Public Comment

Around 75 people piled in to the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) to stop the latest jumbo scoop of brassy luxury housing from being poured on top of a Berkeley city landmark on a recent Thursday (August 13, 2015), and it was both thrilling and sad. 

As a community we looked brilliant. Engineers, architects, a former mayor, former Landmarks Preservation Commissioners, commissioners from other community commissions, respected authors, people who had lengthy backgrounds in historic preservation, and citizens with decades of civic involvement made an impressive case for denying developers a project which distorts almost every planning parameter in existence. 

No low-income housing. A fart in the face of the original landmark, which will whisper around its wind tunnel corners but no longer commune with the other landmark buildings nearby in any meaningful way. Eighteen stories of profit for the well-connected handful of consultants and developers who can count on Silicon Valley techsters to fill even wildly overpriced condos and penthouses even if the displaced theaters the building now features are never replaced. 

The beautiful souls who read through the zoning application materials, the applicant statement, the project plans, the draft historic context report, the geotechnical feasibility report, the environmental site assessments, the stormwater report, the LEED checklist, etc. left the meeting collectively stunned having spent many months diligently documenting the obvious flaws in the proposal and the even more obvious tricks that were played upon the process to fast-track matters and keep investors’ minds at ease. 

This is how homelessness happens. Nobody in the room, probably not even the project’s threadbare handful of supporters, really buys the hype about insanely tall buildings somehow saving the whales or solving the housing crisis. Insanely tall buildings full of luxury housing fill up with insanely wealthy people who rarely seem to wonder why a town which once had a thriving black community now looks like a white country club. 

The project opponents are not entirely out of ideas to stop the project. The politicians who stacked the commission with people carefully instructed not to stand in the way of this project no matter how silly it looks can still come to their senses. What was referred to as “architectural poison” by one speaker doesn’t have to be permanently visited on this or any other town. 

But Berkeley, like other cities in the densely packed Bay Area, doesn’t have any more square footage to squander on the wealthy if it ever wants to help the rest of us get out of the rain. Rich people may sprout exponentially out of the tech world or sail in on personal jets from foreign lands, but somebody’s got to drive their taxis, teach their kids, and pump their coffee drinks. Square footage is finite, and we hit the breaking point on living in Modesto while trying to work in San Francisco a long time ago. The well-organized crowd at the LPC meeting knows we need planning that respects our architectural and cultural heritage, our community needs, and politicians who are willing to play fair instead of short-circuit our democracy for personal political gain. This is how homelessness happens, and this is exactly the group that can stop it.