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The local heat wave officially ended Saturday at 11 pm. Nearly 9000 lost power in San Francisco Friday evening. The power wasn’t out for long, hours not days, but it left me wondering how the UC Berkeley students will fair in the future when the power goes out in their new rooms, now under construction with no windows. 

Cities and buildings in warm climates used to be designed around air flow and breezes to moderate temperatures, but with air conditioning that design and planning ended. Power failures in heat waves turn buildings with few options for ventilation into furnaces. 

I pay a lot more attention to these things after reading Jeff Goodell’s book The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. The book starts with rather startling statistics,too many to list here, but there were several things that stuck. The recorded high temperature in Portland, Oregon during that June 2021 heat dome was 116°, but Vivek Shandas who studies urban heat islands drove around Portland measuring air temperature. In the poorest areas with few trees and lots of concrete the temperature was 124°. That is called urban heat island effect. 

Over 650 people in Oregon, Washington and Canada died from the June 2021 Northwest heat wave. 

We actually change the micro climate when we cut down trees and cover the land with buildings, concrete and asphalt. And that is exactly what we are doing in this endless pursuit of adding housing without thought to building cities for a heating future, and making space and place for nature to survive, and cooling trees with large canopies. 

Nearly every mixed-use housing tower being approved in Berkeley is a state-enabled density project, with 90% of the units intended to rent at market rate (luxury priced), when what is needed is for around 40% of the units to be affordable to lower income renters. 

Declining population in California and erasure of the earlier projections of explosive population growth hasn’t swayed Berkeley’s Mayor Jesse Arreguin. He declared again in his State of the City speech that his intention is still to meet the goal of adding 15,000 new units across all districts in Berkeley. “All districts” sounds like we can see more housing in the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone, Landslide Zones, on the Fault Line and liquefaction zones. 

If all those units fill, which is questionable, Berkeley could count on somewhere between 30,000 to 40,000 new residents, most of whom would be opting for those apartments, which are designed for students, and needing to earn above the area medium income to pay the rent. 

I’m not sure it matters much whether the units are filled, since it is the high-rise building and the land on which it stands which is being bought and sold as the investment, not the income. 

Be assured that the state of the city is fine. You can watch the State of the City speech, including the removal of empty chairs for the crowd that didn’t appear, on Arreguin’s YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlQWFe-CUr4 

Wednesday evening, I opted to attend the Homeless Services Panel of Experts (HSPE) instead of the Planning Commission which usually grabs my attention. 

The meeting was held in the Berkeley Repertory Theater Mercer-Golden Rehearsal Hall at 999 Harrison. The building number wasn’t obvious, so I made a couple of trips past the encampments (they are so depressing) on Harrison before seeing the number and landing at the building parking lot. I learned when I got inside that the location was chosen to enable the homeless to attend. 

Peter Radu, Assistant to the City Manager, introduced the main topic of the evening, item 6 on the agenda, Development of Good Neighbor Guidelines and Encampment Policy, by saying “unsheltered homelessness is our new normal.” That was quite a statement. 

Radu went through his presentation, labeled as a draft, with guidelines consisting of Please throw away trash and old food; Keep belongings out of the road; Do not build structures that can create a fire hazard or injury risk; Stay to one sidewalk side of the street; and Be fire safe. The policy that followed defined what made an encampment the lowest priority, medium priority or highest priority for interventions and actions. You can read the policy and accompanying letters for the October 4, 2023 HSPE meeting at: https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/boards-commissions/homeless-services-panel-experts 

Radu was asking the HSPE to forward the draft policy to the full council to be turned over to a council policy committee to finish. His suggestion was the Health, Life Enrichment, Equity & Community Policy Committee. 

The recent meetings of the Council Agenda and Rules Committee have been about a process to make council committees more effective and the process to get major legislation through city council and on to implementation. The word process is repeated deliberately, because the “process” for improving council function is spelled out complete with presentation documents, explanations, a matrix table, check lists, flow charts, rules, forms and a timeline in the 138 page packet for the October 10 City Council 4 pm special meeting. 

Mayor Arreguin made it plain at the September 26 Agenda and Rules Committee (members Arreguin, Wengraf and Hahn) in the discussion that the process Councilmember Hahn has been instrumental in developing with the city manager, city clerk and others did not have his blessing. The process is the “Systems Alignment Proposal.” 

The included documents in the proposal point to redesigning council work dating back several years. Some of us may recall it was former councilmember Droste who dropped the BERIPE (Bureaucratic Effectiveness and Referral Improvement and Prioritization Effort) on limiting major legislation as her parting gesture in the last days before leaving office in December 2022. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2023-01-08/article/50141?headline=A-BERKELEY-ACTIVIST-S-DIARY-week-ending-January-8--Kelly-Hammargren 

Since I regularly attend these meetings, I was asked to submit my opinion which I did. It amounted to “I don’t think charts, checklists and rules will make the desired change.” 

I have often called the council policy committees a detour on the way to getting things done, and I said as much when my turn arrived to speak to the members of HSPE and city staff. 

I suggested that the HSPE should do the work, not a council committee. There were quite a few other speakers who spoke to lack of trust, destruction of property, the need for bathrooms and trash pickup. Osha Neumann commented that conditions do not correspond to the reality, and Sabyl Landrum from the East Bay Community Law Center stated that there was no commitment to services. Jacquie McCormick from the Mayor’s office, who said she was speaking as an individual, praised Radu for his empathy and caring. 

The members of the HSPE after a long discussion, voted to establish a subcommittee to work with the homeless on guidelines and policies. They set the target to complete their work to bring it back to the full HSPE for a vote in January. The HSPE rejected Radu’s request to approve the draft guidelines and policy that evening as written and send them on to council with a referral to a policy committee to finish.  

While the HSPE should have the greatest potential for working with the homeless, I continue to worry what council will do once this reaches their hands. Council’s actions show little respect for commission work, except when it seems to fit something the city manager, mayor and councilmembers have already decided. 

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Night lights and lots of glass at the McCormick Place Lakeside Center in Chicago drew migrating birds off course into deadly bird-glass collisions Wednesday night. Volunteers and scientists found the bodies of 961 migrating birds Thursday morning October 5, 2023. It is a truly shocking number of birds dying in one night at one building. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/08/us/birds-dead-chicago-building.html 

In the chapter on big data in the book A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds, Scott Weidensaul writes about how tiny GPS devices on the backs of migrating birds document how night lights pull birds off their migration course into cities. Berkeley is in the Pacific flyway and like Chicago we have thousands of birds flying over us in the fall and spring migration. 

Had Berkeley City Council passed the Bird Safe Ordinance last June without change as brought to them by the Planning Commission and Councilmember Harrison, Berkeley would have the best Bird Safe Ordinance in the nation. But, Council dismissed the scientists’ letters of support, community experts, and the teenagers who spoke passionately about their future and instead chose to gut it filling in exemptions so there is little to share with other cities. 

A Dark Skies Initiative accompanied the Bird Safe Ordinance in the March 2, 2022 Planning Department Staff presentation to the Planning Commission, but then it disappeared as the months moved on and the Bird Safe Ordinance moved forward. 

Andy Katz revived the Dark Skies Initiative at the Community Health Commission as a health initiative and it passed. Artificial light pollution at night is hazardous to our own health disrupting sleep and with links to breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity. Maybe this time looking out for our own health “Dark Skies” will spillover to benefit nocturnal wildlife and biodiversity. 

City Council heard the appeals from neighbors on 705 Euclid and 1598 University at a special meeting on September 26. 

The neighbors appealed the Zoning Adjustment Board approval of 705 Euclid a 4,528 square foot 3-story single family dwelling with two parking spaces and associated retaining walls. The appeal was based on the excessive height of the project, impact on views, light and air. Between the time the appeal was filed and the council hearing, the architect modified the plan and lowered the height. 

At the appeal hearing the property owners for the proposed house described themselves as civil engineers. That is probably a good thing since this house in the benign sounding Hillside Overly is in the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone 2 and the site is a designated landslide area according to the Earthquake Zones of Required Investigation map https://maps.conservation.ca.gov/cgs/EQZApp/app/  

If this project had been across the street at 700 Euclid or 708 Euclid, a search of the Earthquake Zones of Required Investigation map would have come with the warning “All or a portion of this parcel LIES WITHIN an Earthquake Fault Zone.” 

There was no mention of the warning that I could find in the staff reports that noted in the same Earthquake Zones of Required Investigation map the property site came with this warning “All or a portion of this parcel LIES WITHIN a Landslide Zone.” In fact, the Geotechnical report by California Engineering Co. included in the administrative record for the appeal on page 13 states, “The site is stable, has very low liquefaction susceptibility, is not in a slide area, has no recent history of seismic activity and outside the Alquist-Priolo Special Studies Zone.” 

No one seems to be calling for a moratorium or asking if there should be more housing in these hazardous zones except the Fire Chief. I found suggested locations for building ADUs right on top of the Hayward Fault in the Housing Element Update. 

Council approved the 8-story state density project at 1598 University. There were a few gains by the neighbors over the months before the appeal in creating more of a stepdown into the neighborhood and three small gains the night of the appeal. The applicant/developer shall relocate the utility box at the corner with approvals from the city and utility providers, the loading zone will be moved further away from the corner and the landscape must be maintained for the life of the building. Nothing changes that this will be a big building for the neighbors backed up next to the project. This is the future. 

We are going to see more high-rise buildings along main traffic corridors. We should just hope the Fire Department Master Plan is approved so we have the services to support the residents in these buildings.  

I still feeling guilty about not attending the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) Thursday evening with the California movie theater at 2113 Kittredge on the agenda. In its place will be an 18-story tower with a live performance stage on the commercial ground floor. I usually attend every possible public City meeting on projects, but I decided to skip the last meeting of the week on my list. 

Friends are fighting to save the last film theater in the downtown. Over the recent years Berkeley lost 20 film theaters, Shattuck Cinemas, United Artists and the California. All that remains is the Elmwood and the Pacific Film Archive. 

I miss going to film on the big screen and the incredible independent and foreign films that were offered at the Shattuck Cinemas, the California and Landmark Theaters throughout the area. The pandemic really killed movie theaters. Barbie and Oppenheimer might offer new life, but holding on to one theater in a shrinking chain doesn’t look like enough to save it. 

In the drive I took to check out the condition of Keeler the subject of a number of speakers at the Transportation Commission, Keeler wasn’t any worse than many of the streets in the flats including in my own neighborhood. When it came my turn to speak that evening, on the five-year paving plan, I said I didn’t expect to be the contrarian, but rough streets slowed down traffic. The street in front of my house near the high school feels less like a speedway now that the condition is deteriorating. 

I heard my comment repeated by commissioner Liza Lutzker. Even as she spoke movingly about her child suffering an injury on her bicycle from a deteriorating street she said she was more afraid of speeding traffic on repaved streets.