Public Comment

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. 

Launched in March 2021 with $1 million from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and unspecified amounts from the James Irvine Foundation and the Conrad Hilton Foundation, Roadmap Home 2030 is led by the California Housing Partnership, Housing California, and the California Budget & Policy Center. It advances 57 “solutions” that, it claims, “address the root causes of housing insecurity and homelessness across the state.” 

Harrison’s item calls the Roadmap “an example of a rigorous approach that acknowledges athe complexity of the housing crisis and provides many actionable policies that when employed together, can substantially improve the state of housing in Berkeley and the state of California in the next ten years.” 

Unfortunately, some of those “actionable” policies will not solve but rather worsen California’s housing woes. For example: 

• “End exclusionary and racially discriminatory zoning in resource-rich neighborhoods by allowing increases in building height and density for mixed-income and affordable housing developments.” (RM C1). Sounds a lot like Toni Atkins’ upzoning bill, SB 9.

• A CEQA exemption for projects that are 100% affordable to low-income households (RM C3). So people of modest means don’t need to live in environmentally protected places?

• Strengthening the Housing Accountability Act (RM C5 and RM C6). The HAA is the quintessential Yimby measure.

• Tying "Housing Element compliance and revamped Prohousing incentives to state transportation funding resources” (RM E5). This is part of Newsom’s push to preempt local land use discretion in behalf of the tech/real estate industry.

Two of these proposals, RM C1 (upzoning) and RM C3 (CEQA exemption), are among the measures that the Roadmap Home group has designated as its top twelve priorities. 

Harrison’s Item 23 specifically mentions just one of the proposals listed above: the Roadmap’s upzoning proposal, stating: “The Berkeley City Council has already taken action on some of the items identified in the Roadmap Homes 2030 report. For example, the recent resolution on ending exclusionary zoning is recommendation C1 in Roadmap Home 2030.” 

The council’s approval of that resolution is deeply controversial in Berkeley. Harrison couldn’t vote on it, because family commitments prevented her from attending the meeting. The implication here is that had she attended, she would have voted to approve. 

Her selective presentation of the Roadmap agenda is regrettable, especially in an item on the consent agenda about a complex project that I’m sure few people in Berkeley have even heard of. 

Roadmap Home 2030 needs to be thoroughly vetted—a process that cannot occur at a council meeting but only in the press and in community gatherings. Only after such a vetting occurs would it be appropriate to have the council deliberate on whether to endorse the project. 

I ask, then, that Harrison pull Item 23 from the council’s May 11 agenda. If she wants to pursue its endorsement, she should tell the community at large why in an opinion piece posted in the Planet or Berkeleyside; see what kind of response she gets; and then decide whether she still wants to put Roadmap Home 2030 before the council. That would be the path of democratic accountability.