Editorials

On the first of May we had the pleasure of dropping in at three homes on the Bringing Back the Natives garden tour which we learned about from Ron Sullivan’s article in these pages. This was not one of your elegant events featuring name architects and landscape designers which are staged, with pricey admission fees, for the benefit of good causes, though we’ve enjoyed some of those too. This one was more basic: just an outright public relations triumph designed to show anybody who’s interested what you can, yes, try at home. The three sites were in the Northeast Richmond flats, numbered streets not far from Barrett and San Pablo. The houses there are modest in scale, and the small gardens on flat city plots were designed and executed by the homeowners themselves. Showcasing native plants in luxuriant display, they demonstrated gardening with minimal water to attract butterflies and other wildlife to the city. That area is a fertile alluvial plain, better for gardening than hilltop view lots. Look at the web page bringingbackthenatives.net to get a glimpse of what they’re up to. 

I thought of these joyous gardens while reading Richard Brenneman’s article about the desire of some Oakland real estate interests to label areas in North Oakland and Temescal as “blighted” targets for redevelopment. The neighborhoods in question are not unlike the Richmond neighborhood where the native gardens are located: flat yards, small houses, nothing particularly fancy about many of them. But it’s possible for anyone with a bit of land to create personal paradises like the ones we saw on May 1, and in fact some in Oakland were on the tour.  

“Blight” is a relative term. One of the residents of the “blighted” area in Oakland is Denny Abrams, who created Berkeley’s spectacularly successful Fourth Street shopping area. I encountered him last Sunday at the jazz festival he sponsors every year for the benefit of Berkeley school music programs. He was fulminating about the stupidity embodied in redevelopment schemes over the years, and about this new one in particular. The Fourth Street area, in the wisdom of the people who controlled Berkeley in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, was slated to be leveled as part of a sterile industrial and office “park” which would have taken out much of West Berkeley.  

Public outcry over several years, often led by the activists who wrote Berkeley’s Landmark Preservation Ordinance and founded the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association, saved the old Oceanview district, and Denny turned it into what is now the biggest producer of sales tax revenues in Berkeley. He said the city planners of the era thought Fourth Street would be a good site for an all-new racquetball club!  

Victory for the Berkeley Citizens Action slate was the new broom that put an end to these foolish plans. But it’s been hard to keep real estate speculators from setting off an endless barrage of bad ideas aimed at flatland neighborhoods with redevelopment as the weapon. Rising Bay Area home prices, even without redevelopment, already threaten the ability of average citizens to buy modest houses with room for a little garden in areas like North Oakland and Northeast Richmond. Yet it’s the existence of such homes in already developed cities that has prevented many people from migrating to former farmlands in areas like Fairfield and Tracy.  

The newest foolish fallacy that planners are trying to foist on city dwellers, akin to, and sometimes accompanied by, redevelopment, is the notion that it’s a good idea to build massive apartment buildings on major streets which happen to be right on top of viable existing urban neighborhoods. Adjacent city dwellers fear that their gardens will be robbed of sunlight by the shadow of these new buildings.  

And “affordable ownership” of a condo in a big box building, touted here by some recent correspondents, is a notoriously poor investment. Because big boxes are already overbuilt, rental vacancies are indeed up, and rents are down. Renters are better off continuing to rent and saving their money until they can afford to buy the small house with room for a little garden that they really want. Cities should not bail out speculators by helping them convert unappealing units to condos when rents drop. 

Continuing disappearance of space for urban community gardens is one more manifestation of short-sighted planning. To the avid redeveloper, vacant lots are more “blight.” But if the goal is to persuade people to go on living in cities, preserving room to garden should be a central strategy. Instead of being used to buy community garden space, however, redevelopment money is often used for pretentious and pointless street décor: fancy light standards, foolish banners and similar unusable money-wasters. 

Judging by the number of people who were at the meeting last week in North Oakland and their passionately negative speeches, redevelopment there may be an idea whose time has come and gone. Perhaps we don’t need to worry about it. But in case anyone in Oakland still thinks it might fly, local residents do seem to be ready to take the redevelopers on if they need to.  

—Becky O’Malley 

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