Negeene and Elana sat down with Councilmember Kate Harrison (District 4) to get a better understanding of the complex housing situation in our city. This is part one of a two part series.

Q1: How was the determination made that Berkeley must produce 9,000 more housing units, 60% at market rate and 40% below market rate by 2031?

A1: Cities do not have exclusive control over housing policy.

State Housing and Community Development (HCD) sets how many new units the Bay Area should develop. HCD is saying that 441,000 new housing units need to be permitted in the region in eight years. The Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) is charged with allocating those between cities in what’s known as the Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA).

The real driver is HCD’s questionable 2030 population assumptions — the Bay Area will grow from 7.2 to 9.2 million people in nine years. By 2031, San Francisco is expected to grow from 883,000 to 1.45 million and Berkeley from 120,000 to 141,000. Is that feasible or even desirable? I don’t think so. -more-

Item 23 on the Berkeley council’s May 11 agenda is a request from Councilmember Kate Harrison that the council endorse Roadmap Home 2030 and send state legislators a letter urging them to adopt the recommendations of the plan.

For reasons detailed below, Harrison should pull the item, wait until the community has vetted Roadmap Home 2030 in its entirety, and then decide whether she still wants to seek the council’s endorsement of the project. -more-

India is seething with an anger and utter despair. Family relatives are watching helplessly as their love ones slip away gasping for breath, their lungs infected with the deadly coronavirus. Oblivious of the suffering, Prime Minister, Narendra Modi put his political fortunes ahead of the welfare of the Indian people. Much like Donald Trump, Modi surrounds himself with sycophants who continue to nourish his ego. -more-

The coming week of city meetings looks way more interesting than the one we just finished. Nothing came to a vote at any of the meetings I attended except the Planning Commission, which voted to add five parcels to the Adeline Corridor Plan. You can check the quick summary in The Activist’s Calendar for the meetings deserving your attention this week.

The event I most wanted to attend I missed, because I had not signed up with Eventbrite when I first saw the notice. It is a lesson I’d had before and chose to ignore. Choosing to ignore is the very thing about which this diary will focus.

I had lunch with a fellow vaccinated friend on Friday at one of those street parklets without the plastic walls. We’ve talked about climate many times, but I was most surprised by his response. I am still assimilating the shock that we’ve had 0.4°C of temperature rise (global warming) from 0.8°C in 2018 to 1.2°C in 2020. My friend has long believed we’ve passed the tipping points and are now in feedback loops that are accelerating global warming. His response, he said, he’s stopped watching and reading the news. Instead, he’s reading WWII history.

How many of us are choosing to ignore the signs that are all around us? Or maybe we are paying attention, but have decided that our individual behavior is so insignificant in the global context that it doesn’t matter. So, we can continue to enjoy all those little things, even though when they are combined together as the sum of us they have enormous impact. It’s likely a lot more complicated, and why we choose not to act is what I really wanted to hear, even though the group to the meeting I missed was self-selected to be motivated.

The event I missed was, “Getting Off Gas - Berkeley Electrification Community Meeting” on Tuesday evening. Individually, I am about halfway there to electrification. I have replaced the stove, water heater and furnace and the natural gas line to my house is shut off. I still have my Prius, and I am sorry now I didn’t purchase the hybrid plug-in in 2014. I don’t have solar and I could really beef up the insulation.

I’ve never had a gas clothes dryer and never will. My best friend’s mother suffered a 90% body burn when she turned on the gas clothes dryer and the house exploded. My friend’s mother died three weeks later, the day before her eleventh birthday, three days before mine.

The meeting presentation document is available now and the meeting zoom will be posted soon. https://www.cityofberkeley.info/HPWH/ All the charts and diagrams look great until page 43, the timeline. With 0.4°C of temperature rise in two years do we really have 24 years to get off natural gas in our buildings and fossil fuels altogether? It is this approach that makes me think maybe I just need to crawl into bed with wine and chocolate—of course, if I do that it will likely be with a book on politics or another on nature by Douglas W. Tallamy.

In closing, I finished the book Kill Switch by Adam Jentleson on the filibuster. If I hadn’t committed to reading at least a book a week and knowing that I would close with a note on that reading, I would have stopped a couple chapters in. The book did get better when describing how Senate leaders acquired and wielded power especially Mitch McConnell and Lyndon Johnson. Jesse Helms was the first to use direct mail to fund raise.

There were other interesting stories, but the books that I find to be more important regarding where we are today, in the fraying of this democracy, are: It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump by Stuart Stevens, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum and How Democracies Die by Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky.

These three books were referenced by Stuart Stevens, Senior Advisor for the Lincoln Project, in his comments on May 5, 2021 in the show All In With Chris Hayes:

“Look, I don`t think this is a tipping point for the Republican Party. I think the Republican Party has tipped. I think it`s a tipping point for America. The greatest danger is not to realize the greatest danger. And what we have here is a moment that appears normal in many ways. We have a normal president who`s going about the business of running a normal, very functional government, but this is an extraordinary moment. -more-

Ralph Raymond Walbridge, son of Ralph and Myra Knupp Walbridge, died at his residence in Berkeley, California, on March 26. He was 92.

Ralph was born on August 18, 1928, in Santa Barbara, California. He graduated from South Pasadena-San Marino High School. In 1961, he received his Bachelor's Degree from San Francisco State College, where he majored in Language Arts.

Ralph's work experiences were diverse. He was a writer and editor for Lockheed and other engineering companies; He was a social worker in San Francisco for eight years, where he also wrote articles and poems for the agency newsletter. In New Mexico, he built adobe homes and fought fires across the West as a member of Southwest Firefighters. Ralph also participated in many poetry readings at local venues with other poets. -more-

Judging from the amount of political email I've been receiving, Democrats are running scared, afraid they will lose the 2022 midterm elections. Dems fear that they'll squander a historic opportunity to put America on the right course. Fortunately, it appears that Joe Biden knows what he is doing and he's determined to make job creation the centerpiece of his presidency

If you missed President Biden's April 28th joint address to Congress (https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/04/28/remarks-as-prepared-for-delivery-by-president-biden-address-to-a-joint-session-of-congress/ ), you probably didn't hear that he mentioned "jobs" 43 times. He began by acknowledging that his Administration has created 1.3 million jobs in his first 100 days in office. He went on to extol his "American Jobs Plan" and observe: "20 million Americans lost their jobs in the pandemic – working- and middle-class Americans. At the same time, the roughly 650 Billionaires in America saw their net worth increase by more than $1 Trillion... My fellow Americans, trickle-down economics ha never worked. It’s time to grow the economy from the bottom up and middle-out. A broad consensus of economists – left, right, center – agree that what I’m proposing will help create millions of jobs and generate historic economic growth." -more-

When members of your church or other religious affiliation dispute the existence of mental illness and advise you not to take psychiatric medication prescribed by a doctor, they're advising you to make a huge mistake. The person advising that will not suffer the consequences themselves, you will. You can be a good Christian, Hindu, Muslim, or any of the above and can still listen to the reality-based warnings and advice from a psychiatrist. A psychiatrist is a medical doctor who specializes in certain brain disorders treatable with psychiatric drugs.

On the other hand, a psychiatrist should never be advising you not to have a religious practice, albeit in my experience I have never seen that happen. Religion and science do not conflict. They are two different things that address completely different areas of human lives. -more-

Meeting the Locals

On my Sunday morning run uphill to the Berkeley Rose Garden, I had an unexpected encounter with one of the local residents. I detected a presence in the street on my right and, when I turned to look, I found myself starring at a young deer. I paused and watched as the deer's four feet passed in front of me—four feet in front of me.

The animal hoof-hopped up the front stairs of the nearest house before diving down between a couple of cars parked in the driveway and heading into the backyard where deer like to linger and munch.

As always, I extended a courteous greeting: "After you, my deer fallow." -more-

Worth Noting:

Fire season is here with the first Red Flag Warning from 11 pm Friday until 6 am Monday

Monday - The Agenda and Rules Committee on Monday at 2:30 pm takes up two pages of space. The proposed new commission chart was inserted to make Item 37 easier to read.

Tuesday – Regular City Council meeting at 6 pm has only two action items. Item 29 under ACTION is the Audit of Berkeley Police Response.

Wednesday – Special Transportation meeting at 6 pm on the California/Dwight intersection. The Parks and Waterfront Commission is at 7 pm. The potential fitness court at Cesar Chavez Park that was previously rejected by Parks Commissioners is back again.

Thursday – The Reimagining Public Safety Task Force meets at 6 pm. The Police Review Commission is meeting Thursday at 7 pm not Wednesday.

There are still spots left for the free Virtual Screening of the Rights of Nature Film Invisible Hand and the Q&A with the Directors at 6 pm May 23. Email hammargrenkelly@gmail.com to register for the film and Q&A. Simon Bramwell one of six Extinction Rebellion activists acquitted April 15 in London stated it was wrong that companies and rights and nature didn’t.

If you have a meeting you would like included in the summary of meetings, please send a notice to kellyhammargren@gmail.com by noon on the Friday of the preceding week. -more-