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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 ...

A recent Regional Economic Models, Inc. (REMI) webinar reviewed the economic and environmental impacts of military base closures through the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) system used by the U.S. Armed Forces. The discussion began with an overview of the BRAC system and the economic and environmental impact of the U.S. military. BRAC has been significant in changing the economic climate of a region, and with the Biden administration looking to hit a greenhouse gas reduction target by 2030 and the Department of Defense signaling for an all-electric vehicle fleet by 2035, the impacts could be felt nationwide. For historical context, the webinar analyzed the economic and environmental impacts of the post-Cold War closures of Bergstrom ...