Editorials

Progress or Decay? Does Berkeley Know Which Is Which?

Becky O'Malley
Friday November 14, 2014 - 10:25:00 AM

The fault lines along the [read from left to right] Radical/Progressive/Liberal/Moderate/Conservative/Reactionary axis are opening wider as the left works on the response to global warming. The Public Comment section of today’s Planet gives witness to the widespread controversy over whether building massive highrises in already urbanized areas will actually prevent the environmental destruction caused by sprawl and the attendant climate change caused by automobile commuting. Some say yes, but others think that turning comfortable old cities into concrete canyons will result in further suburbanization when growing families decide that they want homes where they can garden and can’t find them in cities.

That’s approximately what Berkeley’s Measure R was about, though few voters in last week’s election understood it. The trouble with using zoning law to enforce public policy is that zoning ordinances must be very complex in order to dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s, which makes zoning a poor candidate for an initiative. It’s a truism that when voters don’t understand a ballot measure they just vote No, and Measure R was—perhaps inevitably—impossible for the lay reader to disentangle. This is not the fault of the drafters—if they can be blamed for anything, it’s having too generous a view of the intelligence of the Berkeley electorate.

If it were legal, it might have been a whole lot easier to pass a ballot statement worded simply “the policies proposed in the original Measure R as adopted shall now be enforced as a matter of law.” And the real question still hangs in the air: Can we build our way out of climate change? What’s the progressive answer to that one? 

In my youth, when I was doggedly working in electoral politics, trying to persuade voters in Michigan to reject racial discrimination and oppose the Vietnam war, some of my best friends were busy founding SDS. For them “liberal” was a term of scorn, derisively hurled at the end of evenings fueled by cheap wine and cigarette smoke of both flavors. Politics, they thought, was certainly not local and not liberal: radical or occasionally progressive, but liberal never. 

That was a good half-century ago, but it seems that not much has changed in political discourse since then. Or maybe it has. In some quarters, liberals and progressives are now seen as identical. 

The pundit-wannabe who edits the East Bay’s last surviving alt-weekly provided a good example in the current issue of how confused you can get . His election wrap-up is headed East Bay Progressives Dominated the Election --Liberals won nearly every political contest in Oakland, Berkeley, and Richmond on November 4. And so did the candidates and measures endorsed by the Express. 

Well, yes, if you define progressive as cheering for bigger building everywhere, and think liberals and progressives are synonymous, the fantasy-baseball Prog/Lib Party won it all.  

Linda Maio, who won in Berkeley’s District 1 (though by a smaller margin than she’d gotten in the previous 20-some years she’d been in office) was identified as the “liberal” candidate in the Express’s pre-election endorsement piece: “Maio, a liberal who is a strong supporter of smart growth and of creating a dense downtown, is the clear choice in her race.”  

Some commenters were not so sure.  

Said Margarita Lacabe: “..you might be right if you don't include respect for human rights and civil liberties to be part of your definition of ‘progressive’. I do, and in such sense… Maio [fails]. Maio was a big supporter of Berkeley's Sit-Lie ordinance, which attempted to further criminalize homelessness.” 

Editor Robert Gammon’s responsive to a similar comment: 

“I have to disagree with you on the Linda Maio race. Her opponent Alejandro Soto-Vigil strongly backed the most regressive measure on the Berkeley ballot -- Measure R -- this year.

“Moreover, Maio, by any reasonable definition, is a progressive.” 

Gammon, and people like him, seem to be proposing a new litmus test for who’s a progressive: do you support developers?  

But what would be “a reasonable definition” of progressive which doesn’t include respect for human rights? Can you be a progressive without being a liberal? What does that even mean? 

This is one of the rare instances where Wikipedia fails us. “Progressive” is defined as “ an adjectival form of progress” which it reports is used in a whole laundry list of disparate names and concepts: everything from a rock band to a sect of the Seventh Day Adventist church. 

So then, what’s “progress”, you might ask? Is any and all change “progress”? 

Maybe Wikipedia is right: “progressive” doesn’t mean much. 

San Franciscans with impeccable progressive credentials said no, when they voted for Proposition B, a clear, straightforward measure which stops inappropriate skyscrapers on their waterfront. Will it be progress to let well-wired builders grab most sites in downtown Berkeley for buildings which don’t meet strict environmental standards and provide no affordable housing for working families? 

Here’s the Express again: “Measure R, which environmentalists said would have ruined Berkeley's attempts to create a vibrant downtown, lost big…”.  

But the Sierra Club, usually considered environmentalist, declined to endorse a No vote on R, and many of its members welcome the strict green building standards and other environmental benefits which R would have mandated.  

Is “a more vibrant downtown” more important than a Green downtown? Is it progress, for example, to allow downtown bars to stay open later without getting permits, one of the anti-R talking points, or just a way to put more money in the pockets of the bar owners? 

One of my earliest memories from my St. Louis childhood, probably from the time I was just learning to read, was big billboards which said “Progress or Decay—St. Louis must choose.” I now know this was during the administration of Democratic Mayor Joseph Darst (full disclosure: a family friend, though I was too young to know him). 

From Wikipedia: “Darst was elected mayor of St. Louis in April 1949. Darst was a proponent of urban renewal through slum clearance and the construction of large scale affordable public housing. This approach to urban renewal has been criticized by later generations of urban planners and theorists such as Jane Jacobs. During Darst's time as Mayor, approximately 700 public housing units were completed. When he left office, an additional 17,000 units were under construction and 4,000 were in the planning stages.” 

Sounds like progress, right? Joe Darst meant well. 

But an enormous number of African-Americans were evicted when their “slum” homes were demolished, and that public housing became the notorious Pruitt-Igoe skyscraper complex, eventually blown up when it became unmanageable and crime-ridden. The displaced residents moved north to the suburban fringe—and many of their descendants ended up in the Ferguson area, in the news lately for not-good reasons. 

(For an excellent analysis of how all this happened, see The Making of Ferguson: Public Policies at the Root of its Troubles, by Berkeley Law Professor Richard Rothstein ). 

All change is not progress. In Berkeley as in St. Louis, what looks like progress might actually be decay in sheep’s clothing. 

If downtown Berkeley becomes a luxury dorm for San Francisco techies, or glamourous condo pieds a terre for oligarchs from the international 1% and their UC student offspring, that will not be progress. 

My Elmwood neighbor Professor Brad DeLong, an authentic pundit, recently hosted a discussion of this complicated topic on his widely read blog, to which I contributed more than my share of hot air. Rather than reiterate the whole thing here, why don’t you just read it? And while you’re at it, read some of the other interesting stuff he highlights. In fact, you should bookmark his blog for your frequent edification.