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Daily Planet Staff 

As UC Berkeley grows in number of students and research facilities, and as it replaces its seismically unsafe buildings, it reaches out and up into the Berkeley community. There’s a dearth of housing for students and city streets are jammed with cars, many of them heading to the university. These are among the causes of tensions between the city and the university. 

Chancellor Robert Berdahl, in the second of a two-part interview (the first part appeared in the Weekend edition of the Daily Planet), addresses some of these questions and points to ways to ease tensions. 

Q: What can be done to ease the tensions with the city?  

A: I’ve been disappointed that city hasn’t carried through with the Memorandum of Understanding that we created between the university and the city to create a joint planning board. I think that those kinds of things would help in the easing of whatever tensions there might be. 

We have worked, we have changed many of our plans, in response to criticisms. We have reduced the height of that building, on the Oxford site, in accordance with some of the criticism. We have been responsive to the criticism. 

There have been a number of changes to the Southside Plan, in response to conversations that have been held with the city. It isn’t as if we turn a deaf ear to these criticisms. It is that we need to move forward. We cannot simply be stymied in the effort to make changes that are imperative for the continued effective operation and safe operation of this campus. 

Q: The students desperately need housing. What has the university done to provide it? 

A: We started planning housing shortly after my arrival here. There had been a long hiatus from development of that long-range development plan and the construction of Foothill (university dorms at Galey Road and Hearst Avenue), which was the last residence hall to be constructed. And as you may recall, Foothill was to be considerably larger than, in fact, it turned out to be. It couldn’t be built larger because of the presence of the Hayward Fault. The fault made it unsafe to build. 

When I arrived in 1997, and we faced a housing shortfall, in the fall of 1998, we undertook a lot of short-term measures to address that shortfall. And we launched an immediate plan for the new housing that will be on the Southside. And we have that in the design stages now. 

Like all such activities, there’s a domino effect, before one can do certain kinds of things. For example, the first housing will be built on some of the parking lots, on two different sites, and then the next phase of housing will be to replace the current dining facilities, between the units on the Southside, with a new dining facility that will serve all of those units. Then we will build housing, low-level infill housing, between the housing sites, among the units.  

In order to do that, though, we have to complete the planning for the dining facility, and the Underhill site adjacent to it. And so, we’re working very hard. We’re talking with private developers to develop more housing in the city of Oakland, and I have had several meetings with regard to a variety of sites that are close to BART stations, so that students could take public transportation to the campus. 

I don’t want to build undergraduate housing that far away, possibly because we think that would pull us apart. And, as you know, there are also some proposals of private developers to build private residence halls, on sites on the south side of campus. I don’t know if that will develop or materialize, but that’s a solution that’s a common on many campuses. It’s a common solution at the University of Texas. That provides 900 more units, which is nearly a 20 percent increase. 

Q: The university has done a lot in terms of its transportation - there are new bike paths, the class pass, the shuttles, still Berkeley streets become more and more clogged with traffic coming and going from campus. What is the university doing to improve the situation? 

A: We have done quite a bit to reduce it. As you know, we have been working with public transportation, with the bus system to give bus passes to the students, so that the students, for a minimal fee, can ride the buses.  

We have certainly tried, through our own shuttle system, to reduce car trips and to provide safe transport for students, particularly at night. If they’re studying late on the campus, they can take late-night shuttles home so that they don’t feel they have to drive, in order to avoid walking through unsafe neighborhoods on the south side of campus. 

There has been a lot of effort to encourage public transportation. There is the conviction, among some, that I don’t happen to share, that if you build more parking, you encourage more use of private cars. I would suggest that an awful lot of the congestion is the absence of people being able to find places to park, when they have no alternative than to drive cars. And the congestion therefore, could be mitigated a bit, if we had more parking places. 

Q: You mean people driving around? 

A: Yes. I mean, if you can’t find a parking place, you’re on the street driving. And so the notion that, somehow, parking itself increases the use of the automobile is questionable. I think that most studies would show that the absence of parking is a net cost, because of gas consumed, pollution, and all the rest. 

On the other hand, we are not planning on any expansion of the traditional parking available to the campus. We’re just planning to try to restore parking that has been lost. 

We lost about 1,000 spaces, over the past decade. Most of them, was due to the loss of Underhill, when that parking structure had to be taken down because of the seismic condition. We really have to restore the parking that is missing. 

We are a very large employer and I would venture to say we probably have a much higher percentage of the people who come to this location taking either public transportation or shared automobiles or walking, or taking bikes, than any other site in the city of Berkeley. And so I think that we’ve done a lot to encourage it, and I don’t think people who drive to campus, drive to campus because they want to. 

In many cases I know of, I’ve talked to faculty who used to take buses and public transportation, who no longer can because it is not available. The time from home to work has increased or doubled, because of curtailment of public transportation. If the East Bay really got very much engaged in the use of public transportation or expansion of transportation, that would help, too. 

Q: Does the university have a lobbyist who advocates for public transportation? 

A: We work closely with AC Transit. That’s how we got the class pass. In the (1990) Long-range Development Plan, there was talk of satellite parking, but that never really happened. 

In the first place, parking is not a free good. Any parking place is expensive. Just the surface parking place, in terms of site preparation, costs about $20,000 per space. And unless one can provide satellite parking that is attractive in terms of its access, either through bus service or shuttle bus, it really doesn’t work. 

We do have some satellite parking. We have it across from the Lawrence Museum and we have bus service that runs to the Lawrence Hall of Science. And so there is parking in more remote sites. I’m encouraging the use of more sites up behind Foothill, where we have a large parking lot and then running a shuttle service down to the campus. 

We’re looking at some satellite sites, but it has to be closely coordinated with timing. People are not going to park in a remote site if it is unsafe, if they have to stand there waiting for a long period of time, particularly in the evening. 

Q: In the couple of minutes we have remaining, I’m wondering if there’s anything else that you wanted to say about the city-university tensions, and maybe some things that you’d like to see the city do to, on its part, to help reduce them. 

A: Sometimes if one looks at the history of the University of California, and the city of Berkeley, you discover, as I have, from looking at old documents, that there have been at times, tensions between the city and the university. I wouldn’t exaggerate those tensions at any given moment. I think that they are a product of many things. And so I don’t think they should be exaggerated. I think the city, for its part, should really recognize the problems that we have as a university in our need to maintain the quality of this institution. This city is what it is, because of the university. Berkeley has become an attractive place to live because of the university and everybody recognizes that. 

In order to be that university, we cannot stand still. We cannot live in the past. We have to look toward the future and do those things that are really necessary, to make sure that we have quality and safe facilities. Think for a moment of what this university brings to the economy of Berkeley, a $1.3 billion a year budget. Most of that money is spent here. 

If we have an earthquake on the Hayward Fault, that renders 27 percent of our campus incapable of use, you will see faculty leave, you will see students leave, you will see this university and this community go into a real serious depression. It is in the interest of the university and the community to make certain that we are able to make this a safe place and a place that will withstand any kind of disaster. I think that when you look at Northridge, when you look at Loma Prieta, when you look at what happened in Taiwan, where I was just a month or so after the earthquake, you begin to really recognize that this is serious business. We’ve got to take it seriously and we’re going to.