Public Comment

" And for a cool $2,247/month, you can live at 77 Bluxome inside this 240-square-foot residence."

Spend your entire paycheck on this 240-foot SoMa apartment: The micro apartment trend shows no signs of shrinking—especially in South of Market.

--Micro Week article by Brock Keeling ,Sep 21, 2016


So much for the fallacy that micro-units create affordability or end homelessness.

The Berkeley City Council should refuse to be party to developer Patrick Kennedy's effort to paint his "stacked coffins" micro-units housing, rejected by San Francisco, as a solution to homelessness. This is a cynical effort to continue to capitalize on, rather than honestly addressing, the decades-old need for low-income, affordable housing much of which was destroyed by Patrick Kennedy and a handful of other developers over the thirty years of the Bates majority. 

It is unfair to repeatedly raid tent groups while letting others reap the lucrative benefits of unpermitted Airb&b rooms and backyard rentals which contribute to the housing shortage and are a much more immediate resource for emergency housing. Dipping into public funds to create sweet deals for the developers who set this table, the table that starves the poor of housing but feeds the rich who substitute micro-housing without embarrassment is an outrage and a recipe for further eroding vulnerable tenant protections. 

There is no dignity, no community, in Kennedy's self-serving proposal, which should at least be sent through the relevant commissions before being rushed toward the council agenda, especially considering the obvious conflicts of interest in Councilmember Linda Maio's case. Linda Maio's ceramics business sits in the commercial space which was once advertised as an "arts" amenity. 

Please stand up for human rights, tenant rights, and against this further desecration of sensible approaches to affordable housing. For real solutions, work with the nonprofits who have rehabilitated dilapidated housing and helped nurture low-income equity co-ops, such as Resources for Community Development. Our city's only communication with Patrick Kennedy should be to ask him to give us a tour of the "art spaces" he touted would be community amenities in his buildings, most of which are gone, so that our representatives remember what his promises are worth.