Brilliant jazz singer Kalil Wilson, a North Oakland native, will perform swinging standards, ballads and original songs from his new album 'Time Stops,' this Friday, 8 to 11 p. m. backed by his trio--Grant Levin on piano, Aidan McCarthy on bass and drum prodigy Genius Wilson--at The Sound Room, 2147 Broadway at 22nd Street, Oakland, a block north of the Paramount Theatre and 19th Street BART. Tickets: $20-$25 at www.soundroom.org or (510) 496-4180.

The failure of the Justice Department to charge the arresting officer with aggravated assault, or possibly murder by strangulation, and the female NYPD sergeant, Kizzy Adonim, for not interceding, is profoundly disturbing. There appears to be two sets of police guidelines, one for non-whites and a much milder version for whites. It’s hard to believe a white man would have suffered the same horrible fate as Eric Garner lying face on the pavement. Garner’s offense, - selling cigarettes to earn money for himself and his family. A quiet conversation to deescalate the situation would have resulted in a very different outcome. Garner gasping for breath, cried out “I can’t breathe 11 times” before he fell unconscious. “I can’t breathe” become a rallying cry for activists demanding justice. Garner was not armed and imposed no threat. 

Police guidelines need to be changed. How can the same set of rules be used for subduing an unnamed man selling cigarettes and a dangerous criminal toting a gun threatening to harm the public? Garner was guilty of a very minor offense. The police could have imposed a small fine much like handing a traffic ticket. If a social worker were present there is little doubt the “public nuisance crime” could easily have been averted and Garner would be alive today. African-Americans are severely handicapped by lack of access to education and job training. This travesty demands immediate action.

In light of how Council has been discussing greenhouse gas emissions and the climate and ecological emergency, I am challenging all Councilmembers to join me in taking an upcoming online course in the essentials of current, up-to-date climate science as of 2019. This self-paced course will be taught by Michael Mann, a graduate of Cal and Princeton, an internationally famous climate scientist known for documenting a global temperature record covering the past 1,000 years - showing extremely strong proof that our burning of fossil fuels has caused an unprecedented disaster (the "hockey stick" graph). 

You can see details about the course, including a 2 minute video introduction, here. You can also sign up here:

https://sdgacademy.org/course/climate-change-the-science-and-global-impact/ 

To audit the course is free (but requires registration). I would encourage you to join me in signing up ($50) for the option of working towards a certification. This option allows you to have your homework graded, to test for your own benefit your understanding. There are 8 modules in the course; each is estimated to take 4-6 hours to complete. And again: the course is self-paced. You will have a whole year to complete it to be eligible for a certificate. 

As people who help to form public policy, each of us has a duty above and beyond just this course. In this course we'll learn the urgency of reducing emissions, immediately, from today's levels, and by a large amount. But it is up to us, as public servants, to struggle with what the science implies for the specific situation of Berkeley, of the region, of the economy, and of our way of life. It is our responsibility to learn these things and tell the truth to the larger public, and then to *act as if the truth is real*, as climate activists are putting it these days.

On tonight's second reading of the eventual ban on natural gas in new buildings, I'll leave you with this:

Q. How many tons of CO₂ equivalent emissions will this item reduce Berkeley's emissions compared to today's level?

A. 0 (zero). None at all. It is not a meaningful response to the urgency of the emergency that we face. 

I think what was missed last Tuesday was the opportunity for Council to help educate your constituents about the real and present emergency. By analogy: If we were in the throes of an earthquake, with people trapped in rubble, with supplies so endangered that deaths might amplify in coming days -- you would not be crowing for the TV cameras about improvements to the building code. You would not pretend you were responding to the emergency with such stuff. Yet in the context of climate, you sit in a burning building and crow about your thoughts on improving fire safety someday.

To the citizen’s [sic] of Berkley [sic]; It is all over social media your city government decided to emasculate the words like “manhole” to maintenance hole. Is this true? Did you really convene and decide the term “manhole” was offensive?? Really?? If not, please clear the air so that we-the rest of the country or the sane part of the country stop making fun of you. I’m just sure there are normal hard working adults in this town. I’m sure someone there is shaking their heads saying “please God, not another black eye.”. 

If you did indeed spend time and money to do this, what the heck were you thinking? My Lord, have you had too much dope, sunshine, artificial flavors in the dorito’s [sic] to realize just how stupid you look to the rest of the world? Are you wanting to be the laughing stock of the world? Anyway I was just wondering and thought also you need to know how batshit crazy y’all sound.

You often here people refer to the current housing shortage in Berkeley as “Berkeley’s worst housing crisis ever”. That’s probably not so. An arguably worse crisis was during World War II when the East Bay was flooded with war industry workers and, because of wartime material shortages and rationing, it was hard to get either construction materials or approval to build new housing. 

In addition to war workers at that time Berkeley was temporarily housing refugees from other countries, the spouses and families of servicemen who were based in the Bay Area—or had shipped out to the Pacific from here—and large numbers of men from the Armed Forces who were either passing through or temporally assigned here for training or active duty. 

There were repeated calls for residents to open up their homes to renters, make their spare bedrooms available, and convert houses into boarding quarters. There was even, in 1942, some possibility rumored that the Federal government might order non-essential residents to temporarily move out of the city so war workers could use their homes (nothing came of that, of course). 

So from about 1941 to the late 1940s there was a huge local housing crunch. One of the suggestions made at the time was to provide spaces to temporarily park trailers where newcomers, particularly war workers, could live. 

For example, in October 1942 a local businessman, G.A. Beukers, made a serious proposal to the City Council “to convert the entire length of Sacramento Street center parking lot from Alcatraz Avenue to Hopkins Street into a trailer camp.” (Berkeley Daily Gazette, October 20, 1942). 

At that time the Sacramento median was asphalt and dirt—a former rail right of way—not landscaped as it is today. He suggested that the City could earn as much as $45,000 from renting the space. 

Official Berkeley turned thumbs down to the idea of a temporary linear “trailer camp” on Sacramento Street, in part because there was fear that people living in trailers would bring unsanitary conditions and crime, and their presence would lower property values. 

Sort of like some of the arguments against recreational vehicle living in Berkeley’s housing crisis today. 

So Berkeley didn’t experiment in the 40s with a trailer park, temporary or otherwise. 

But neighboring El Cerrito did. A dog racing park east of San Pablo Avenue was turned into a large trailer camp ground. 

After a year, the results seemed wholly positive. Thousands of new residents, many of them workers in the Richmond shipyards, had been accommodated—there was space for at least 500 trailers—the park had both local supervision and its own elected self-governing council, and even the conservative Berkeley Gazette acknowledged in mid 1944 that things had gone well. 

Below, I’ve transcribed an article from the July 13, 2019 Gazette so you can read the local view from 75 years ago for yourself. 

— 

El Cerrito Trailer Park is Named Model Community: 

War Experiment Blends Well With City 

Berkeley Daily Gazette, July 17, 1944. Second section 

By Zerelda Owsley 

April 15 of this year marked the first anniversary of a unique experiment in war time living--the Fairmount Trailer Park in El Cerrito. Situated on the grounds and in the buildings of the outlawed dog racing track, more than 500 trailer spots have been home and hearth to almost 5000 persons within the space of a year's time. 

Under the general management of Judge Martyn Turner, the trailer park has a Citizens' Council, headed by Mrs. Frances McLane, which handles internal problems and disputes. Group bathing, washing and ironing facilities, child care, nursery school, 'teen age club rooms, Boy and Girl Scout troops, library and a weekly dance every Saturday night are some of the activities carried on in the trailer park. 

In every patriotic fund drive, the Fairmount Trailer Park has contributed a creditable share of El Cerrito's quota, and in addition, often goes far over the prescribed quota for its population. 

Since its inception more than a year ago, not one major crime has emanated from the trailer park, the most serious charges made against a man for disturbing the peace and investigation of arson. The Citizens' Council members are elected every three months because of the ever-changing population. Mrs. McLane has been chairman of the Council since its initiation in September, 1943, by successive elections. 

One nurse is on hand at all times, with a doctor giving half-time. At the present there is no group insurance plan in effect, but the residents are attempting to work out a plan which will be more successful than one which operated during the first few months of the park's development. 

There are about 1,638 persons in the camp now. Many of the trailers have small picket fences built around them, flower pots grace approaches, and Victory Gardens are thriving in the vacant ground surrounding the park. 

Although space and permanent equipment were provided by the Federal Government, the park is self-supporting now. At a recent breakfast, representatives from 33 different states sat around the table, many of them University graduates from State colleges. 

As an experiment in adaptability, the trailer park has proved that tolerance and reason can adjust almost any problem. With workers leaving and arriving at varied hours, the question of undisturbed sleep became acute quite early. The solution was simple. Certain areas were set aside for various shift workers and, as a consequence, day sleeper areas are combatively more quiet than any section of an average community could hope to attain. Other critical points have been solved with the same common sense and simplicity. 

Juvenile delinquency is no more prevalent in the trailer park than in surrounding neighborhoods. Births, weddings and deaths have occurred in the park and they would in any small section of the United States. 

Marketing, gas shortages, recreation limitations, higher salaries and wages, and other conditions that have created stress in long-established communities have created the same stress in the trailer park. 

But the lawlessness, illness and lack of sanitation that El Cerrito and neighboring cities feared when the Trailer Park was organized have never come to pass. Fairmont Trailer Park is an integral part of El Cerrito, a self-respecting and a respected segment of war time emergency." 

(Note: "marketing" in the second to last paragraph refers to going to the grocery market--that is, shopping for food and other staples.)

Berkeley never experienced an enemy attack during World War II, but in the middle of the night on July 17, 1944 many locals must have thought the town’s time under actual fire had finally come.

The sound and vibration of a powerful explosion reverberated through the hills and flatlands shaking buildings and waking hundreds. Anyone outside at 10:18 PM might have also seen a flash of white light above the hills to the east.

Telephone calls poured into the Berkeley Police department. Some thought it was an earthquake, others a bombing attack. A few called for police help, thinking that the shaking that jolted them out of sleep was someone trying to break into their house.

It was none of those things. Instead, in one of the worst Stateside disasters of the war years, a massive explosion had obliterated the Navy ammunition depot and loading dock near Port Chicago, about 15 miles northeast of Berkeley.  

The blast was so immense it was heard up to 50 miles away. Berkeley seismographs recorded the equivalent of a 3.4 earthquake on the Richter scale. The San Francisco Chronicle called it at the time “the most disastrous explosion in the history of the Bay Area”. (SF Chronicle July 17, 1944). More people died in it than in any other “Homefront” disaster during the War. 

During World War II the Bay Area was filled with active military installations. It was the major port of embarkation for troops and supplies going to the Pacific, as well as a cargo ship building center of unprecedented size. Army and Navy installations, ranging from training camps to repair bases, military airfields, hospitals, barracks, and coastal defense fortifications, dotted the landscape.  

Civilian factories churning out materials from naval engines to medicines crowded the industrial districts of San Francisco and the East Bay, including Berkeley. 

In this hive of Homefront activity, the Navy installation at Port Chicago received regular trainloads of military munitions destined for the Pacific theater of the war. Navy teams loaded them by hand onto cargo ships moored by a wooden pier where up to three lines of boxcars could be positioned adjacent to the vessels. 

Just before 10:20 PM on that Monday night, something went terribly wrong during the loading of one ship. Thousands of tons of munitions exploded in an uncontrollable chain reaction. A pilot flying at 9,000 feet above the North Bay reported seeing a vast fireball rising immensely into the night sky, then debris hurtling past his plane.  

The nearby town of Port Chicago was devastated. Debris landed miles from the explosion site. At least 320 people were killed at and around the pier and hundreds were injured nearby, including many civilians in Port Chicago—going about their night routines, gathering in a movie theater to watch a war film, or asleep at home—who were hurt by flying glass, collapsing walls, and the powerful shock itself. 

There were two ships at the munitions dock that night, both of them more than 400 feet long. The Liberty ship E.A. Bryan, already partially loaded with explosives, was blasted entirely into small fragments scattered as far as three miles away. The Quinault Victory, on its maiden voyage and docked at the pier but not yet loaded, was broken into large segments, with the shattered stern protruding from the Bay. 

A locomotive and boxcars parked on the pier disappeared, blown apart along with most of the 1,500 foot wooden pier. Other explosive laden boxcars on shore—some of them stationed protectively between earthen and wooden berms—were damaged, but didn’t explode. Survivors successfully put out a fire that threatened to ignite the cars. 

One Coast Guard firefighting barge moored next to the cargo ships was smashed with its crewmen, and thrown hundreds of feet out into the straits, and another Coast Guard vessel on patrol was seriously damaged and set afire but made it to Mare Island for repairs. 

(Ammunition ship explosions had happened before. December 6, 1917 during World War I two cargo ships, one carrying explosives, collided outside the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia. A fire broke out on the ammunition ship, and could not be contained. The resulting explosion threw heavy debris more than three miles, momentarily emptied part of the harbor of its water, created a tsunami, and wrecked several towns. 1,600 people were killed and 9,000 injured, many of them blinded by broken glass; they had been watching the burning ship in the harbor through the windows of homes and businesses.) 

And on July 4, 1944, just a few weeks before the Port Chicago blast, nearly 300 people were killed or wounded when a German ammunition barge carrying munitions destined for occupied Norway blew up in the harbor of Aarhus, Denmark. Berkeleyeans had just read about that disaster in the pages of the Gazette.) 

Local dead 

In the Port Chicago aftermath, two Berkeley men were quickly identified as killed in the blast. One, Thomas David Hunt, age 26, was a civilian engineer and Cal alumnus whose widowed mother lived on Piedmont Avenue. His father, UC Professor Thomas Francis Hunt, was deceased. 

He worked for a construction company and had apparently been on the pier with two assistants, supervising construction of a new pier. Only pieces of his body, along with a notebook belonging to him, were recovered. His only sibling, a Navy flyer, had been killed in a crash in Hawaii in 1943. 

A former Berkeley man, Charles Hobart Reilly, also 26 and now a resident of Albany, was on duty on the Coast Guard fire fighting barge and also died. 

Civil response 

Over the hills, “thousands of Berkeley citizens…were awakened by the blast.” reported the Berkeley Daily Gazette the next day. The first calls to the police were a jumble of confused reports and anxious inquiries. The Contra Costa sheriff’s office in Martinez called the Berkeley police to let them know something had happened, and there would be more information later. 

Then, as commercial radio stations began reporting the likely nature and location of the explosion, the calls turned into offers of help. 

Berkeley mobilized support, including a 1,500 candlepower portable light from the Fire Department which was driven to Port Chicago for night rescue operations. Police officers were stationed on Tunnel Road to direct ambulances with the injured to Berkeley hospitals, and emergency supplies were assembled. 

After Pearl Harbor, the city had long prepared and practiced for civil defense and the Gazette said the response preceded smoothly. 

“Four ambulances and a caravan of cars and trucks, loaded down with medical supplies, including blood plasma, formed in front of City Hall and were about to start for Port Chicago when word was received from the local unit to stand by,” the Gazette reported.  

Local hospitals were mobilized and 150 beds in Berkeley reported ready for casualties, but it does not seem any were immediately sent to Berkeley. Most were taken to military or civilian hospitals closer to the blast site. Berkeley police reported ambulances with “minor casualties” came through the Broadway tunnel but continued on to hospitals in Oakland. 

“Most citizens had something to offer disaster workers” a police spokesman told the Gazette. “We had calls from Blake’s Restaurant offering food crews. All the mortuaries offered their automobile facilities. More than 50 doctors registered their names and offered assistance. A supply company listed ten tanks of oxygen, tents and stretchers plus the use of a truck.. Nurses’ Aides called up and asked what they could do to help.” 

“Police reports show many private citizens called and offered their gas and automobiles to emergency workers.” 

Police cars were dispatched to San Pablo Avenue “to try and regulate the immense flow of ambulances and thrill seekers who started for the disaster scene.” In the absence of freeways, San Pablo was still one of the more direct routes to the shores of the Carquinez Straits. 

The police noted at least three reports of windows broken by the blast in Berkeley. One was a store on the 2300 block of Shattuck, the other two were at homes on the 1600 block of University Avenue.  

Eyewitness reports 

The Gazette despatched reporter Zerelda Owsley, who often wrote human interest stories for the paper, to gather eyewitness coverage. 

She drove to Port Chicago soon after midnight and passed “a ribbon of red lights…one after another Army, Navy, and civilian ambulances wound their way into Oakland. There were few sirens. It was an orderly procession of death and pain.” 

She was stopped by military guards on the highway and couldn’t reach the blast site, but talked to numerous survivors and witnesses and gave a unnamed naval corpsman a ride back to Berkeley. He told her that he didn’t believe many bodies would be found, which was the case.  

“In Port Chicago, not a single building stands undamaged today” she wrote in the next day’s evening edition. “Hotels, restaurants, markets, barber shops and the theater vie with the homes of citizens in presenting a scene of unparalleled destruction.” 

Other military personnel she tried to interview were close lipped. However, the Navy apparently didn’t try to conceal the explosion news. Photographers were soon allowed access to the ruins and an aerial picture was even published showing the site of the demolished pier, shoreline, and a large fragment of the Quinault Victory half sunken in the bay.  

The Gazette carried several of those pictures in the July 19 issue. Since they came from wire service photographers, presumably they were also printed worldwide.  

A racial issue 

The immediate coverage hardly mentioned that mainly African-American sailors and workers had died. One note was a line in Owsley’s article that “Today, I talked to a 26-year-old Negro sailor who saw his buddy die and he himself was one of six out of a barracks of one hundred who came out unscathed.” “My buddy he was killed. He didn’t have a chance. He was just thrown with his bunk right out of the barracks.” 

Finally, two days later, the paper carried a story saying “the Navy has estimated 250 enlisted personnel, most of them Negro sailors, are ‘missing and presumed dead’.” Others missing including an estimated nine Coast Guard personnel, some 70 merchant seamen from the two cargo ships, three railroad workers, about 40 military guards, and nine officers. 

The Armed Services were segregated at the time. African American men and women who volunteered or were drafted for the military were shunted into support jobs. “Most African Americans serving at the beginning of World War II were assigned to non-combat units and relegated to service duties, such as supply, maintenance, and transportation,” despite the eagerness of many to serve in combat. (African Americans in World War II. Fighting for a Double Victory, nationalww2museum.org) 

Long time Berkeley resident and activist Betty Reid Soskin recalled many years later in an oral history that her husband, native Berkeleyan Mel Reid, had enlisted in the Navy but found he would be assigned like other African-American servicemen as a messman—that is, a cook or kitchen worker in a non-combat role, and probably stationed at a training camp on the Great Lakes. He told the Navy he would not follow that course and wanted to be a sailor, and was given an honorable discharge. (Soskin ROHO oral history, page 49). 

By 1945 the racial segregation of tasks and units would slightly ease because more soldiers were needed in combat roles as casualties mounted in Europe, but in mid-1944 it was still strongly in force. At Port Chicago, all African-American crews commanded by all white officers did most of the handling and loading of the munitions. 

Although it’s not clear if any of the African Americans killed at Port Chicago had Berkeley roots, some did have connections. Soskin talked in the oral history about African Americans in the military during the war.  

“The ones I did get to know were some of the servicemen. One of our friends among the servicemen was stationed at Port Chicago and was blown up in that explosion. In fact, some of these young guys were at my house at a party the night before and they went home and we heard the explosion all the way from Berkeley from Port Chicago when that blew up, and we knew that our friends had gone.” (Soskin, ROHO oral history, page 53). 

By Thursday, July 20, just three days after the explosion, the local news was back to “normal”. Gazette headlines included a report of an assassination attempt on Hitler, local traffic accidents, and a feature story about a Berkeley man who picked up a disoriented opossum on the highway in Martinez and brought it to a Berkeley firehouse. By the time he arrived eight tiny baby opossums had also appeared in his car, presumably from the mother’s pouch or fur. 

The possum tale merited a two column front page picture of the little creatures crawling around the lawn of the Claremont Hotel, but there was only one small, single column, story about plans to rebuild Port Chicago and investigate the explosion. It noted that 322 men were now believed dead, but only four bodies had been found—just what the Navy Corpsman had predicted.  

The names of the Navy dead were released and the Gazette printed basic information about five from Oakland and others from San Francisco and Martinez.  

Mishandling 

There was one aftermath to the blast which had important repercussions years later for civil rights in the United States. 

There were reports and accusations that the African American loading crews were not given training for the increasingly complex variety of explosives—including incendiary bombs, depth charges, and torpedoes—they were required to handle. 

The commander of the Port Chicago facility, a Navy captain recalled to active duty, had reportedly kept a chalkboard where he compared the tonnage loaded by each work detachment and some of his officers made side bets with each other on how fast their crews could work. 

The loading process was not fully mechanical, but involved lots of muscle power and manipulation of all different types of volatile materials. Munitions were taken from boxcars onto the pier, and then laboriously lifted by steam winches into the cargo holds of the ships, where they were repacked, often by hand. Observers reported seeing some of the workers having to use crowbars to lever heavy shells out of the tightly packed boxcars. 

The Coast Guard had already warned the handling procedures were not safe and had withdrawn a supervising detail from the pier when the Navy didn’t change the process. 

Also, some of the equipment was reportedly in poor working order including one of the winches on the ships. Survivors of the explosion reported that they heard a “metallic sound” and breaking wood several seconds before the main explosion. That would imply that a piece of equipment—perhaps one of the steam powered hoists on the ship—might have failed, dropping or jostling explosives, and triggering the blast. But all direct evidence of what might have happened went up in fire and fragments moments later. 

Civil rights aftermath 

Uninjured African American survivors from the loading crews who had not been on the docks were quickly taken by the Navy to the Mare Island Navy Yard in Vallejo and put in barracks there. They were given no leave and no opportunity for transfer between duties. On August 8 they were marched out to start loading an ammunition ship. When the destination became clear, they stopped marching en masse.  

Ultimately 258 sailors—all African American—refused to load ammunition and were imprisoned in what the Navy and the press characterized as a “mutiny”. Fifty were later tried in a mass Navy court martial on Yerba Buena Island, within sight of Berkeley. 

The trial was attended by future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, then the general counsel for the NAACP. After the men were convicted and sentenced to up to 15 years of hard labor, Marshall organized a nationwide petition and letter writing campaign objecting to not only the sentences but the unfair and biased procedures of the court martial. 

The campaign reached as far as the White House, where Eleanor Roosevelt informally encouraged the Secretary of the Navy to reconsider the matter. The Navy ultimately reconvened the courts-martial, but then affirmed the convictions.  

Still, the issue of discrimination and unequal treatment of African-Americans in the military had been prominently raised. In 1946 the last of the sailors who had been courts martialed were released, long before their sentences ran out. The same year the Navy became the first of the Armed Services to fully de-segregate. 

Postscript 

As an ironic local follow-up to the Port Chicago disaster, during the Cold War that followed World War II civil defense planning for the Bay Area designated various rural communities where urban residents should congregate if there was a nuclear attack.  

Berkeley, of course, would be a prime bombing target because of what is now the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the prominence of the campus in atomic research. 

Berkeley was assigned the then small town of Antioch, just east of Port Chicago, as a place to shelter and assemble if a nuclear attack threatened or occurred. 

So in the 50s and 60s tens of thousands of Berkeleyans—many of them still with memories of that night in 1944—might have found themselves trekking towards elusive safety near the site of a disaster where an explosion the magnitude of a small nuclear bomb had once flashed across the local landscape and sky. 

I recently attended the 2019 Opportunity Zone Expo in Los Angeles. This sold out event was billed as the largest gathering of experts in the country on the subject of investment in an “opportunity zone (OZ),” using a “qualified opportunity fund (QOZ).”

It was held in the ballrooms at the LA LIVE - JW Marriott Hotel in downtown. Keynote speakers included California Secretary of State Fiona Ma, U.S. Congressman Alex Mooney, Former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt, and former U.S. Congressman Keith Rothfus. The Expo was opened with an enthusiastic videotaped welcome by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti.

Event panels and breakout sessions had names like Capitalizing on opportunities: financing, sourcing and investors; Following your money: Choosing the best investment and protecting your capital; When to head out: understanding your fund and exit strategies; and Right place, right zone: identifying promising zones and why.

The 1,000+ attendees overflowed the well-appointed facility. Each panel was standing room only, filled with a sea of mostly male participants talking about deal flow, rates of return, whether partnerships or C Corps were the best investment structure, and so on. And on the dais of each session sat developers, fund managers, investment bankers, financial advisors, tax accountants, and incisively articulate, high-priced Washington DC lawyers, comparing bragging rights about their assets under management (from the low hundreds of millions to the tens of billions) available for office, commercial, retail, hotel, resort, industrial, and high density luxury housing development.

You know, just regular folks.

I jest, but make no mistake about it these were some very smart people. And they are precisely the people you want to have sitting around the table with you, figuring out how to address affordable housing needs, environmental protection and social justice – and how to make money doing it. These are the people who are really good at figuring that out. The only problem is if we let the unbridled pursuit of profits be their only guide, we end up with results that throw everything else under the bus.

There was no doubt that the OZ Tax Code is a game changer that could supercharge investment in real estate. But at the end of the day it became equally clear that this would probably be just another case of the rich getting richer.

Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against anyone getting rich. In fact, I'm absolutely all for it, especially if they get rich doing right by others. But if they're getting rich as the result of a gift from the government (taxpayers), then there have to be commensurate public benefits. Otherwise, it always ends up leaving the rest of us holding the bag.

So what are opportunity zones and qualified opportunity funds, and why should you care?  

Opportunity Zones and Qualified Opportunity Funds  

Opportunity Zones and the use of Qualified Opportunity Funds are the result of a relatively small provision in the 2018 Federal Tax Reform Bill. Simply put, the law establishes “opportunity zones” (land parcels in every state and city that designate where the tax code wants to incentivize investment) to provide a way for private investors, who have an unrealized capital gain in one type of investment, to be able to move those gains into a new investment (in real estate / new business creation) within one of those designated opportunity zones. And if they do this reinvestment of deferred capital gains within very strict timelines and using a financial entity called a “Qualified Opportunity Fund,” they can defer all taxes on the capital gains on their original investment until 2026, and if that new opportunity zone investment is maintained for 10 years or more, the investor can pay zero taxes on all those gains… forever.  

As I said in a previous article, this an extremely big deal and a huge investment incentive. It is based on the economic calculus that business creation and capital investments in these designated areas will ultimately have a multiplier effect, the results of which will produce far more wealth than the cost of the tax forgiveness. It is an effort to tap private capital for investment in low income and under-developed census tracts. At least that’s the theory. But the qualifying question remains, wealth for whom?  

The specific parcels that ended up being designated on the national maps were decided by the Governor’s office of each state.  

The overall intentions in the Tax Law were a step in the right direction. But there is one gigantic problem. The whole exercise is a monumental case in point of what happens when you have legislation written predominately for business interests by business interests: the tragedies of the commons that flow downstream are enormous and remain unpaid by those reaping the financial rewards.  

What is most disheartening is that the opportunity to do this right was completely ignored. And that is why you should care. 

Maximizing the efficient use of private capital for public benefit? 

Lately, I’ve been writing about the importance of the “efficient” use of capital, and the men and (the occasional) women at this event were clearly really good that doing that, thus the hyper-enthusiasm and “S.R.O.” attendance. I would conservatively estimate that this event’s participants were within 1 or 2 degrees of separation from over $1/2 trillion of investment capital. So, one would assume that since the Tax Law purports to target lower income census tracts and under-developed areas (e.g., brownfield sites, old rail yards, etc.) it’s all good news, right? 

Not so fast. 

As I sat and listened to the panels of experts and advisors throughout the day, I began to have the uncomfortable feeling that I had entered a parallel universe. Everyone was extremely positive, you couldn’t find a more energized group of people. But public benefit considerations were completely missing from the discussions: with holes in the exuberant narratives big enough to drive a truck through. 

Finally, at one of the afternoon sessions, a silver-haired speaker up on the dais, made the following comment to his colleagues, almost as a half-joking aside. He said, “You know I was telling my daughter about all this the other day and she looked at me and said, that all sounds great, dad, but what are you doing for the people in those communities?” 

And he said this in a way that clearly showed that this was a totally new concept for him: that he should bother thinking about the connection between the multi-billion dollar investment fund he ran and the impacts of its investments on the communities he was “investing” in. In his way of thinking, investment was always a good thing. 

The others on the dais sort of hemmed and hawed, awkwardly mulling that over for a moment, until one finally concluded, “Yes, I think that’s something we’re going to have to deal with, going forward,” as if to suggest that it was yet another obstacle to doing business, an annoyance, and just another cost that they needed to begrudgingly throw some money into the investment return calculations to account for. 

With only one or two notable exceptions, the majority of the audience seemed to concur. It would be another challenge and cost of doing business, but by no means an integral part of anyone’s development plans. Many even acknowledged that the opportunity zone legislation pretty much guaranteed displacement and gentrification of existing communities. But, they concluded that’s just how it is. 

It was then that it became clear to me what was wrong with this whole picture. The Opportunity Zone legislation was not just about doing “business as usual” with extra tax incentives. It was, as one CPA on a panel put it, “tax advantages on steroids” without any requirements for public benefits, whatsoever. 

In my recent articles, I’ve been arguing that we should be tapping private capital instead of taxing private capital in order to address affordable housing challenges. The OZ regulations were clearly a chance to do that, except Congress flat out blew it. 

Opportunities squandered 

You can’t pick up a newspaper these days without reading about the affordable housing crisis or the impacts of climate change. So why were the opportunity zone regulations written without any public policy goal requirements? Why aren’t its tax benefits tied to creating affordable housing, or mitigating environmental impacts, or providing public transportation, or using green building methods, or protecting existing residents from displacement and unwanted gentrification? Or what about jobs creation, worker education and training, paying a living wage, or environmental preservation and restoration? There are also no provisions in the legislation to benefit local residents or local, community-serving businesses. And there is no consideration given to the unique challenges that smaller, local developers face. 

Apparently, we are just collateral damage. 

If we’re going to give the investment banking / development community what one tax expert on a panel called “the biggest tax benefits in recent U.S. history,” don’t we want the outcomes to be tied to the biggest socioeconomic challenges we face? Why just give it all away? 

How else are we going to pay to mitigate the impacts of this new development – with drinking water taxes like our new Governor wants to do? 

At present, none of these issues are addressed in the OZ regulations. And that’s a tragedy, because it would have been relatively easy to create a point scale system, whereby the more public benefits a development provided the greater the tax benefits the investor would receive. We had a golden opportunity to address a long list of public policy goals, which has been squandered for no purpose other than to enhance private profits. 

When are we going to stop giving away the store in the misguided belief that “the market” will solve everything on its own? 

It won’t. 

Worse still, we have the attention of some of the best and brightest problem solvers in the financial industry, and we’ve wasted that once in a lifetime opportunity. If there’s any way to make a buck doing the right thing, I’m confident this group would find it. But they need the guidance of well-crafted tax law to do it. 

The shortcomings of the OZ tax scheme 

The list of what is wrong with the OZ legislation is long, but here are a few examples. 

Maps are dumb 

The opportunity zone incentives are based on maps of every parcel in the entire country. These “top down” maps were drawn by bureaucrats in Washington DC and Sacramento, sitting around looking at census statistics. The result is counter-productive, because no one in Sacramento is smart enough to look at a map from 10,000 feet and tell what is or is not a real estate investment opportunity or even more ridiculously where and what types of uses should or should not be built. It's like a form of reverse "red-lining." 

Investment opportunities in communities are a fluid phenomenon that are in a constant state of change, depending on an ungainly list of things like competition, market demand, terms of purchase, local conditions, government regulatory changes, interest rates, available financing, the economy and the whims of millions of people who are not always rational actors. That is why on-the-ground brokers and developers know best what is or is not the place to build this or that type of use at any given time. That is why if given specific incentives to develop specific types of uses (such as affordable housing), they will be best at figuring out exactly how to do that profitably. 

For example, in a number of Bay Area cities that I’ve studied, the opportunity zone maps only identify only single family zoned neighborhoods as opportunity zones. But areas with existing multifamily zoning nearby are not included. Dumber still, adjacent commercially zoned areas (where mixed-use would likely be preferable and potential jobs could be created right next to existing housing) are not included either. 

Looking at the maps, one has to ask what genius made these decisions. 

“Opportunity investments” not “Opportunity Zones” 

The “market” knows how to efficiently allocate capital and maximize return better than bureaucrats and planners, regardless of what type of development is allowed. We should have legislation that lets them do that. However, if we want to solve our current socioeconomic challenges, the gift of tax deferral and forgiveness needs to be tied directly to development of things we need, such as affordable housing and using green building methods, or mitigations against community destroying gentrification and the wholesale displacement of the residents of low income communities. 

The OZ legislation fails to do that. 

The OZ legislation ensures gentrification, displacement and concentration of poverty 

Because the Opportunity Zone maps intentionally outline parcels in low income census tracts, but include no affordable housing or other public benefit requirements, they absolutely guarantee that if housing is built in those areas, it will be luxury housing and result in displacement and gentrification. Or if any affordable housing is built – to be in compliance with local in-lieu requirements -- the OZ approach absolutely ensures that low income people will remain concentrated in existing low income neighborhoods, contradicting the stated public policy goal of providing affordable housing throughout the SF Bay Area. 

For example, Marin County has almost no opportunity zone areas identified, because we are not a low income census tract. That’s really dumb and proof why maps are dumb to begin with. So as written, the Opportunity Zone legislation ensures the status quo. It guarantees that no investor will have any incentive to build affordable housing in Marin, which is precisely where we want and need it to be built. 

If our goal is to have affordable housing built in every community throughout the region, then there have to be incentives to make that happen... everywhere. 

The OZ legislation offers nothing to small entrepreneurs and local developers 

One thing that became abundantly clear at the OZ event was that the Opportunity Zone rules are complex. As such, the “opportunities” are largely inaccessible for the average local developer. It’s not that the law excludes anyone from taking advantage of its benefits and it is likely that some of these benefits will prove valuable to smaller development projects once all the technical regulations are released. But the price of admission will be steep. 

The panelists strongly advised that anyone considering entering this investment landscape needs to hire the best possible legal and tax advice money can buy, because there are so many uncertainties. The panelists also readily admitted that the regulations favor the biggest and best funded development and investment banking / fund advisor interests, who can afford appropriate legal representation. 

So, how would a small to mid-sized developer or an agency in a small city stand a chance of getting in this game without the benefit of a high-priced Washington DC-based law firm essentially lobbying for them? 

Scrape and built is favored? 

It appears that the legislation is written to heavily favor “scrape and build” development projects, which it refers to as “substantial improvement.” And because the OZ legislation includes onerous time period provisions within which an investor must invest and actual construction must begin (a maximum of 30 months for everything including receiving entitlements), it seems the law is mostly targeted to fund “shovel ready” projects at a large scale. 

Most small to mid-sized developers need considerable time to put their deal and financing together, while major funding aggregators are building up war chests from their major clients to be ready to fund projects on short notice. 

Some panelists also suggested that in some instances an IRS private letter ruling might be required to green-light a project, which assumes that a small developer could afford that kind of high-priced legal counsel. 

Investment benefits only go to those who have capital gains to defer 

It’s pretty clear that beneficiaries of the OZ legislation will be predominately the very wealthy, because the only kind of capital that qualifies for the tax benefits is unrealized capital gains. Anyone wanting to just invest cash in an affordable housing project, for example, does not qualify for the tax benefits (I consider this a major flaw, particularly as it relates to smaller projects that are more difficult to finance). 

The OZ legislation works well for large asset management and investment advisory firms, who are amassing pools of capital, but how many small developers or small city agencies know individuals who have a few million in unrealized capital gains lying around, to invest? Probably very few, which is a problem, because there’s little chance that any of the funds aggregating billions of investment dollars will even look at a project for a 25 unit apartment building or anything that is not of institutional size (150 units or more).

I assume this is all well and good for MTC and the corporate interests that brought us the CASA Housing Compact, but once again, this does next to nothing to increase the capital available for smaller, infill affordable housing development that we so desperately need.

Legislation gone wild? 

The whole thing is just upside down. My guess is that 90% of all the tax benefits will go to the very top and 90% of the impacts will be unnecessarily borne by everyone else. The OZ legislation is business as usual and offers little to help us solve our affordable housing challenges from the ground up, in a community-serving and environmentally sustainable way. 

Because this tax giveaway fails to create a nexus between market forces and public policy goals, it all but guarantees that the rich will get richer, extracting wealth out of our communities, while the rest of us will pay the costs of the impacts by way of increased taxes and fees and penalties that will be needed to fund those same unfulfilled public policy goals. 

Some will argue with this... something about the importance of letting "animal spirits" run free, or whatever. But my bet is that our short-term and often too-clever schemes need start considering the bigger picture if there is any hope of preserving our liberal democratic institutions in the future. 

Xenophobia. It’s a fifty-dollar word with, for good reason, Greek roots. It means fear of foreigners, and it goes all the way back in the western tradition to the ancient Greeks and their Roman successors.

It’s not limited to the western tradition either. There’s plenty of xenophobia in the rest of the world, ancient and contemporary. For a while, some hoped that it was fading, at least in some quarters, and that it had been vanquished by modern internationalism.

Even Disneyland, not known as a shrine to liberalism, has had for decades the ear-worming anthem “It’s a Small World, Isn’t It?” President Barack Obama is the child of international exchange, as is Senator Kamala Harris, though both have voluntarily embraced the USA’s historic African American culture created by the descendants of those who were enslaved here.

Well, perhaps not 100% voluntarily. Racism is a special gloss on xenophobia, marked by onus against dark-skinned people in particular. Those infected by racism regard Black and Brown foreigners, regardless of culture, as barbarians, another Greek word, labelling them as uncivilized. Obama and Harris experience the prejudice against African Americans despite their backgrounds . 

The xenophobic tradition seems to be baked into human nature. It’s not surprising to see it exhibited by the truly uncivilized vulgarian who is now the president of the United States, but even the apparently civil can be infected by it 

Once upon a time I was walking around historic London and happened upon a kindly-seeming vicar in his charming little churchyard. He delivered a learned lecture on the origin and architecture of his church, and then without provocation launched into a vitriolic lecture about the savage nature of the Irish. Needless to say, I did not introduce myself by my married name. 

There’s a book called “How the Irish Became White”, and though some of its premises are dubious the title illustrates a path to privilege which is open to some immigrants but not others. Many ethnic groups were despised by those here when they came, but gradually assimilated into the dominant White sector because they were able to blend in visually. 

It’s interesting to see that today’s white supremacists are adopting the language and rituals of the Know-Nothings, who hated Catholics and Jews when they first arrived in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. My husband’s maternal great grandfather, raised a Quaker, was roundly denounced in the small Dakota town where he lived in the early 20^th Century because he sold land to Slavic Catholics to build their church. 

Every day this week we have seen the unseemly spectacle of technology being used by a man two generations away from some immigrants and serially married to two others to denounce members of the U.S. House of Representatives with similar backgrounds. Ironically, the ancient Romans regarded his presumptive distant ancestors, the tribal Germani, as primitive barbarians. It wasn’t that long ago that there was prejudice here against German immigrants like his grandfather, as any reader of Little Women can discover. 

Not, of course, that he reads books. 

I notice in the opinion section of Sunday’s New York Times that two ordinarily reliable columnists, Maureen Dowd and Nicolas Kristof, seemed to be struck almost speechless by the week’s spectacle. Their horror is engendered not so much by Trump’s appalling behavior, which has become the norm, but by the spinelessness of the party formerly known as Republican, the heir to the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and even on their good days Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. Trump makes Ol’ Tricky Dick look like a statesman, Ronny like a mensch. 

But after you’ve said that, what else is there to say? When you look around the world, you see a whole array of equally tragicomic figures running other countries. The new head of the Ukraine is a professional comic, and might not even be a bad guy. The president of Guatemala is another comedian, with not much else to recommend him. Soon-to-be British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is another clown, though only semi-pro . And then there are the not-funny tyrants, e.g. Duterte of the Phillipines . 

So Planet Earth’s in the hands of hooligans, and our very own hooligan-in-chief is entertaining himself by hurling racist epithets at a quartet of young women of color. 

But actually, not to worry. 

If perchance we good guys can get our act together, we’ve got Trump outnumbered. If sensible women and progressive dark-skinned people stick together, it might not be too long before some semblance of sanity is restored to the world. (Though this optimistic prediction ignores the fact that Duterte is a person of color and Theresa May is a woman…) 

With climate change breathing down our collective necks, we must rely on Dr. Johnson’s famous observation: “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” 

So, we (men, women and others, of all complexions) have about two weeks to get our act together. Time to concentrate. 

Here’s another quote about hanging, this one from an American, Benjamin Franklin: “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”  

If those powerful old white guys who think they can control the fate of the world don’t learn to work with the black, brown and non-male majority, we’ll all be in the soup together. You’d hope that even a few corporate Republicans would be worried enough to just get along. 

The Adeline Corridor Plan's Transportation element is ill thought-out and unacceptable.

This DEIR proposes to reduce Adeline Street's transportation capacity by 33%, simply to create a curiously ill-defined "Public Space Opportunity Area," which "may include landscaped areas, plazas and programmed events." The authors arrogantly wave away the lost capacity as "excess right-of-way.";

Adeline Street is – like it or not – a vital transportation corridor in and out of Berkeley. It serves buses as well as private cars, and enables commuting by Berkeley residents who need to work in other cities to support ourselves.

What responsible planning document would propose to cut 33% of capacity with no specific offsetting goal? It seems clear what's happened here: There is no goal, and no real planning.

This document simply reflects the casual anti-automobile bias of its Berkeley-dwelling consultant (Philip Erickson), who has an amply-expressed personal axe to grind; and of certain planners on the City's staff. Just block 33% of the carrying capacity; force the remaining evil motorists into artificial congestion; and...um, we'll do...you know, something with the repurposed land that previous generations' real planners had laid out to serve transportation needs.; 

So procedurally, this DEIR element reflects both conflicts of interest and a lack of professional analysis or results. It seems to embody specific consultant and staff goals, rather than the public's aspirations or input. I should note here that I'm writing as a daily bicycle and public-transit commuter. However, I value transparency in policy-making, and honesty in evaluating environmental impacts. 

In terms of those environmental impacts, I see no real gain from forcing traffic into artificial congestion. Conversely, there are real CEQA-relevant detriments. Slower-moving traffic is less-efficient traffic. Therefore, this plan proposes to worsen pollutant emissions – a local impact directly affecting South Berkeley's underserved communities of color – and to magnify Berkeley's carbon footprint. 

Especially with no clearly-defined goal for the converted space, the environmental detriments of drastically narrowing Adeline arguably outweigh any benefits. This element should not be pursued or implemented. 

It's very odd that Berkeley residents are being informed of this DEIR just 48 hours before the deadline for comments. I would like to thank the Mayor and his office for at least getting the word out (in his July 17 newsletter) before the public was entirely excluded from this process.