Editorials

Say what? Did Mayor Tom Bates really say that the purpose of the zoning code requirement for asking “significant community benefits” from the seven allowable extra-tall buildings in Berkeley’s downtown was to “incentivize” [his word, not mine] building some office towers here?  

This is the quote as transcribed from Tuesday's City Council meeting:  

“So the idea was we would incentivize people to--hopefully, we would like to see the buildings constructed but it also-- in the future people look at this-- hoping we are going to incentivize people to build office buildings rather than just build apartments. So there was a thinking in our thoughts that because the downtown needs above anything else, if you look at what our greatest need is -- people may disagree with this -- but in my judgment is we need an office building. We need a first class office building in downtown Berkeley. So in any case that's the thinking. That's what is behind it.”  

Sure, what Berkeley needs is more office jobs for more people who would make more demands on our already stressed housing supply. I don’t think so. 

The dirty little secret is that one reason for the housing crunch in the Bay is that the jobs/housing balance is perpetually out of whack, geographically unfocussed. We’ve ostensibly been tasked by the Association of Bay Area governments with adding more housing near our BART stations, per ABAG’s widely denounced Plan Bay Area. We’ve built a lot of fancy luxury units possibly intended for people who want to BART their way to San Francisco’s high tech jobs, but almost nothing for people who must BART to Berkeley from Richmond and Antioch and San Leandro for low-wage service jobs at UC and elsewhere because they can’t find homes here. 

If Bates gets his high rise office buildings downtown, they’ll empty out in the next inevitable tech bust, exactly as the building formerly known as the Great Western/Power Bar/ CitiBank/the-who-the-hell-knows-what-building has done in the previous busts which I well remember from my previous tech career (which started in the funky loft space above what is now Rasputin’s on Telegraph). And then they’ll be ripe for U.C. Berkeley’s newly-rechristened Real Estate office to pluck off the tax rolls, exactly what happened with the Golden Bear building on University, which was sold to a gullible city council with the promise that it would provide sales tax revenue. Instead it's U.C. offices and finance corporations. The “community benefits” angle was milked on that one too, with the never-fulfilled promise that the YMCA would move to that site. 

Maybe it’s time for Mountain View to add housing for those in its already existing jobs instead. And for Fremont to add more job sites to the acres of strip-mall parking lots which serve its predominantly one-story housing stock—Fremont even has BART. 

The Capitelli-Bates “significant community benefits” calculation scheme leaves a lot of bread on the corporate table. The accepted way of calculating what new development offers a community is to get a professional third party assessment of how much profit up-zoning has added to the building site in question. Instead, Capitelli and Bates, surely math wizards both, claim they’ve done it on the back of the proverbial paper napkin, as Bates recounted on Tuesday: 

“The highest amount we found was $20 a square foot for an entire building. We said that's one thing. But another thing that would be much better would be to go way beyond the $20 a square foot. Because they are doing the whole building and we are just doing a portion above 75 feet. That is how we came up with $20 a square foot. We said five times that. A hundred dollars a square foot. Then from 120 to 180 that's another value so we added another $50 a square foot. So $150.” 

In other words, we just made up the figures. 

At the council meeting and in letters written beforehand, plenty of citizens who are better qualified than Capitelli and Bates to deal with numbers pointed out that such estimates were dramatically off the mark. We posted a few of these analyses, from Kate Harrison and James Hendry and Rob Wrenn, in last week’s Planet. All concluded that many millions more in community benefits could and should be gleaned from the profits on just one project, the proposed Residences at Berkeley Plaza (RatBP) on the corner of Shattuck and Harold Way. That one would set the standard for future highrises, so it should not be undervalued. 

The principal way Councilmember Jesse Arreguin’s alternative significant community benefits proposal was much better than Capitelli/Bates’ is that it called for applicants to submit pro forma cost analyses which would be vetted by competent third party consultants. At least Arreguin is smart enough to know what he doesn’t know. 

But both Bates and Arreguin make a mistake by proposing that agreements to use union labor should be counted as part of the community benefits. Here’s the Bates statement at the meeting: 

"I think there is an extraordinary amount of money that we would collect on apartments and condominiums up to 120 and 150 above that. And then from that figure we will give a credit, because we would like to see people use labor, so we will give them a credit, so we will give them a five percent credit on the amount of the construction costs. And we know the cost. Because when we go into the building permit we have a good idea of what exactly the building cost is going to cost. We think that's a fair figure because what happens when you build these tall buildings, you will build them with steel, concrete. Those members who work in the buildings are going to be labor, people who do those trades. But the other trades, the allied trades that work with them, the people who do the framing and some of the electrical work and HVAC, we want to cover them. So we think this is a sufficient incentive for people to choose to use labor in this way.” 

Translated into standard English, what he’s saying first is that a project labor agreement should be counted as a major part of community benefits. In Polspeak "labor" equates to members of the powerful building trades unions.  

But also, he's saying that tall buildings which require steel and concrete construction methods (as opposed to those 5 stories and under, which can be wood-based) are preferable simply because they employ workers in the unionized building trades (which are incidentally major contributors to political campaigns, including the Measures R). This outdated assumption ignores the fact, well explained by Tim Hansen in the last issue of the Planet, that wood construction is a much better choice when climate change is factored into the equation. It’s time to stop promoting environmentally costly make-work, even for union workers 

Finally, saying that something might be left in the pot to promote the arts is a joke. I previously referred to the Capitelli/Bates plan as a slush fund, and I stand by that opinion.  

Here’s Bates: 

“ …[W]e are saying that if the owners of the building should really put money into the building in arts or in culture and make that kind of a commitment, that we in fact will recognize that commitment. It is not going to be done by anyone except the city council. So what would happen is they would propose something and then it would come to the city council and the city council would make a decision whether we think this is an appropriate use of the money.”  

That’s a slush fund in my book. 

The plan which Bates tried to sell to the Berkeley Arts Commission is that all new buildings would be required to contribute 1% of their cost to fund the arts in Berkeley except for downtown projects. The Commission soundly rejected the exemption for downtown, insisting that the fee should be applied across the board as it has been for years in other cities, and allocated by the experts on the Arts Commission. This is yet another case where Bates and his cronies have bypassed the very commissioners they themselves appointed to advise them—the same thing that happened not long ago to the Homeless Commission. 

And speaking of homelessness and attendant ills, the first half of Tuesday’s meeting was devoted to a pathetic parade of clients from the South Berkeley Drop-In center worried about losing $35,000 in funding if the City Manager’s recommendation was followed. Only $35,000—and the RatBP will be worth many millions in profits to its out of town investors. The gross undervaluation scheme proposed by Capitelli and Bates, along with their questionable reliance on off-site affordable housing if any were to be funded, completely ignores the real needs of Berkeley’s poorest citizens.  

At Tuesday’s meeting the seats in the council chambers were packed, and an equivalent number of citizens who couldn’t get in packed the upstairs hall and the vestibule as the meeting started. As has become standard under Bates, the item which brought the most citizens out was scheduled as the last item on the agenda, and of course even at one minute per speaker they ran out of time. 

I was prepared to do a clever riff on the date to which the community benefits discussion was re-scheduled: June 16, Bloomsday, celebrated as the day Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses walked the streets of Dublin: Mayor Bates’ speaking style is reminiscent of Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness depiction of Bloom and friends. Sadly, as I was finishing this I got word that the meeting for the 16^th has been cancelled, future date To Be Decided. 

Rumor has it that fixer Mark Rhoades “needs” to have the entitlements for RatBP tied down before Council’s recess in late July. The Capitelli/Bates allies among the councilmembers seem to be trying as hard as they can to please Rhoades and his financier principals in L.A., but many of Berkeley’s citizens don’t appear to have gotten the memo. If you’re interested in joining their efforts to slow down the steamroller, they can be contacted at sustainableberkeleycoalition@gmail.com.