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The California Supreme Court ruled in March that the University of California, Berkeley must cut its undergraduate enrollment by nearly 3,000 for the 2022–23 school year. The ruling came only three weeks before the university had planned to mail acceptance letters, forcing it to send 5,000 fewer offers. The university had been sued by Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods, a local anti-density group, under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods successfully argued that the university had insufficiently assessed the environmental impact of increasing its enrollment. However, the group’s leader publicly stated that he sued because higher enrollment would increase the city’s ...

The housing affordability crisis is likely to continue for low-to-moderate income households and people of color, according to a recent annual report from the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies. As the crisis has intensified, people and groups opposed to new housing developments in their neighborhoods have come under increasing levels of criticism. Such opposition is often characterized by the acronym NIMBY, short for “not in my backyard,” and the term NIMBYism. The San Francisco Bay Area has been plagued by a severe affordable housing shortage since the 1990s. In recent decades, anti-density activists have been elected to positions of power in Marin County, Palo Alto, and Cupertino, entrenching opposition to ...

Vail Resorts has rebuffed the most recent attempt to stop construction of an affordable workforce housing development in East Vail, Colorado. The town council originally approved the proposal in October 2019 but changed course, voting 4-3 in May to initiate condemnation proceedings. The town justified their decision by claiming that development on the property would endanger a local herd of bighorn sheep. Vail Resorts countered that there have been numerous luxury and other developments in the same sheep habitat. The developments in Vail are the latest instance of a greater push for affordable workforce housing in towns with large recreational industries. Ski resorts and other recreational businesses are often seen as beneficial for their ...

Aaron N. Gruen, principal of the urban-economics, market-research, land-use policy, and pre-development services firm Gruen Gruen + Associates, shares his thoughts on how to combat skyrocketing gas and housing costs.