Editorials
Mourning and moving forward
Today was the day I’d hoped to add my own words to the many which have been written and spoken regarding the tragic loss of indefatigable civic activist and critic Elisa Cooper. But really, what more is there to say? Elisa set an example simply by showing up, no matter how she felt, when her intelligent voice was needed to analyse and explain what was going on that shouldn’t be, and what should be happening instead. Her letter to the city council reprinted here, forwarded by Moni Law, is a textbook example of how she formed an opinion about what was happening, supported it by pertinent examples, and then communicated it to decisionmakers in the hope that they’d pay attention. Often, though sadly not always, they did. And this was just one of many such letters and statements she made when she was needed.
In the close to half-century I’ve been back in Berkeley, where I first lived as an undergraduate in 1959, I’ve seen a few heros and heroines who spoke for the public interest pass through and pass on, and I miss them all. I started to make a list, and then realized I could fill up this whole space with the pantheon of those who’ve worked to keep Berkeley Berkeley who have now left us. I’ve written all too many of these tributes. Looking back, I realize that they’ve all ended on essentially the same note, the famous quote from Joe Hill’s last telegram to a friend:
“Don’t mourn, organize!”
So I guess that’s what we should be doing. Avanti populo!
One of Elisa’s major causes in her last years was protecting her neighborhood from being taken over by greedy speculators. She lived in South Berkeley, near the Ashby BART station and what's lately been called the Adeline corridor.
Greedy—we used to call them Yuppies, but now they call themselves YIMBYs—covet South and West Berkeley, once the segregated domain of the many Japanese Americans who were sent to concentration camps during World War II. They were replaced by the African Americans who migrated here to support the war effort and are now struggling to hang on. The modest houses here, often homes to multi-generational families with room for backyard gardens, are now being foreclosed on and snatched up for demolition by speculative foreign flight capital to be replaced by "luxury" apartment blocks to be rented at the Bay Area's exorbitantly un-affordable what-the-market-will-bear rates.
Shills for developers often claim that such projects will add to the supply of affordable housing. But UC Berkeley researchers and others have shown that if trickle-down ever happens it takes at least 50 years, at least a generation. By 2067 time most of South and West Berkeley’s non-White residents will be long gone, not to mention anyone else who must live on extremely low income as Elisa did with her disabilities.
It’s ironic that these pleasant neighborhoods, which were once reserved for non-Whites by segregation both legal and contractual, are now being expropriated by better-off buyers from privileged backgrounds. That’s what we call gentrification, a peculiar term related to the French “gentile”, meaning nice. The entitled offspring of the almost all White middle-class seem to believe that when they bid up housing prices and move in, the neighborhood is somehow made “nicer” with the addition of laptop cafes and expensive grocery stores.
After a recent civic meeting where a current resident lamented the loss of backyard sun on her vegetable garden which a tall apartment next door would cause, YIMBY list-servs were full of derogatory references to”zucchini”, with the clear implication that it’s much “nicer” to buy pricey organic produce at Whole Foods than to grow it in your own garden.
And by the way, YIMBY is supposed to stand for “Yes in My Back Yard”, but in fact it’s actually Yes in Back Yard. A couple of the most prominent upper middle class proponents of market-rate apartment blocks that I happen to know live near North Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto and in Piedmont, in very comfortable single family houses with lovely gardens, estimated by Zillow to be worth a cool couple of millions.
They’re eager to develop Berkeley’s Adeline Corridor, aren’t they, but how about building in their very own backyards? Not bloody likely.
By the way, Elisa often emphasized that she wasn’t opposed to all development, she just supported appropriate development, to provide housing for people who really needed it, in the right place in the right way. The Berkeley City Council took a baby step in the right direction on Tuesday by upping the amount developers needed to pay instead of (in-lieu of) including affordable apartments in new buildings, but that won’t solve the problem.
Among other things, now that the Trumpers are in the saddle, it looks like the practice of taking the in-lieu payments and leveraging them with federal funds derived from tax credits to build all-low-income developments isn’t going to work any more because taxes on the rich are going away. If you’re interested in this and want to read a long wonky analysis of why the much-touted Berkeley Way project, in partnership with Bridge Housing, may be doomed to fail, or at least to exhaust any possible foreseeable pot of affordable building capital, read Housing Advisory Commissioner Thomas Lord’s report on the topic, which will be discussed at the Thursday HAC Meeting at the South Berkeley Senior Center, 2939 Ellis St., at 7 p.m.
You can find the packet by clicking here:
Then be sure to scroll all the way down to Attachment 6 on page 22. A hard slog with lots of math, but well worth it if you care, and sobering. Here’s where we really miss Elisa, who would have understood it and explained it to us.
Organizing against the theft of Berkeley’s already affordable neighborhoods by for-profit corporate interests is one way to memorialize Elisa Cooper, but there are many more things going wrong: Take your pick.
What else can you organize? There are all too many choices.
Yesterday’s news, for example, brought another chapter in the ongoing saga of the Trump crowd’s war against the tired and the poor. If you want to get an idea of what refugees are up against, you might want to see Berkeley Chamber Opera's upcoming production of The Consul, advertised to the right.
It’s especially outrageous that what’s left of the State Department thinks sons-in-law and fiancés are core relatives for visa purposes, but we grandmas (and aunts) are not.
How about Grandmothers and Aunts Against the Ban? Maybe a Knit-In, for those of us too creaky to Sit In? Sounds funny, but of course it’s not…too many outrages, too little time.
