Editorials
Why the Droste Resolution is Bad History, Bad Planning and Bad for Berkeley
So, last week we introduced the concept of the Pandemic Putsch, the quick and dirty drive by real estate speculators and their elected enablers to take the power to regulate land use away from local governments. We focused on the Berkeley version, helmed by District 8 Councilperson Lori Droste, aided and abetted by Mayor Jesse Arreguin and endorsed by a majority of the City Council with a resolution that was green-washed, black-washed and hogwashed with more than a spoonful of saccharin to make it go down.
The good councilpersons have been fooled by the, shall we say, unique version of Berkeley’s Black history promulgated by Droste and her YIMBY allies. Much of what she purports to know about the topic happened before she was born, certainly before she moved to Berkeley from her hometown of Centerville, Ohio (pop. ~23,000), so let’s review the facts.
She claims, for example, that Berkeley is the birthplace of single family residential zoning, and further, that the primary purpose of SFR zoning in Berkeley was to prevent African Americans from buying houses in Berkeley. In fact, Berkeley was indeed one of the earliest places to zone for single family homes, but the main purpose of the early 20th century legal device of residential zoning was to separate homes of all kinds from noxious industrial uses.
My old friend Marc Weiss explains all this in his seminal book The Rise of the Community Builders, a book councilmembers should be required to read before opining on zoning law.
Key quote: “Indeed, some of the more sophisticated zoning laws, such as Berkeley’s, actually created exclusive industrial use districts to protect factory owners from complaints and lawsuits by low-income residential neighbors.”
Residential zoning has never been only“single family”. Residential zoning has accommodated many kinds of buildings and living groups with a variety of classifications such as the multi-unit R2 zone. Already in Berkeley R1 zones now allow up to 3 units in the right circumstances.
In Berkeley, like many college towns, many of the so-called “single family” houses near campus became all sorts of group homes—rooming houses, shared rentals, communes, co-ops and more. Many Berkeley widows rented spare rooms to a student or two. Home-based occupations like music lessons and psychotherapy have always taken place in Berkeley’s “single family residences” with or without the law’s explicit blessing.
Residential zoning of all kinds has certainly had racist side effects in expensive areas, but the principal racist tricks in the first half of the 20th century were restrictive covenants on deeds, enforced by the real estate industry. These were employed to exclude those of non-European descent and even Jews from buying in the fancier districts, accompanied by claims of protecting property values. Chinese people were a particular target of exclusion in the early years as would-be home buyers, though not as servants.
These practices were legal until 1963, when the Bay Area’s first African-American Assemblymember, Berkeley’s William Byron Rumford (elected in 1948) succeeded in getting the Rumford Fair Housing Act to become state law.
Enacted at the state level despite opposition from the California Real Estate Association, the Apartment House Owners Association, and the Chamber of Commerce, the Rumford Act banned racial discrimination in housing transactions. Those industry groups quickly succeeded in getting Proposition 14, which was intended to overturn the Rumford Act, passed as a ballot initiative in 1964. But Prop.14 was subsequently overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court, upholding the Rumford Act.
Anyone who thinks that the history of race relations in Berkeley began and ended with the zoning code of a hundred years ago should bone up on Berkeley’s later history, especially William Byron Rumford’s role. Among other things, Rumford took part in Berkeley’s efforts to secure the release of our Japanese-American citizens who were interned during World War II, while also working to secure housing for the southern Blacks who migrated here during the war to work in defense plants. My daughters heard stories of that period of Berkeley history from an African-American teacher at Berkeley High whose family lived in the flatlands home of an interned family during the war and gave it back to them when they returned.
A statue of William Rumford has recently been erected on Sacramento Blvd., across from the site of the pharmacy he owned there for many years after his service in the Legislature.
It’s true that real estate interests and developers persisted in their illegal exclusionary practices well into the 1970s despite the law. Ying Lee, future Berkeley Councilmember , who is Chinese-American, told me that in the ‘60s she and her math professor husband, John Kelly, were prevented by real estate chicanery from buying a house on the same Elmwood block where both Councilmember Droste’s family and mine now own homes, even though it was contrary to the Rumford Act.
There were in this period, to be sure, some heroic individuals in real estate who actively tried to promote housing equity—Arlene Slaughter notable among them. Eventually their efforts to end discrimination largely succeeded. For decades distinguished Black citizens of means have made their homes in the Elmwood: Judge Thelton Henderson, Judge Henry Ramsey and many more. Neighbors on our block have included both African- and Asian- Americans in all the close to 50 years we’ve been here.
But at the same time the percentage of Black residents of Berkeley has shrunk from about 30-35% to about 5-10%. Why should that be?
CM Droste’s draft legislation, now in its third revision, is based on undocumented claims that upzoning areas now zoned for “single family residential” to allow four or more units on each lot will be the solution to what she defines as Berkeley’s “housing crisis”. But Berkeley has already has met 124% of a state-mandated quota for building market rate housing, so we don’t need more of that.
Berkeley has just gotten too expensive. What we have is not just a "housing" crisis, we have an affordable housing crisis, and more accurately a low-cost housing crisis.
The real problem is that too many people who work in Berkeley are paid too little to live here. What makes this look like a racial crisis is that underpaid workers are disproportionately black and brown, just as they’ve always been. Similar housing situations now exist in many American cities, not just Berkeley, because of the financialization of residential properties, as vulture capitalists snap up distressed homes, bundle and market them to rich investors, often international.
We also have a university addicted to impossible expansion of enrollment with scant consideration of where all these students and their attendant service workers will live.
Now smaller houses in south and west Berkeley, the ones currently or formerly occupied by people of color, are the ones with developers’ targets painted on them. It won’t be the houses in the hills which will be torn down, of course--much of Berkeley’s prohibitively expensive housing stock is in hill areas with steep, narrow, winding streets, where fire risk will preclude adding more buildings.
What the quick and dirty members of the development industry (yes, the same kinds of folks who tried to sink the Rumford Act all those years ago) count on is acquiring the remaining “single family “ homes in Berkeley’s flatlands, often these days lower-priced rentals to multi-generational families of color, demolishing the existing house to build four or more small units, and most likely selling them as pricey condos to tech commuters or renting to groups of students.
And meanwhile the tenant family must move to Vallejo, or Antioch, or even Tracy and drive for hours to work in Berkeley.
It’s not just people of color who are suffering from this distorted housing market—even working white families are getting priced out. Home prices go up, and wages don’t.
The problem is not zoning, it’s income disparity. The adjacent graph tells it all.
Meanwhile, the chattering classes have swallowed Wiener and Droste’s disinformation hook, line and sinker. They love what they perceive as a man-bites-dog story: "Progs finally side with developers! Who knew?"
(For a particularly goofy example, see:
But converting single family homes in neighborhoods created by redlining to investment opportunities for the global ultra-rich is not reparation for decades of discriminatory real estate practices. It’s dishonest to claim that it is, but that doesn’t stop data-free neo-liberal pundits posing as progressives from doing so.
What’s needed, among other things, is real reparations, a genuine attempt at financial redress for the generations descended from enslaved people who have long been deprived of the opportunity to build family wealth by a discriminatory marketplace. And also, we need a lot more low-rent housing for those at the bottom of the income scale--and absolutely no more market-rate (i.e. very expensive) housing for the privileged. Affordable workforce housing could be co-ops, government subsidized social housing, conversions of larger building—there are lots of viable options if excess profits are off the table.
One more point: the kind of spot re-zoning that the Droste resolution backs is dreadful planning, no matter what the objective. It could well be time to take an overall look at zoning for use, now that our work-at-home experiment has been in place for a year/ Mandating instant over-the-counter permits administered by staff without neighborhood input is no way to make correct decisions.
This discussion was supposed to be Pandemonium Putsch 2.0, exploring how San Francisco’s State Senator Scott Wiener and associates, including Senator Nancy Skinner, have been (dare I say it) conspiring at the state level to end local control of land use in order to enrich the development industry. But this is at best Putsch 1.5—the state chapter will have to wait.
Meanwhile,former Berkeley Planning Commission Chair Zelda Bronstein and Tim Redmond at 48hills.org have been doing a great job of covering the Bay Area regional story, and livablecalifornia.org , a statewide advocacy organization, has an excellent website with current news from Sacto, including factsheets on the latest proposed revisions of Wiener and Skinner's ongoing assaults on local control.
