When I asked how you felt about new housing in Albany, you said, “I don’t know how Albany feels about it.” Is there a tension between how people might feel in any given neighborhood where there are more students or more housing versus the idea that this is a zero-sum game, and it needs to be built somewhere? We are all Californians.

Well, if those students were Californians, I think that would change the equation somewhat. But of the fourteen thousand students they added from 2005 to now, eight thousand of those are non-residents. [According to the spokesperson, the campus has added about eleven thousand students since the 2005-2006 school year, some seventy-one hundred of whom are non-residents.]

Some are foreign students, correct?

Yeah. Well, they’re non-resident Californians. They break down about half domestic, half foreign.

But that’s a good thing, right? To have—

I don’t think so. It’s a state university. I think that the legislature’s been pushing them to go back to ten per cent of non-residents. And the non-residents are kind of double tax-exempt. [The university is] tax-exempt like a private university, but then they’re also exempt from local zoning or planning control, as well as exempt from paying anything for their use of local services. [In a follow-up call, Bokovoy conceded that the university does pay, but what he believes to be an insufficient amount.] So I don’t know how Albany feels about having to spend money on them and the additional residents without compensation.

There was a quote I read from a law professor at Davis, who is an expert on land use, who said, “Almost certainly, someone in Berkeley — a city with great public transit, in a temperate climate with minimal heating and cooling costs — is going to have less of an environmental footprint than if they were living elsewhere in California.” This would seem to hold true for people living in many places in the country and world. Why wouldn’t it be good to have them be in Berkeley from an environmental perspective, at least?

Well, I don’t know about the last time you were on the 51.

This is a local bus route.

Yeah. The transit infrastructure that serves the campus is overtaxed. I think, while it might be good in some ways to have more people in Berkeley, you have to have the infrastructure to support the increased density, and that hasn’t happened. While it may be better to have population growth be centered in places where there’s already population, there are infrastructure costs to that.

And I think those issues need to be resolved before we start deciding where we’re going to densify. Because if we’re going to increase density, then the infrastructure’s got to be put in place. Do you put the infrastructure in place before you increase the population, or do you increase the population and hope that the infrastructure catches up? What we’ve been doing in the Bay Area is we’ve been letting the Bay Area develop without the infrastructure. And who’s profited from that? Technology companies, primarily.

We’ve also been keeping people from building new housing, correct?

Well, Berkeley’s built several thousand new units in the last ten years, in a city that’s already got twelve thousand people per square mile. The reason that there’s so much pressure in Berkeley is that developers make more money by developing in Berkeley than they would in Orinda or Lafayette.

Maybe it’s worth distinguishing how someone like you, as a Berkeley homeowner, feels about quality of life with a certain number of people, and what environmental impact that would have. Because the lawsuits are about the environment. Building in towns east of Berkley, like Orinda or Lafayette, may make people in Berkeley happier. It’s not clear to me that having more people live in those places would be better for the environment.

Well, if the theory is that you need to be building where there’s transit and you can move people around, then you are deciding at the end of the day between developing parking lots at bart stations.

There’s also a lawsuit going on that I believe you’re a plaintiff to about Clark Kerr, and—

Well, actually I’m the defendant in that lawsuit. The university is trying to remove the covenants from the Clark Kerr Campus. [The covenants, which U.C. Berkeley agreed to in 1982, when it acquired the campus, restrict its use in various ways for fifty years. The university says its plans for the campus do not violate the covenants, which it says it is trying to reform, not remove.]

No. The campus is completely surrounded by residential neighborhoods. The restrictions limited the activity on the campus and also made sure that the campus would be open as a community resource for the fifty years that the covenant covered. And the university’s closed off parts of the campus now to the public that were formerly open. [The U.C. Berkeley spokesperson attributed these limitations to the pandemic.]

The other thing was that there were only supposed to be four hundred and fifty first-year students on the campus. And it was supposed to be a multigenerational residential facility. But what happened was, while the university was ramping up its enrollment, they basically repurposed the apartments that were up there that were supposed to be for graduate students and faculty and transfer students, and put all first-year students up there. [The university said that it was under no such obligations from the covenants.]

So I think a lot of the neighborhood supports more housing up there, but I guess first- and second-year students have more impact on the surrounding community than older students and graduate students. And I think that the community would be supportive of a housing increase there that focussed on graduate students and transfer students, but not if the development is for more first-year students.

So, just to clarify, you’re not part of the litigation?

Oh, I am. Well, there were four neighborhood groups that sued over the volleyball courts, because there was no environmental-impact report. The university said that they were exempt, and the court said that they weren’t. So they released [a draft of] an environmental-impact report in January, and the neighborhoods have all commented on it. But, in the meantime, the university sued the covenant holders who are property owners. There are about eight hundred property owners who are benefitted by the covenants. And so they sued us. [The court ruled that in order to change the covenants U.C. Berkeley had to give all affected property owners the opportunity to sign on as defendants.]

You’ve said a lot of different things about your concerns. I know you told Slate, “We’ll end up like Bangkok, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur—dense Asian cities where there’s no transportation network.”

You know what? Everything that was in that Slate article was taken out of context. So.

O.K.

I helped finance infrastructure in those cities in the nineties. And the population growth had far outrun their carrying capacity, and it was tens of billions of dollars of investment. And that’s what I was talking about there.

Forget the Slate article then. All of the things you’ve said to me up to the latest comment about it being more difficult to live with younger students—all of that stuff makes sense. But these don’t seem exactly like environmental concerns to me. They seem like concerns about quality of life, or how you perceive quality of life.

I don’t mean “one’s environment.”

They are environmental changes that affect human beings: housing displacement, homelessness, the impact on the public’s emergency services. The point of C.E.Q.A. wasn’t just to protect the green belts around our cities but to make our cities more livable for human beings. Population growth has impacts on human beings. Density has impacts on human beings, and those are environmental.

I’m not an expert on this, but I believe most people think that density of population is actually very good for the environment, in terms of emissions, in—

Right. The emissions are only one piece of the environment. C.E.Q.A. requires analysis of all kinds of things that have impacts on the environment, and on human beings living in the environment and their quality of life.

You told The Atlantic that there are towns “full of new homeowners who were immigrants, who lived in crowded, dense places.” And “they do not want to have fourplexes next door to them. It’s just—that’s what they spent their lives trying to get away from.” So you’re not talking about the environment, per se? You’re talking about the way people want to live.

Yeah. I don’t think that’s a C.E.Q.A. issue. We were talking about, I think, S.B. 9 when we were talking about that. S.B. 9 is incredibly unpopular in Southern California.

This is the so-called yimby Bill in California?

It’s the Fourplex Bill, yeah. And I wasn’t saying whether it was a good thing or a bad thing. I think a few more cottages and things like that are a good thing. But I was referring to Conor Dougherty’s article about a neighborhood in San Diego where what’s going up is not fourplexes, just massive increases on the square footage, and the neighbors are upset down there. And that neighborhood that was in his story has a lot of Vietnamese Americans. And they’re trying to live. I empathize with how they feel, because it’s not your neighborhood that you grew up in and my neighborhood that are going to suffer the greatest effects from the densification. It’s going to be neighborhoods like that, where immigrants live. And I think that’s why immigrants have become homeowners, because those are the lower-cost neighborhoods that can be redeveloped. And so we’re looking at another wave of displacement. And I empathize with the people who live in those neighborhoods around the state.

What do you think when you hear the term nimby?

Oh, I think it’s been broadened so far that it’s pretty much meaningless.

It seems like you’re sort of saying two different things: one is that we’d be fine with more housing—we just want the infrastructure to be able to deal with more people. And the other is that, just generally, living in less dense areas with fewer people is something that’s totally reasonable as a quality-of-life desire, and that should be something that people are able to do. Those two things seem a little bit at odds to me.

But how do you feel? You are expressing both.

I’m sympathetic to both sides. I’m an economist. I’m a social scientist. And I look around the world at dense cities, and they’re all surrounded by single-family houses. I spent a lot of time in Japan cycling, and you go out into Saitama Prefecture, which is a big suburban area. It’s the more middle-class, upper-middle-class, suburban area of Tokyo. And it’s covered in single-family houses. And people commute a long distance, and they don’t do it because of the housing prices but because the apartments in central Tokyo are pretty small. And so, if you want more space, you move out to Saitama, and there’s something fundamental about what people want. Shanghai is surrounded by single-family houses. It’s kind of, like, what are the unintended consequences of increasing development?

I think the fundamental problem is population growth. I don’t think we’ll be able to tackle climate change unless we tackle population growth and rising living standards over a huge part of the world. As living standards rise, carbon consumption increases.

You mean total population growth in the world?

Yeah. If we add another billion people in the next twenty years or—I don’t know what the current things are. So yeah.

It just seems like, with denser places that people could live and good environmental policies, we could accommodate that much more than we could the way we’re living now.

I totally agree with that. And there are lots of places in Berkeley where I’ve supported higher-density housing.

In your neighborhood?

Well, my neighborhood doesn’t have the infrastructure to support it. Even the sewer lines in my neighborhood aren’t big enough to support high-density housing.

I know stuff has been written about how much time you spend in New Zealand, including in a piece by Annie Lowrey for The Atlantic. Did you spend the pandemic there?

No, I did not. I was here. And I only spend, like, several weeks there every year. I’ve written to The Atlantic, because a good friend called me really pissed off about the Atlantic article. And there were several things that Annie Lowrey put in there that were false, including the punch line.

What was the punch line?

The punch line was that I can go down to my second home in New Zealand for six months and to the country that welcomes me, or something like that. Non-residents can’t even buy property in New Zealand, you know? Since 2018, the new Labour Government, because of the housing crisis there, prohibits foreign ownership of residential property. [Lowrey told The New Yorker that Bokovoy said to her, “I live part-time in New Zealand.” In a follow-up call, Bokovoy told me that he owned a house in New Zealand from 2001 to 2006. He also amended his previous statement, telling me he lived there “two to two-and-a-half months per year.”]

Article thumbnail photo credit: Oden Taylor for CalMatters