Editorials
Twitterati Mob Berkeley's Historic Preservation Commission
If you’re not a Twitter addict, it’s possible that all you know about the medium is news reports about the emanations from the person Willie Brown now calls “DT”. I like Willie’s choice of names—DT evokes the late night tremors that issue daily from whatever vulgar luxury resort the Trump is currently inhabiting. But if you want another example closer to home of what mischief can be done with Twitter, you might have learned something from the Twitter storm which preceded last Thursday’s meeting of Berkeley’s Landmark Preservation Commission.
First, full disclosure: I’ve twice been a member of this body, and I confess to bias in favor of its mission. The first time, I was appointed by progressive icon Maudelle Shirek, for whom Berkeley’s Old City Hall is named. Maudelle wanted to make sure that a church-owned brown shingle apartment building which once hosted meetings which eventually became the disability rights movement was not demolished. After I joined the commission, the building eventually became a City of Berkeley landmark, which didn’t guarantee its preservation, but did require the church elders to stop and think before tearing it down, and they ended up saving it.
I was on the LPC close to 8 years that time, ultimately resigning early in this millenium to try to revive the Daily Planet. About three years ago I was re-appointed by Mayor Jesse Arreguin.
He fired me unceremoniously after three years via email. This may have been in part because of my open defense of another City of Berkeley landmark, People’s Park, which the mayor had openly offered to sacrifice to UC Berkeley’s expansionist enthusiasms. Or maybe not, but anyway I was tired of the job, so it was fine.
But last week a couple of outraged citizens forwarded links to a Twitter thread which, as near as my limited Twitter skills could decipher, had been started by an ambitious Harvard history grad student. He posted a copy of a letter from the LPC’s online file that lefty politico and UCB professor Robert Reich and his wife had written to support the designation as a historic structure of an 1889 brown shingled house on the North Berkeley block where they own their home. This nomination, supported by a good number of letters from both neighbors and others, was the subject of a hearing before the LPC last Thursday.
Professor Reich’s house is in a transitional neighborhood near Berkeley’s Live Oak park zoned R2A, multi-units allowed. It's a comfortable mix of old houses and 20th century apartment buildings , ethnically diverse if you judge by the people you see on the street. The house in question is indeed old, and it currently shows its age. It was originally built for the family of William Payson, a founder of the First Unitarian Church of Berkeley.
Sometime in the 20th century it was legally divided into three or four units, depending on how you count, but most recently it was owned and occupied by a multi-generational family of working class origin. They were not wealthy people, so maintenance was delayed. It’s on a big lot, thick with (legally protected) coastal live oaks and other mature trees. To some it might look a bit neglected, or even seedy, like many Berkeley houses within walking distance of campus.
The would-be developer who showed up to argue against designating this house called it squalid. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it?
The developer said he has a nascent proposal to tear it down, replacing it with ten units, nine at the Bay Area’s still-high market rate and one at some as yet unspecified level of affordability.
The most interesting part of Thursday’s spectacle was how the Twitter + Zoom equation has redefined public process in Berkeley.
I read through the Twitter thread before joining the Zoomed meeting. I’d love to show it to you, but it seems to have been deleted. Let me know if you can find it.
The author of the ur-Twitter, I figured out, is the son of an academic and a museum executive. His family of origin lives in Arlington, a Virginia suburb of DC where few homes would be called squalid, and he himself now lives in Cambridge.
He’s a white male. He’s ultra-Ivy: both a Yale graduate and a Harvard history Ph.D. student. He and his wife (she went to Brown) met when they were interns on Teddy Kennedy’s staff, the kind of opportunity open to the privileged young.
How do I know all this personal stuff? I deduced it from a write-up of his wedding in the society— now“LOVE”— section of the New York Times, which mysteriously surfaced, not just once but in multiple copies, in this Twitter thread. No idea why or how it got there. That’s Twitter for you, I guess.
And why does it matter? Because the Twitter thread my correspondents sent me featured personal attacks on Robert Reich as a hypocrite, a faux-prog, for speaking up about what’s happening on his own block. If you launch personal attacks, expect personal replies.
Tweeters implied that Robert Reich was personally responsible for the exclusionary practices that marred California before our fair housing law was passed in the 1950s. Not only that, they suggested, he was supporting the designation of the Payson home because he didn’t want poor neighbors.
That makes him a NIMBY, right?.
Not in My Backyard (NIMBY) is the slogan coined by the mothers who exposed the chemical pollution of Love Canal. As you surely know by now, the semi-literate greedy and privileged young have branded themselves with the non-acronymic YIMBY, which means, despite the deceptive M, Yes in Your Back Yard. So when the self-righteous grad student issued a call to arms, his fellow YIMBYs jumped on the Twitter bandwagon with their own attacks.
This time, they used the front name Berkeley Neighbors for Housing and Climate Action, with a web page that had no one’s actual name associated with it. Same old same old YIMBYs as usual. And one of them posted the link to the Zoomed LPC meeting.
For pandemic era Zoomed public meetings in Berkeley, the rule is that anyone anywhere can log in, and by clicking a raised-hand icon be added to the queue to eventually speak, usually for just one minute. Speakers are not required to be Berkeley residents, or even ever to have visited Berkeley. This has resulted in infinitely long comment periods with nothing of any complexity articulated because of the time limits.
Yimby-ism has acquired an almost messianic following, characterized by a quasi-religious belief that if enough housing is built they might eventually score homes like the ones their privileged parents provided for them. The claim is that the only way to provide badly needed housing for very low income people is as a required ad-on to market-rate projects. In this case, there’s talk of nine expensive units and one “affordable” one, but since the developer’s permit application is not complete we can’t be sure what’s planned for this site or whether it will ever materialize.
Alerted by Twitter, last Thursday maybe a hundred hopeful young men plus a few women called in from all over the country to say that they’ve always wanted to live in Berkeley, if we’d only tear down those squalid old brown shingle houses and build them some nice new condos. Many also parroted some version of the old refrain "I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like."
Since commenters’ faces were not visible because of technical limitations and real names were not required, there’s no way to know if any of the speakers were under-represented very low-income people of color, but I doubt it. Just one speaker identified himself as Black, and he already lives in the neighborhood.
Nobody fact-checked this steady stream of opinion and invective. Several speakers, needless to say, went after Professor Reich personally.
I spotted many errors of fact offered as argument. Here’s just one sample: the house was charged by several speakers with being part of the Northbrae neighborhood, which was indeed developed by an admitted racist.
It’s not—it was built well before Northbrae in a different place.
I watched the whole sorry exercise, and my conclusion is that it was an object lesson in the power of predatory capitalism. On his YouTube channel, Professor Reich, an experienced politician and no dummy, dissected the phony argument that demolishing old houses like this guarantees low-cost housing on his blog. Watch this:
I hope he’ll reprise this analysis when the next old house is threatened.
I did manage to copy one quote from the Payson House Twitter thread before it was deleted. This one is from an Older White Guy, another Berkeley academic, kind of a lefty, someone I know and generally admire. I’ll charitably conceal his name here hoping he’ll come to his senses and be embarrassed by this:
“Is there any reason why I should not denounce this as a grotesque abuse of landmarking? As something that will make it much harder down the road to preserve real landmarks, after the dam breaks and the NIMBYs go down?”
Hey Prof! Here’s your reason:
Historic preservation should not be only about landmarks. There’s no such thing as a “real” landmark.
In most towns ordinances like the one which governs Berkeley’s LPC are called historic preservation ordinances—perhaps we should change the name of ours. It’s now considered important by egalitarian people to preserve places and buildings where ordinary people lived and worked, not just grandiose “landmark” monuments to lifestyles of the rich and famous. Architectural historians call this vernacular architecture, and in most countries thoughtful citizens now take pains to preserve it in situ.
History used to be all about famous men, but now it’s also about regular women and men and how they lived their ordinary lives. If you read up on Berkeley history, you’ll discover that this city and its physical and cultural fabric were woven of lots of kinds of lives: the Ohlone whose shell mound is located near what’s now the Fourth Street mini-mall, the Irish workman buried in a collapse while Old City Hall was being built, the Japanese-American family who ran a laundry in an inconspicuous building on Shattuck, and sincere high-minded Unitarian intellectuals like the Paysons who built Berkeley’s brown shingle houses like this one with respect for nature and fought for social justice. We need to remember all of them.
In this case a majority of LPC commissioners didn't agree, however, since they did not decide to designate the Payson House, either as a landmark or as a structure of merit. I don't know if the flood of comments from the Twitterati influenced them. The decision, or lack of one, can be appealed to the Berkeley City Council.
P.S. I’ve left out the Twitter accuser’s name because what he obviously wants is publicity, and I’d rather not gratify him. But to get his measure, here are some of his posts on a different thread where the topic is the Point Reyes National Seashore and environs:
“A bunch of property owners got together and decided that their definition of environmental protection was wilderness and dairy farms five miles from a major city and everyone for the most part bought it.
“Marin residents would love you to believe they made a noble environmental decision on behalf of the entire region, but instead they simply redirected the sprawl to Antioch and Vallejo.
“This is where I would suggest an intersectional approach that considers open space, exclusion, and inequality as interrelated, especially insofar as ‘nature’ is not a pure public good but a thing that can be used to enrich some and immiserate others.”
I especially love the last graf, don’t you? Lots of pricey Latinate words. Translation: We oughta build more market-rate high-rise condos in Inverness, okay?
And if you’d like to know who he’s in bed with, take a look at this supportive blog post:
