Editorials

Here we are again, week 3 or is it 5 or 35 or 53 of lockdown, and the president of the United States of America is still crazy as a hoot owl. A friend in The East called me in some alarm yesterday, because she’d just watched her first Trump daily press conference, and she noticed that his discourse wandered wildly all over the place to no particular point. Well, yes.

Myself, I’ve already seen too many of them, so I hadn’t watched this one. After she called I dutifully looked on YouTube for the recording, just to see how much had changed, and I realized that I couldn’t distinguish among the available presidential press conferences except by the color of Trump’s ugly crotch-skimming ties.

Here in limbo facts of all kinds have started to drift. Thanks to Zoom and its competitors I’ve been able to chat with seldom-seen friends and experience all kinds of interesting information dumps, but I can’t necessarily remember what day of the week it is.

And I’m not alone in that. The online New York Times informed us today that Charles Blow would be Twittering on Wednesday, April 7. Well, no.  

I now know a whole lot more about immunology than I’d ever hoped to, thanks to a couple of really excellent programs presented online last week by Caltech and UCSF. Folks, we’re in deep trouble, but you knew that, didn’t you?  

It looks like my cohort might be expected, if we’re lucky, to spend all of our remaining golden years at home under wraps, kind of like a Faberge egg in a Czarist palace, as the world waits for a vaccine or at least a reliable antibody test. Not much fun really, so let’s talk about something completely different instead.  

That would be the new shape of the city of the future, if and when we get to the future. Here’s a clue: this New York Times story : Density Is New York City’s Big ‘Enemy’ in the Coronavirus Fight.  

In the blink of an eye, we’ve gone from offering bonuses to developers for including density to density as the enemy. Here’s a good article on the changes which might be in store for cities like Berkeley with the new distrust of density for density’s sake: The Geography of Coronavirus by Richard Florida. 

Being stuck at my desk with only the internet for diversion allowed me to take part in the online version of another conference I might never have attended otherwise. 

The statewide advocacy group Livable California invited participants in a Saturday Zoom event to “chat with urban planner Peter Calthorpe, a leading density advocate who stunned Silicon Valley this year by slamming SB 50’s attempted upzoning of residential areas. 

“Amidst COVID-19 turmoil, Peter will discuss why the legislature should end its divisive fixation on upzoning our residential neighborhoods. He’ll discuss focusing future housing in commercial corridors.” 

I’d been familiar with Calthorpe’s work since he was one of the original advocates of what was then called the New Urbanism as well as an early advocate of Smart Growth. Transit-Oriented Development is one of his signature coinages. His Berkeley-based planning design firm is world renowned, with considerable work in China. 

For some years he’s been a resident of Berkeley’s Claremont district, an original transit oriented development as one of the turn of the 20^th century “streetcar suburbs”, though the streetcars are long gone. Years ago I attended some sort of political fundraiser in the garden of his lovely home. 

All of these buzz-worded trends added up to one core assertion: We can have it all with the right planning. Developers can continue to amass fat profits without causing too much environmental damage. There’s no limit to economic growth, even in the Bay Area. 

Before the big bang of COVID-19, groups like Livable California had already begun to suggest that California’s purported housing crisis might be caused by too many jobs, not just too little housing production. Peter Calthorpe has always been a Growth guy, albeit Smart, so the contentious world of land use advocates was shaken when he denounced what we might call Wienerism. That’s the endless push to wrest control of land use from local governments and put it under state control. 

San Francisco Senator Scott Wiener started it all. He has been aided and abetted by a coterie of state legislators who get major campaign funding from the development industry lobby, including Berkeley’s own representatives, State Senator Nancy Skinner and Assemblymember Buffy Wicks. 

Last year’s AB50, his latest attempt, went down to defeat as did some predecessors, but there are several more in the hopper for this year. One of them has Ms. Wicks’ fingerprints all over it. 

Calthorpe’s informal presentation, complete with attractive power point illustrations and charts, sketched out his alternative to the Wiener-Skinner-Wicks ideology of mandating multiple unit developments in most of California’s “single family” neighborhoods, facilitated by drastic upzoning. His drawing board was El Camino Real, the wide and long drag that runs six lanes and more the length of the Peninsula where he grew up. 

His scheme repopulated a string of one-story strip malls and parking lots with a charming-appearing combination of 4-6 story apartment buildings, ground floor shops and offices. mature trees, park benches and the obligatory bicycle lanes. 

The most interesting innovation was presented as a mass alternative to private vehicles, “Autonomous Rapid Transit”. This is self-driving electric vans which move speedily through dedicated lanes but also go off route to deliver passengers directly to destinations. But will we want to share any small compartments with strangers after 2020? 

In Saturday’s conference Calthorpe suggested that all of California’s current housing needs could be met by rebuilding the numerous similar strips which exist throughout California as he envisions. Will it work? 

We’ve got a brave new world in front of us post-COVID, and what the goals of planning will be is not clear. Iconic contemporary concepts like urbanism, density and public transit might be challenged after the necessity of mandated physical separation under the odd name of Social Distancing. 

Now usage of mass transit is dominated by people of color who work in the service industries. If crowded BART cars will be considered toxic for the next 18 months, more service workers will prefer to drive in from Tracy in their funky old cars. Mass transit might lose its appeal, along with increased urban density 

As the excellent Charles Blow points out in today’s New York Times, social distancing is a privilege for those of us who have comfortable homes to work from when offices are closed, and pleasant—yes—back yards to sit in when the parks are closed, or perhaps balconies on apartments where residents can grow some tomatoes if they can't go to the beach. 

Bruce Brugman, my old boss at the San Francisco Bay Guardian in the 70s and 80s, used to fulminate against two main villains, PG&E and the Manhattanization of San Francisco, for which he was roundly mocked by subsequent post-millenial generations. He’s been proved right, in spades, on the former topic, and insofar as he’s been able to slow down the Manhattanization of the Bay Area in the last half-century he’ll probably turn out to have been prematurely right on that one too.