Editorials

New Yorkers, bless their hearts, love to believe that what happens in their city is unique—that they’re somehow exempt from the inexorable laws that govern the universe. The truth is that often bad things happen elsewhere first, but eventually even New York is vulnerable. The elegant writer Adam Gopnik has a piece in this week’s New Yorker magazine’s Talk of the Town section which highlights the grim homogenization which other parts of the country have already undergone, but is just now taking over in Gotham City. He spent several past years in Paris, so he’s now looking at New York with a fresh eye, and he doesn’t like much of what he sees.  

Here’s how he describes what worries him and others who’ve loved the city: “It is the sense that the city’s recovery has come at the cost of a part of its identity: that New York is safer and richer but less like itself, an old lover who has gone for a face-lift and come out looking like no one in particular. The wrinkles are gone, but so is the face. This transformation is one you see on every street corner in Manhattan, and now in Brooklyn, too, where another local toy store or smoked-fish emporium disappears and another bank branch or mall store opens. For the first time in Manhattan’s history, it has no bohemian frontier. Another bookstore closes, another theatre becomes a condo, another soulful place becomes a sealed residence. These are small things, but they are the small things that the city’s soul clings to.” 

That’s where cities and small towns too, all over America, have gone—or, perhaps an even worse alternative, they’ve become ghost towns, without even the boring bank branches and mall stores to support Main Street. It’s happened in Berkeley—where bookstores are closing and being sold to foreign chains, where the Fine Arts theater has been displaced by condos-in-waiting, where non-union mall stores like Trader Joe’s are valued more highly by politicians than Fred’s Market down the street, a pedestrian-oriented family business known for feeding poor people out the back door, or Andronico’s, a small Bay Area chain, also family-owned, with union employees. Berkeley’s erstwhile bohemian frontiers, Telegraph Avenue and West Berkeley, are coveted as sites for even more mall stores. Bruce Brugman in the Bay Guardian of the early seventies warned about the Manhattan-ization of San Francisco, but now we’re seeing the Berkeley-ization of Manhattan.  

We happened to run into a couple of the kind of small business people who were the soul of the old Berkeley over the holidays. They had various theories about what’s happened here, based on their own experience, and when you put their ideas together a picture emerges. One, a skilled craftsman, used to have his shop on Shattuck, back in the days when there was a viable department store, a music store, a kitchenwares store and other businesses that attracted a variety of customers who then patronized his own shop, which he’s now moved to a neighborhood location. He thought the trouble with downtown Berkeley is that it’s no longer a destination—that during the day it’s mostly the kind of mall fast food places which appeal to Southern California-bred undergraduates, plus a few cheap bookstores. The arts venues bring in a different crowd at night, but patrons are not there to shop, just to be entertained, and perhaps to have dinner at the two or three interesting restaurants which stay open after 9:30.  

The other one, a bookseller, agreed with the diagnosis of what’s lacking downtown, but added his own more sinister spin. He begged us to have the Planet investigate who’s bought up all the commercial rental property downtown, because he strongly suspects that investors are keeping rents there high on purpose to drive out small businesses to make room for University of California expansion. This pattern can be observed in New York too, especially in the neighborhoods adjacent to Columbia and NYU.  

Such an investigation is a great idea, but very difficult, because such properties are typically held by faceless real estate investment trusts where it’s hard to identify the principals. The Planet has outted one business school professor who’s the international financial muscle behind a number of the most egregious projects, but there are probably others like him. And there’s no quick way of finding out which local politicians have serious financial ties to property ownership, though developers have been observed doing modest favors for relatives of some Berkeley councilmembers.  

Realtor-councilmember Laurie Capitelli’s current push to limit the term of service of experienced land use commissioners, coupled with the council’s recent revision of the Landmarks Preservation Ordinance, could add up to a drastic emasculation of Berkeley’s traditional land use control structure which has kept the city livable for the past 25 years. Our city is on the cusp of the kind of change which has the potential for shaping its destiny for years to come. Gopnik sees the same dynamic in New York: “…. what we want the city to look like in 2030 will depend on the rules we make now. Aggressive policies for housing, especially low-income housing; a reasonable process of review to help neighborhoods remain neighborhoods; less passive welcome to every form of monster store; more support for tenants and small merchants—all of these things are worth arguing for, and legislating for, too.” We agree—those things are worth arguing for in Berkeley, too. Let’s make it a New Year’s resolution.