Editorial: Freeze UC Berkeley enrollment until there’s enough housing

21% of students last fall reported they had lacked a safe, regular and adequate nighttime place to stay and sleep.

Enrollment levels at UC Berkeley should be frozen until the campus can provide housing for all additional students.

We have witnessed a sudden outcry from Gov. Gavin Newsom, state legislators, UC regents and campus officials as they face a court order to limit enrollment at Cal to 2020 levels.

The Alameda County Superior Court order was issued in August. Yet, UC regents waited months to ask an appellate court to block implementation of the decision — and then were shocked when that bid was rejected this month.

The regents and the governor are now asking the state Supreme Court to intervene, warning that without a stay of the lower-court order the university will have to reduce by 3,050 the number of new students it plans to admit later this year.

There’s great legal consternation about Superior Court Judge Brad Seligman’s ruling. University officials claim he overstepped by applying California’s environmental review law to student enrollment levels. And they object to his applying the freeze to levels in 2020, a year student enrollment had dipped  because of the pandemic.

But that legal fight misses the bigger picture: UC Berkeley has for decades failed to provide sufficient housing for its students, yet regents and California lawmakers have continued making matters worse by boosting enrollment without commensurate living accommodations.

If it takes a judge’s order to wake up state officials to Cal’s student housing crisis, then so be it. Even if the Supreme Court intervenes and stays Seligman’s order while the appellate court reviews the merits of his decision, and even if it is overturned, the crisis will remain.

In 2005, UC Berkeley forecast its enrollment would stabilize at 33,450 students in 2020. Instead, it now tops 45,000 students, with plans to keep growing to 48,200 by 2036-37.

Meanwhile, the university provides housing for less than a quarter of its students — turning the rest loose to fend for themselves in often-substandard conditions in Berkeley, Oakland and other surrounding cities.

The more the university boosts its enrollment, the greater the pressure on rental housing prices in the region, the more unaffordable shelter becomes, not just for students but for the entire community.

It helps explain why a university survey found that 21% of students last fall reported that since the beginning of that semester they had lacked a safe, regular and adequate nighttime place to stay and sleep. That’s more than one of every five students. It’s shameful.

We can’t keep making the housing shortage worse. We can’t keep expecting students to live out of their cars or sleep on friends’ sofas while attending one of the nation’s premier universities. University officials say they anticipate building housing for 11,730 more students by 2037. But there’s no clear plan, much less funding, for doing that.

To be sure, the university also faces legal hurdles to building more housing from the very same environmental review law that was at the heart of Seligman’s ruling. The case before him involved a project that would provide about 150 residential units for faculty, staff and post doctorate and graduate students. It would also provide 37,000 square feet of office, classroom and event space, thereby adding more campus facilities.

Some state lawmakers are outraged that Berkeley residents are using the California Environmental Quality Act to impose limits on student enrollment. The lawmakers’ protests wouldn’t ring so hallow if they were also concerned about their union backers’ use of CEQA to leverage labor agreements that drive up the cost of housing construction.

Meanwhile, there’s much hue and cry about Seligman’s ruling limiting student access to the university. Yes, it’s unfortunate that California cannot provide top-quality public education to all its standout students. Clearly, we need more university facilities across the state.

But increasing enrollment at the Berkeley campus should be out of the question until the university provides those students a place to live.