many California students because you just can't grow.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The enrollment cap that the lawsuit would've put on the incoming school year, well, it would've been devastating to incoming students. The university would've had to cut enrollment by almost 3,000 this fall, including enrolling some 1,000 incoming freshmen in online classes.

Harry Le Grande: It would be unfortunate for many California students who have worked hard to be competitive for UC Berkeley. It goes beyond being University of California-eligible, but you got to be Berkeley-competitive which means you really are the top of your class.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In the University of California system, decisions about increased enrollment and growth are actually made by the state legislature or board of regents. The university uses these enrollment numbers to set the budget for the school year, which is a pretty delicate balance.

Harry Le Grande: One point, we had increased our out-of-state and international student populations in order to offset the budget that we were getting from the state legislature. To use round numbers, say the state legislator was paying for about 19,000 California residents, that's what we were getting financed for, but we've got 25,000 undergraduates. That meant that other 6,000 did not take away from Californians, but we were actually able to use the revenues because those students paid not only the California tuition, but also the out-of-state fees, which could be anywhere from $30,000 to $35,000 more. We were actually able to use those revenues as additional revenues to enhance what Californians were getting because that meant we could add more sections, we could add more TAs, we could actually add more courses that way. I think sometimes people don't understand the economic balance that you're often trying to reach when you do stuff like that.

When the legislator came back because they were getting a lot of pressure from California said, "Limit your out of state enrollment or limit your international enrollment," we did that, but it also meant, in some ways, a budget cut, because that meant that we had to reduce those programs and services that we were providing and those courses that we providing with that additional revenue that the out of state and international students provided for us.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Le Grande also told us that the way in which UC Berkeley relies on the surrounding community for housing is pretty typical in higher ed.

Harry Le Grande: In many universities, I think look at student housing as a partnership. There's no way Berkeley would be able to build 35,000 units of housing to house all its undergraduate and graduate students. We're always going to be dependent upon that local community to support that and to help us in that endeavor.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We're going to take a quick break, back with more in just a moment.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Thanks for sticking with us on The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. We've been talking about the University of California, Berkeley, and the effects that higher enrollment at the university has had on the surrounding community. I'm continuing my conversation now with Harry Le Grande, Vice-Chancellor Emeritus for Student Affairs at the University of California, Berkeley. I asked him how universities can be good neighbors.

Harry Le Grande: You have to communicate. That's usually our biggest flaw if we're not communicating with each other, and so then people make assumptions about what's going on or what's not going on, which is really why we have a Community Affairs Office in order to make sure that that dialogue is continuous. We sometimes don't always agree, sometimes we agree to disagree, but we actually make that effort to have that engagement and to have that understanding.

I feel sometimes universities are caught in the middle because the local community feels one way, and the legislature feels a different way, and maybe the city government feels another way. You've got three, for lack of a better word, masters that you're trying to satisfy. I don't know if you ever make all three of them happy. I think what you try to do is mitigate the impact that you have on each one of those.

When we got the California School for the Deaf and Blind back in the early '80s and there was a neighborhood association around there that was really upset that the state had given it to us because we were going to turn it into student housing because we had a high housing demand. Well, there was an agreement reached for 30 years that limited the number of students we could have there and the kinds of things that we could do. Now, our housing demand, I think we were limited to like 750 students, we could have easily doubled them on that property, but because of the impact that the community felt was going to have on them, we acquiesce and just kept it at 750.

I think now that 30-year agreement should just about be over, it should be over by now. Whether or not it's been re-mitigated, I don't know because I've been gone now since about 2016. Those are the kinds of things that I think universities do to try to balance that. I would say in the past, in my early years at Berkeley, the City Council and the university were at odds quite a bit. I think that relationship has changed. Over time, we periodically would have administrative and city government and city staff breakfast sessions or luncheons, or meetings, to talk about you what's happening in both areas and the impacts that we have.

I think the university tries to be a good neighbor. We do realize that we're a huge impact on most communities. That's something that's going to always be in the forefront. I would say this, we don't we're not cavalier about it. The fact that we're a state, and we're not required to pay their taxes, doesn't necessarily mean that we're just going to ignore them and not do anything.

If I was going to leave a message, that's what I'm trying to let people understand is that we don't have to operate in a vacuum. We do try to listen and mitigate and understand the impact that we're having, but we also realize that we are in huge demand internationally, not just in California. I think there's always that tension about how we actually make that happen. Since we are state-located and state-assisted, we would always lean to making sure that our California residents are giving our top priority, and we would make cuts in other areas if we had to do that.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Harry Le Grande is the UC Berkeley Vice Chancellor Emeritus for Student Affairs and current Interim Vice President for Student Experience at California Institute of the Arts. Thanks so much for joining us.

Harry Le Grande: You're welcome. Thank you.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We reached out to UC Berkeley for comment on this story. While we did not receive an official statement from the University of California, we did receive an email from Dan Mogulof, Assistant Vice-Chancellor of the Office of Communications and Public Affairs. He expressed his clear displeasure with our reporting, writing to us, "The fact that your program is opted to let a small group of litigants present themselves as representing the community's interest, as opposed to the city's elected representatives, whose perspectives are far different and far more representative boggles the mind."

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