Cal Student Sues Over Moldy Housing

By Brian Anderson
Valley Times

May 24, 2001

OAKLAND — A former UC-Berkeley student who lived with his family in a student housing complex in Albany filed a class action lawsuit Wednesday claiming his apartment and hundreds of others owned by Cal are infested with mold.

David Augustus Garcia contended in the suit that he and his young son Elias David Garcia suffered serious respiratory injuries after three years of renting a mold- and fungi-plagued unit in the University Village development.

“The University has a responsibility to provide student housing, to provide safe housing,” said Garcia attorney Kenneth Kasdan of Irvine. “What’s going on here is that they’re renting these units that they know there are problems with.”

Garcia said in the 10-page complaint filed in Alameda County Superior Court that mold led to coughs, congestion, eye irritation, fevers and breathing problems, among other things. Elias, he argued in the complaint, continues to suffer mentally and physically.

Upwards of 800 residents could be included if a judge certifies the class, which Kasdan hopes to extend to people who lived at the property as long as four years ago.

Garcia, a recent law school graduate, could not be reached for comment.

Bob Jacobs, Cal’s director of housing facilities, said the mold problem has not reached the dramatic level characterized in the complaint. He acknowledged that some apartments contained mold, but said they have been handled appropriately and students were included every step of the way.

“The kicker in all of this is there are no federal or state guidelines,” Jacobs said. “It’s really a tough thing to get a handle on. So, we’re sort of frustrated and stymied.”

He said a Pleasant Hill consultant studied the problem and recently issued a 1,200-page report that is being reviewed. Additionally, Jacobs said, a panel of medical and environmental health professionals is in the process of being organized to further study the problem.

The complaint zeroed in on part of the 136-building, family-focused University Village complex in Albany about three miles from campus. A section known as Area B, which was built in the 1960s, was the epicenter of the mold problem, Kasdan said.

University officials tested more than 50 apartments, discovering 33 that showed an excessive amount of mold. Two were so heavily laden with the fungus that residents were immediately told to leave their belongings behind and were put up in local hotels.

Marcela Borge, 24, a recent psychology graduate, said she and her 22-month-old daughter were uprooted from her two-bedroom apartment during finals week. She worked out an agreement with her instructors to complete finals, but missed her convocation because of the mold-mandated move, she said.

“It hasn’t even dawned on me that I’m graduating because I’m doing inventories and writing down everything that was damaged and I have to go through these piles of ruined clothes,” Borge said. “It’s so frustrating because I had to overcome a lot to just to be able to graduate and it just feels like in a way they took that from me.”