Holiday gatherings offer a chance to meet new people and find out what’s going on outside of Berkeley. Christmas cards and phone calls from distant friends are another way to get a window on the rest of the world. What I’ve learned this year is that planning issues and answers (or lack of answers) are remarkably similar throughout the country. From a farm friend back east: “We are still enjoying central Pennsylvania although there has been a great spurt of building around here—condominiums and McMansions going up with great abandon on some of the best farmland in the East. Progress marches on! It can’t be any crazier than California, though.” A young friend brought her brother from a midwestern university town to a Christmas party. He’s chair of his local historic preservation organization, and he reports that privately developed high-rise apartments are rapidly displacing the charming turn-of-the-century frame houses that sheltered generations of students with low rents. His major complaint is that easily disproved “affordability” criteria have been used as political cover for buildings which soon turn into high-priced market rate rentals. As a devoted progressive Democratic party activist, he’s particularly unhappy that his recently elected Democratic mayor has turned out to be in the developers’ pocket. Closer to home, some residents of an older East Bay exurb, who call themselves “democratic socialists;” complain that in their town trees are being cut down and potential parkland converted to apartments in the name of “saving the wilderness.” They still believe in what now seems to be an old-fashioned slogan, “think globally, act locally,” and they don’t think that filling up their local open space will prevent tenants of the new developments from moving to condominiums and McMansions on formerly rural lands as soon as they can afford it. Any of this sound familiar?
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