Public Comment

₌It was back in 2014 when it all started, a small group of DSA members asked to help canvass for Tony Thurmond. I would meet them for coffee. “The sanity café” would socialize, talk politics and discuss canvassing.

How I ended up as a campaign canvass lead with not one drop of political campaign experience is a much longer story. One day I floated the idea of starting a political book club. I realized I wasn’t reading and thought starting a book club would give me the push I neededl plus this was a group that had been politically engaged for decades. Little did I know how starting this book club would change my life in so many ways.

I was listening to The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee, February 2021 as I cleaned up the kitchen before sitting back down at the computer to reflect on the last week and finish this column. Chapter 4 was playing on the 1933 Home Owners Loan Corporation, redlining, FHA loans facilitating White home ownership while preventing Blacks from the same privileges and subprime mortgages. I kept hitting the pause as I stopped to make notes in my reading journal to record quotes like, “What is racism without greed?” I mention this as it is the lead into what happened this last week.

When the mail arrived on Tuesday there were two “I want to buy your house” postcards promising no commission, no costs, AS-IS, and cash offer. Later the book Dry Spring the Coming Water Crisis of North America by Chris Wood arrived. This was all before the back to back special and regular city council meetings.

The supposed value of the house my nephew called “two bedroom no bath” (the bathroom is 5’3” by 9’) and the neighborhood my sister called “funky,” is off the charts ridiculous. My house sits in the formerly redlined district of Berkeley. I didn’t know this when I bought the house in 1990, but when I called the agent who had handled my car insurance and the house I sold in Sacramento, he told me Farmers didn’t insure this zip code, 94703. I was so naïve that it was years before I put this all together. 

Months on zoom and pandemic restrictions have demonstrated how little being in a particular location matters. I’ve lived in nine different cities, northern and southern California and the Midwest. What drew me to this city is on the block to disappear, but it isn’t just Berkeley, it is all across the State as the real estate investor industry has captured the legislature, the governor, staff and six members of our local city council. The lure of financing campaigns and lobbyists using the deceptive frame of eliminating racist exclusionary zoning moves into justifying trickle-down economics and destroying neighborhoods with densification. 

At the Berkeley City Council meeting on Tuesday evening, Alfred Twu ( CouncilmemberTerry Taplin’s appointee to the Landmarks Commission) stated that Republicans opposed SB 9, implying that anyone who opposed SB 9 should be horrified to be associated with Republicans or is otherwise a deep seated racist. SB 9 is one of several bills on housing floating through the State Senate and Assembly that removes local control and densify cities with no regard to the environmental impacts. 

Front buyers and flippers are scouring neighborhoods for sellers while these bills are probably giving developers wet dreams. 

Not long ago I was on a statewide call listening to a Black home owner from Altadena lamenting that the homes Black families had worked so hard to purchase and the neighborhoods they had built were now all on the chopping block if SB 9 and like bills passed. Anyone who is paying attention should be able to grasp the difficulties Black families have had trying to create intergenerational wealth through home ownership, and how their neighborhoods are now the target of speculators. The Whiteness of Wealth by Dorothy A. Brown drives the point home. 

Mayor Arreguin and five council members( Droste, Kesarwani, Robinson, Taplin and Bartlett) all declared their allegiance to SB 9’s unfettered development. Bartlett should know better. 

I doubt any of them have read Sick City: Disease, Race, Inequality and Urban Land by Patrick Condon (free download - https://justicelandandthecity.blogspot.com/p/download-sick-city-pdf.html) 

or watched his presentation, https://www.livablecalifornia.org/vancouver-smartest-planner-prof-patrick-condon-calls-california-upzoning-a-costly-mistake-2-6-21/, but then why would they? 

These days the response to any challenge is to dismiss it and run to your corner for reinforcement. It reminds me of denying climate change. If you look hard enough, you can always find a crackpot denier with fancy degrees. 

As for being on the same side as Republican legislators, I remember volunteering to help Hollister activists gather ballot signatures in 2014 to block fracking in San Benito County. Republicans signed the ballot initiative because blocking fracking would put an end to lateral drilling under their farm land, which would remove all control from land owners. The left, all of us knee jerk environmentalists, opposed fracking because of the pollution of ground water and impact on climate change. We were all going in the same direction, just starting from different points. 

SB 9 removes local control over zoning and piles on multiple small unit housing projects, the kind that often escape affordable housing requirements. SB 10 prohibits future council members from reversing zoning changes regardless of what impacts are identified. The target is the neighborhoods where land is the cheapest and profit the easiest. If you guessed poorer neighborhoods and neighborhoods with higher percentages of home owners and occupants who are people of color you hit BINGO. 

There are also restrictions on requiring parking for buildings within a half mile of transit, which is fine if you are young, healthy with no children, but not good for older Americans. The May 2021 issue of Nutrition Action quoted from JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association) that one in four women over the age of 65 is unable to walk just two to three blocks at a stretch. That certainly is far less than a half mile. 

I oppose SB 9 for a whole host of reasons described better by others https://berkeleyneighborhoodscouncil.com/, but mostly because of the environmental impacts. All these bills and even the Sierra club ignore the importance of cities as creating a refuge, urban habitat, a reservoir for biodiversity. Covering our urban land from lot line to lot line with buildings and hardscape has a terrible devastating impact on water, climate and biodiversity. If rain ever comes, all this hardscape will just result in runoff rather than recharging the ground. 

I had a conversation earlier today with a leader in the Sierra Club, a fighter on environmental issues who admitted to never thinking about urban habitat. I’m not letting it drop there. We look at the larger picture and stop the silo that comes from “smart growth,” “infill,” and “single family homes as racist and exclusionary.” All these terms and phrases are meant to close down exploring the larger impacts of actions. 

As for the rest of the meetings of the week, I missed most of them. Too many were scheduled at the same time. I did make the 4 pm Tuesday council meeting where the vote was unanimous to merge commissions. Animal Care will be folded into the Parks Commission. Public Works and Transportation will be combined. Zero waste will be broken apart with the transfer station component going to Public Works/Transportation and the recycling going to the merged CEAC (Community Environmental Advisory Commission) and Energy Commission. They also voted to explore merging the Aging and Disability Commissions as they decided that the issues of aging are really disabilities. 

The Transportation Commission did meet Thursday evening and they pointed out problems with the BerkDOT (Berkeley Department of Transportation) planning. 

The one positive outcome of the entire week was at BCDC (the San Francisco Conservation and Development Commission) 

Despite pressure from the chair, Zachary Wasserman, an attorney, who makes his living from real estate deals and commissioner Tom Butts, Mayor of Richmond, the commission postponed for four months consideration of the Proposed Bay Map Amendment to allow a dense housing development at Point Molate. https://bcdc.ca.gov/cm/2021/06-17-Meeting-Summary.html 

In closing, I finished West of Kabul, East of New York by Tamim Ansary. When Ansary, an American who grew up in Afghanistan, heard talk show callers the day after 911 declaring how Afghanistan should be bombed into the stone age, Ansary wrote an anguished email to friends that was forwarded so many times, it circulated the world. The book includes the email and his personal memoir. This is not an author or book I would have found on my own and am so grateful for book club. Twenty years of war and the US occupation of Afghanistan are coming to a close, but closure for the Afghans is a long way off. West of Kubal, East of New York published in 2002 is still relevant. Ansary gave me an appreciation of a culture that is so distant from my own.