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Gene Poschman, a towering stalwart of Berkeley civic life, died at home on September 8. He was 86 years old. As a longtime member of the Zoning Adjustments Board and the Planning Commission, he used his unparalleled knowledge and political acumen to ride herd on development interests and their enablers in City Hall. He was the strategist behind the successful No on T campaign, which thwarted the Bates council’s 2012 attempt to transform light-industrial/artisanal West Berkeley into a warren of multi-block office parks.

When he retired from the Planning Commission in April 2018, after serving twenty-two years on that body, Mayor Arreguin and the council issued a proclamation honoring him as “a treasured community advocate and dedicated volunteeer, who for decades has given generously of his time, wisdom, and wit to the citizens of Berkeley.”  

Gene was an invaluable comrade, a dear friend, and my political mentor. I met him in the early Seventies, when he was on the faculty committee that hired me to teach a class on American government at what was then called Hayward State University. We shared a common intellectual background: the political theory scene at UC Berkeley in the Sixties.  

I only came to know him well after Councilmember Linda Maio appointed me to the Planning Commission in 1997. During the next seven years, Gene provided an on-the-ground education in land use politics and politics at large. He taught me how to read the Zoning Code and the unwritten codes of maneuvering for influence and power. He’d studied the latter subject as a legislative aide to Assemblymember Byron Rumford who helped create the landmark Fair Housing Act—and also as a lifelong jock. As he told me, “You have to know someone’s moves.”  

One night as we were walking to the parking lot behind the North Berkeley Senior Center after a meeting, I complained that when I’d been attacked by a fellow commissioner, he hadn’t offered me support. Gene didn’t apologize. “Zelda,” he said, “you’re too thin-skinned.”  

The next morning, a page rolled into my Fax machine. It was from Gene. Across the top, he’d written: “Since graduate school, this has been my prayer.” The text was the conclusion of Max Weber’s essay “Politics as a Vocation.” Every line was underscored, some twice. This is how it ends:  

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth—that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible….[E]ven those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today. Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say ‘In spite of all!’ has the calling for politics.  

Gene Poschman had the calling for politics.