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There is a strange mystique to the alleged planning process through which the Berkeley city government is leading the Adeline neighborhood, and the rest of the city. It knows that those who take the time to attend its "planning" workshops are simply trying to keep a diligent eye on what the city is doing. Yet it considers them representatives of the neighborhood, and thereby people who are empowered to make a plan for it. Even the title of the workshop invokes this aura. It is called “Building the Plan Together.” But a certain substance is missing. In order to represent the neighborhood, there would have to be local organizations throughout, in which people discussed what the city has in mind, and could actually make decisions with respect to it, which would then be represented in these workshops. If the city really wanted local participation, it would foster such local organization, insure a certain autonomy for local organization, and make those local discussions a basis for its planning. But the workshop process ignores this, and barges ahead. Ostensibly, the purpose is then to "workshop" those who attend.

This one, which occurred on May 21 at the South Berkeley Senior Center, was the fourth in a series. Its theme was transportation (meaning streets, bike paths, and crosswalks, not local bus routes or shuttle networks).  

As with the previous workshops, this one was half lecture on what the city’s agents have been doing, and half breakout groups. During the lecture portion, the organizers spoke about the surveys they have taken in the community, and about how they have interpreted the surveys, which they then summarized as the community’s visions and desires. There was no general discussion. That was left for the end. The meeting then broke into groups to discuss streets, bike paths, and crosswalks. There were reportbacks afterwards, and no time for general discussion. Time is always the wild card. 

Or perhaps that is something the organizers learned from previous experience. In the earlier workshops, they did allow people to address the whole workshop, and initiate broader discussion that way. The ideas and critiques and general attitudes of the people are a lot easier to control, however, if you leave that part out. 

So we heard about the “Planning Process Context,” and “The Emerging Community Vision Framework.” Planning and vision were the rhetorical terms for community participation. The workshop personnel summed them up with an additional term h:“community priorities.” 

You have to love a discourse that can throw words around like that. Vision. Planning. Process. Yet nothing was said about needs, what the community needs to survive. The communities of the bay area have dire needs because their economy and membership are getting shredded by the gentrification process. Instead, the notion of needs gets shifted to "plans" and "visions." Yet all the communities of the bay area are facing the same erosion of their infrastructure. They need, first and foremost, a plan that will guarantee that people won’t be thrown out of their homes in order to make money for someone else. This has been stated loud and clear in neighborhood meetings for over a year. 

And it’s serious. I’m not just being rhetorical here. When I left the "workshop," I went to a jazz festival in Oakland, and ran into a friend I hadn’t seen for a while. The first words out of her mouth, when I mentioned the workshop I had come from, were that she herself had just been told her rent was going up, and it was going to be more than she could pay. She was wondering where she could move to. What are the odds? How probable is it that the very same day, a mere couple of hours after leaving a city workshop in which dislocation was the catastrophic subtext, there it was, looking me in the face in the words of a friend. That is the face of crisis. 

But the idea of needs actually was present – in euphemism, however. That was the role given the term “community priorities.” The organizers distilled those priorities from their surveys. And in their lectures, that term got used a lot. But it had a funny ring to it, like a bell that someone has their hands on. You strike the bell and you get a metalic thud. 

That is because the term "priorities" is a serious term. It means that something has great importance. And that should mean that any plan concerning things of importance must reflect those priorities. But at one point, the organizers let something slip. One of the speakers (aka lecturers) said that the community priorities would feed into the city’s processes and goals. They almost whispered it, so that it wouldn’t attract too much attention. 

One had the feeling of seeing a card being dealt from the bottom of the deck. The community’s priorities would be fed into the city’s priorities, which would constitute the “Planning Process Context” (as the agenda put it). Community priorities would lose their priority on their way to city hall. They are destined to be subordinate to the city’s priorities. That is, they will be divested of their priority character. They will only be "priorities" until we all “build the plan together.” Then, when that comes to pass, “community priorities” will get busted down to "visions." The community’s visions will be rendered subordinate to the city’s priorities, and that will be the planning process. 

I know that sounds prophetic. But if we take the city agents (the organizers) at their word – well really, it means taking them at their non-word. With all the talk about vision and planning, they still didn’t cover community needs – the need for survival as a community. Visions are not needs. Needs are priorities. In order to recognize needs as needs, they have to be given priority. Take all the surveys you like, and spend as much effort as you can muster to channel "workshop" discussions into where to put the bike lanes, and how to make crosswalks safer, but you already know what the community needs. 

It was said loud and clear in the preceding "workshop" (several months ago). When asked what the solution was to the problem of rising rents and the dislocation of residents, the city agent said, very concisely, “building affordable housing.” That is what the community needs in order to stop its hemorrhaging. It is bleeding low income people all over the landscape because there are no means of keeping them at home. Housing development based on rental markets have become wounds in the social body of this city. What is needed is housing whose costs are based on income ("affordable" means 30% of income). 

And with respect to this wounding of the community, this hemorrhaging of low income people to Antioch, Martinez, Modesto, and points further elsewhere, the workshop dealt from the bottom of the deck a second time. Speaking about the “emerging community vision,” they got to a slide in their PowerPoint presentation entitled “obstacles.” These were obstacles to being able to meet the community vision. And they listed four. Number three made the others irrelevant. It was: “rising rents.” 

I’ve played in some crooked games in my day, but this one took the cake. Rising rents are the very engine, the motor, the dynamic mechanism of the entire housing crisis!!! Whatever else is going on, if there were no rising rents leading to people being thrown out of their homes, there would be no crisis. And that force slashing open these communities gets categorized as an "obstacle"? 

But then, we have to remember that our political culture has been drowned in a sea of euphemism. An overt act of war, the bombing of towns in another country, is called a “defensive reaction strike.” The inviolate integrity of a woman with her body gets divided by proclaiming a relation in which she has “a right to privacy.” Massive dislocation of low income people is called "development." And rising rents are called an "obstacle." 

What this brought up, because it was so blatant, was the fact that these people who work for the city, whose constituents are the ones facing this crisis, have not once mentioned the need to repeal the Costa-Hawkins Act. 

The Costa-Hawkins Act is the state law that makes it unlawful for a city to institute any kind of rent control. To ordain a moratorium on rent increases until the city can provide affordable housing for those victimized by those increases would be in violation of that law. The city government cannot protect its own people because of that law. Yet it wants the people who need protection to participate in a housing planning process that assumes that they cannot be protected. It cannot see that, for its call to a workshop to be in good faith, it would have to oppose and expunge the state imposition that makes that protection impossible. It wants neighborhood people to participate in a planning process when it cannot even guarantee that they will still live in this city when the plan is finally promulgated. 

In discussing streets, bike paths, and crosswalks, it did not discuss who would still be in town to use them. That is the other face of the housing crisis. 

It is like when a person has fallen overboard and is floundering in the water, all you do is throw him a piece of candy called a “life-saver.” 

It is time to use the “D” word. Participation in a game played with a stacked deck is not democracy. Polite discourses insuring people that they have a say, and can influence their own destiny, are a con because spoken in an anti-democratic context. 

The Costa-Hawkins Act is a state government imposition on cities. It preempts those cities’ ability to make democratic decisions about what happens to people within their boundaries. As a state law, it destroys a city’s ability to confront and alleviate a process that has already victimized hundreds and promises to victimize thousands. That is the anti-democratic essence of the Costa-Hawkins Act. And its existence means that the Plan Bay Area, which was also promulgated by the state and which is now the political source for the emergence of the housing crisis itself, is also an anti-democratic measure. Together and separately, this law and this plan suppress and destroy the democratic rights of people to govern their own lives, their own rights, and to house themselves as a community. They violate the internationally recognized principle that “housing is a right.” 

The people who organize these workshops work for the city. The city refuses to initiate a general movement throughout the state to repeal this act so that it can fulfill its democratic responsibility to its own residents, its own constituents. Thus it renders dishonest the language that its organizers must use to call on people to participate in workshops. 

As long as Costa-Hawkins exists, any representation or expression of the vision or plan or desires or priorities of low or moderate income communities caught in the throes of a housing crisis is simply empty rhetoric. One does not have to be a prophet to see the gloom at the end of that tunnel. 

Community priorities will not be given priority. Community needs will continue to be ignored. The planning of the Adeline Corridor will be in the hands of the city and its developers, and there is nothing the community is going to be able to do to have their needs expressed in it – except to be given thanks for their "vision."