Editorials

Not long ago the Berkeley City Council held a special meeting at the behest of Association of Bay Area Governments President (oh, and also Berkeley Mayor) Jesse Arreguin. He called the meeting to reify the dubious proposition that the City of Berkeley could make amends to the descendants of enslaved Africans by giving investors the right to put ten dwelling units on one city lot where previously only one had been allowed.

Did you find that hard to follow? If you happened to tune in via Zoom, you might have wondered what all the excitement among the one-minute public commenters was about.

You’re not the only one to be confused, especially if you figured out while listening on Zoom that the preponderance of the fans calling to support the original proposal (sponsored by Arreguin and Lori Droste) seemed to be young (well, 30-something) White males.  

Though you couldn’t see the speakers (and no, I don’t know why Berkeley chooses to hide the faces of its online Public Commenters) it was not hard to imagine that they were garbed in spandex bike shorts. Zoom lets viewers see the list of participants, but the COB meeting protocol doesn’t support that feature, even though people are allowed to sign in under pseudonyms, which most of the supporters of the proposal chose to do.  

Opponents, identifying themselves as Berkeley residents, almost all used their real names, first and last. And they were men and women of all ages, genders and ethnicities, judging by their voices.  

What was decided at the meeting? Well, that’s really hard to say. Arreguin made it abundantly clear that he had the votes in his pocket for whatever he wanted, and versions of the proposal that he sponsored floated in the ether right up until the 6 pm starting time. The whole thing came across as a shell game, and the pea under the walnut shells was that sponsors wanted to make sure that Berkeley continues to be branded as the city that defeated racism by eliminating single family zoning, a concept introduced conceptually at an earlier meeting. (That’s “branded” in the Coca-Cola sense, not the cattle one, though both might apply here.)  

In the end, Arreguin’s latest version passed. Whatever it was.  

Councilmembers Hahn, Bartlett and Harrison (absent for a family Passover gathering) offered a competing resolution that mandated studying the problems before settling on a solution. What an old-fashioned idea! Mysteriously, their resolution also passed.  

One more time: What exactly is the problem we’re solving? Well, among other things, ABAG has told the City of Berkeley that it must come up with 9,000 new housing units by 2023. Actually, it’s a lot more complicated than that, but if you really need to know, take a look at this. Do you think this will mean enough affordable housing will be produced? As Mr. Bush used to say, that's voodoo economics.  

In order to prove its bona fides, cities are asked to add a “housing element” to their general plans, in Berkeley’s case to promise that 9,000 additional residences will appear on schedule—or at least their enabling paperwork. The penalty? If we don’t achieve this mandate, our power over local land use will be taken by the state of California.  

Yes, you’re right, that’s magical thinking, so let’s skip over the details at the moment. The fact that the two competing resolutions both passed tells the tale—neither one makes any actual difference in the real world.  

Arreguin and cohorts are wont to call the requested number of added dwellings “state law”, but it’s not nearly that simple. The number is called by the cognoscenti our RHNA (‘reena”) number. From the above-referenced web site:  

“The Draft Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) Methodology and Final RHNA Subregional Shares were approved by the ABAG Executive Board on January 21, 2021, meeting a major milestone in the multi-year RHNA process.”  

So, a “major milestone” is not a law. Many people believe that the draft RHNA numbers are, to use a term of art, nutty. Many cities and towns have begun to work their way through an insanely tortuous appeal process to challenge their RHNA number. But not Berkeley. Why, you might wonder. Perhaps it would embarrass our very own ABAG president?  

And, full circle, why again is Berkeley now up-zoning madly? To make amends for the racist misdeeds of the 1920s?  

Just exactly what does that do for African Americans a century later? Or, for that matter, for all the White Boys who have drunk the YIMBY Kool-ade?  

Listening to the young men at that meeting made me sad at first. They really would like to live in Berkeley I think, and they truly believe that ending single family zoning will make that possible. It’s a complicated topic, but the simple answer is that capitalism is not their friend.  

There are buckets of international capital sloshing around the U.S.A. right now. Investors are scooping up all kinds of little homes in cities and suburbs with all-cash offers—even, for example, in Akron, Ohio. Upzoning increases the value of the land under the houses.  

A simple Berkeley calculation: Buy a house from an elderly widow lady in SW Berkeley for a million, and tear it down. Build, let’s say, four townhouses on it.  

How much do you think each will sell for? At least that same million each, right? Do the math. Not a windfall for these YIMBYs, most of whom are sons of privilege and developer wannabes who don’t realize that the odds are stacked against them.  

And it’s highly unlikely that Black families will be able to afford to buy them either. Also, and this is seldom acknowledged, people of color want the same old American dream house that whites have wanted until now. In California’s inland empire more than half of the homeowners are Latinx, and they’re not pushing to have their single family homes upzoned.  

I started writing this on the 18^th, Patriot’s Day in Massachusetts, commemorating the famous ride of Paul Revere  

If my horse were not in the shop I might ride around shouting “the moneybags are coming”. Or perhaps ““beware the one percent”.  

But I won’t be shouting “The British Are Coming”, because the financialization of housing, the real problem, is affecting Britain the same way these days. The immense escalation of real estate prices, in Berkeley and all over the world, is a disaster, but don’t think doing away with single family zones will fix it.  

As the Wizard of Oz once said, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” He’s not here to find you a place to live.  

The meeting I watched was billed as the authorization of an 18-month process. In Berkeley, we're off to see the wizard.