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A BERKELEY ACTIVIST'S DIARY: week ending Feb. 5, 2023
In another time, pre-pandemic, I would be standing in line at the Shattuck Cinemas to see “All That Breathes” , the Academy Award nominated documentary film of two brothers in New Delhi who rescue black kite birds.
The ten theatres with the murals so many of us love are closed and on the demolition block to make way for 2065 Kittredge. In place of the Shattuck Cinemas, once the economic engine of the downtown with over 300,000 patrons annually from the entire Bay Area and beyond, will stand student housing. It is a development many will applaud, with 187 units (including four live/work and nine very low income units) stacked into eight stories, with 4,993 square feet of commercial space at street level and 43 parking spaces underground. The nine very low income units qualify the project for a density bonus and added height and California Senate Bill 330 limits review to five meetings including the appeal on January 31 to City Council.
The appeal to City Council was not brought by unhappy neighbors protesting the planting of an oversize tower lording over their little houses. This appeal was brought by Adams, Broadwell, Joseph and Cardozo on behalf of East Bay Residents for Responsible Development. East Bay Residents for Responsible Development are our local skilled and trained workforce, union workers like plumbers, electricians, and sheet metal workers and local residents seeking to complete apprenticeship training. They were not trying to stop the project, they were asking for the hiring of local union trade workers, healthcare, apprenticeships and safe working conditions.
You can read the complaint in pages 63 – 80 https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2023-01-31%20Item%2021%20ZAB%20Appeal%202065%20Kittredge%20Street.pdf
The applicant for 2065 Kittredge is William “Bill” Shrader (developer/builder) with CA Student Living Berkeley, LLC as the property owner, which is Student Living – CA Ventures, an international investor in student housing based in Chicago, with European headquarters in London and offices in Milan, Barcelona and Amsterdam. The big investors have come to town.
There was a lot that came to light. Bill Shrader, who has several active projects in Berkeley, said he ran an open shop and less than 40% of workers were union. Healthcare coverage is not provided.
The Hard Hat ordinance, authored by Mayor Arreguin with councilmembers Bartlett, Hahn and Taplin as supporters, which was central to the complaint as the conditions sought by the workers, is so far a big nothing. The ordinance described in the September 20, 2022 City Council agenda as “Helping Achieve Responsible Development with Healthcare and Apprenticeship Training Standards (HARD HATS) Referral” languishes somewhere in the bowels of city administration as a referral to the City Manager and the City Attorney. It is a referral likely to wither and die with big money on the plate. At the very least it is months, possibly years, away from turning into legislation (local law).
The appellants visited seven worksites in Berkeley and sent photos of findings of unsafe conditions to the City for action. While it was acknowledged at the hearing that the City received the photos and is acting on the unsafe work conditions, the public was given no information as to the sites or the extent of the conditions.
The City Council voted unanimously to dismiss the appeal and approve 2065 Kittredge with Arreguin’s “modifications from the floor.” The added conditions sounded as though the issues from the unions were recognized. Actually, Shrader received a green light to proceed. Shrader only has to consider the feasibility of an apprenticeship program, only consider making contributions to healthcare, and make a good faith effort to hire residents living within 10 miles of the project. The only binding modification that Arreguin added and the council approved is for Shrader to send an affidavit (report), after all the work is done and the building is ready for the students to move in, of the number of union workers and local workers within 10 miles of the project who actually worked at the Kittredge job site.
The other big news of the week was that the Department of Housing and Community Development Division of Housing Policy Development (HCD) rejected the Berkeley Housing Element for the years 2023 – 2031. The contract with the consultants Rami + Associates, hired for $540,000 to “perform professional planning services” for the Housing Element, doesn’t expire until May 15, 2023, so maybe they can still pull it out of the rejection bag.
The plan sent to HCD was based on an Environmental Impact Report for adding 15,001 new dwelling units, 6,067 more than the assigned 8,934. In all of the maps and charts in the Housing Element sent to HCD, not one of them showed the fault line, running through the hills, the slide areas and the high fire hazard zones where we shouldn’t be adding more housing. Nor was there any mapping of liquefaction and flood plains. These things ought to be of higher consideration after the atmospheric river put the hillside and at least one house on the move.
The day before the HCD letter arrived the January 29, 2023 San Francisco Chronicle edition published back in section E page 7, “Population in Bay Area, state continues to decline.”
The entire Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) and mandate for the updated Housing Element is based on enormous population growth. There is a major disconnect between the facts on the ground of declining population which is a good thing and HCD growth projections.
The January 30, 2023 letter from HCD is finally posted for the public to read on the City Housing Element Update webpage by clicking on the words “formal comments.” There is the call for upzoning (increasing density with multi-unit projects) in high resource areas (wealthy neighborhoods) and more importantly the housing element “…should include additional actions beyond housing improvements such as infrastructure,
streetscapes, active transportation, community amenities, parks, and other
community improvements...”
It is the call for parks that I love. If we are going to add more people or even if we don’t, parks rejuvenate us. One of my favorite books An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong is #6 on the SF Chronicle bestsellers list. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer has been on the SF best seller list for months. These are wonderful books about nature. People love nature. Parks filled with birds and butterflies bring the awesome world around us right to us. Strawberry Creek Park is a magnate for people. Just imagine how lovely the Civic Center Park could be with restoring Strawberry Creek to its natural state (daylighting).
For all the bad news, the HCD rejection there is opportunity here. We should be adding and enhancing our parks.
There are times and places for entertainment. We can do a lot more with taking advantage of the BART Plaza and downtown for festivals. The times Shattuck Avenue has been closed to traffic and open for events, it was filled with people making activating the street a real thing.
And it isn’t just parks, we have our own part in nature by making connections with creating habitat for birds and butterflies where ever we live. Go back to the January 29 Activist’s Diary and read Erin Diehm’s gardening directions steps 1 to 5.
In case you missed it, at the Community for a Cultural Civic Center on January 30th, former mayor Tom Bates suggested that since the Civic Center buildings (old city hall-Maudelle Shirek and the Veterans Building) are in need of millions of dollars of seismic upgrade, maybe the city should give the buildings to UC.
In the “go to meeting” of the week, the Monday Agenda and Rules Committee with the Droste proposals, one to further limit public comment at City Council meetings and the other to limit legislation to one item per year per each councilmember, Arreguin kept the attendees hanging on for nearly two hours, until 4:20 pm. That is when Arreguin finally said he opposed former Councilmember Droste’s measure to limit public comment at city meetings. He wasn’t even sure if it was legal. After public comment Arreguin and Vice Mayor Bartlett voted to make a negative recommendation to Council on the Droste public comment proposal.
Another important statement at the meeting was by Todd Darling, who described South Berkeley as a “pin cushion of projects,” consultants as a rubber stamp for the Planning Department and the need for a better process—that the Planning Department which is dependent on developer fees selects consultants who go along with developers’ wishes and intentions, and this is not in the public interest.
The Droste proposal on legislation will come back again. The proposal to add Youth to the Climate and Environment Commissions will show up at a future Council meeting with three options. Arreguin and Bartlett were not in favor of allowing BUSD making the appointments, pointing out that BUSD has not been filling all the vacant commission spots.
What is the saying? “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” I am for BUSD making the appointments not the council. The council already has nine spots.
The Commission on Disability has only two commissioners and seven open spots. We need a robust Commission on Disability with the challenges impacting the disabled community in street redesign. As stated at one of the many meetings on the Hopkins corridor Plan, there are at least as many disabled persons as bicyclists.
Pete Buttegieg was making the rounds this last week on pedestrian deaths. In one interview he noted, pedestrian deaths increased after the implementation of Vision Zero in Los Angeles. Vision Zero is supposed to eliminate traffic deaths through narrowing streets with road diets, bulb outs, bike lanes and such. https://www.fastcompany.com/90841997/this-is-a-preventable-crisis-pete-buttigieg-on-spending-800-million-to-eliminate-traffic-deaths
In the interview I caught, Buttegieg skirted commenting on vehicle design. I suppose to avoid giving the GOP more bait with adding SUVs and light trucks to their list of threats: “They (Democrats) are coming for your guns and gas stoves.”
Next time you look at an SUV or truck compare that to a car. It is that high front end that restricts visibility and hits people in the chest. These vehicles come with a deadly cost. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2021/07/27/study-americas-suv-jag-spurred-pedestrian-death-surge/
My own opinion is evolving as a pedestrian and a driver following the furor over the Hopkins Corridor Plan. I had a bunch of errands to run for a friend sick with COVID (now is not the time to skip that N95 mask) and drove up Hopkins from Gilman to Sutter. Hopkins is already narrow and its state of moderate disrepair slows traffic.
I made a third trip at dusk to pick up Paxlovid from Kaiser Oakland and drove back after dark on Telegraph then Shattuck. The street lighting high above the tree canopy doesn’t do much for pedestrians nearly all dressed in black. Only one cyclist of the handful had a bike light and that was in the front, not the back.
I am coming to the point where I do not believe bike lanes on busy streets reduces injuries and fatalities. In fact, bike lanes seem to give the bicyclist a false unwarranted sense of safety. That is not what the consultants, road diet enthusiasts and bicyclists want to hear.
Politicians love newly repaved streets, and of course all the repaving and redesign keeps the engineers, repaving companies and transportation administration happy. It also quiets complaining residents. If you want to speed up vehicle traffic and increase traffic deaths, then the way to do it is repave the streets. If you want more people to die in an emergency, then do what Paradise, California did, put evacuation routes on a road diet.
I’d like to go back to the pandemic slow streets. Maybe put an island in the middle of Monterey at Hopkins. Otherwise fix the potholes and leave the rest alone. There are plenty of other ways to spend taxpayer money. And repairing ecosystems sits higher on my priority list.
Not so long ago, a friend sent the link to the article “Addressing Climate Change Will Not Save the Planet” by Christopher Ketcham in the Intercept. Ketcham is correct. Climate change was not the cause of 69% loss of total wildlife populations between 1970 and 2018. That was us. https://theintercept.com/2022/12/03/climate-biodiversity-green-energy/
The cause of the biodiversity crisis, more aptly described as the biodiversity apocalypse,g is deforestation, overgrazing of livestock, monocrop agriculture, megafauna kill-off, soil degradation, habitat fragmentation, pollution, open pit and mountain top mining, depleted fresh water, toxification of rainfall, destruction of ecosystems. The constant is a dysfunctional system of perpetual growth of economies and population.
Warren M. Hern, physician, anthropologist, epidemiologist, writes that the earth cannot be saved without identifying the disease process, the diagnosis and that is Homo Ecophagus, “the man who devours the ecosystem.”
Homo Ecophagus: A Deep Diagnosis to Save the Earth is not the kind of book you will find on any shelf in Governor Ron DeSantis’ Florida, where anything that might make a child uncomfortable or challenge the thinking of college students like classes on race must be removed and censured.
There is a lot in Hern’s book as he lays out how he reached his diagnosis of the disease process. Hern describes the harsh truths we wish to deny. The book is also filled with beautiful photographs, charts and stories of his travels to remote villages in South America and hiking in the Colorado wilderness.
Hern describes the tension between denial and the diagnosis, the wanting to turn away from the facts. The diagnosis is grim, humans as a cancer devouring the planet, but not hopeless if we accept the urgency and choose to act with immediacy.
Douglas Tallamy gives hope too. There is a challenge here, restoring biodiversity, restoring ecosystems. Joining the Homegrown National Park is a movement that can bring endless pleasure in the amazing world around us. Will we grab it?
The psychology professor in the nursing program in my college classes, lectured endlessly on the capacity for denial. I never believed her.
After graduation, I remember vividly as a young nurse standing in the room when the physician walked in to give the results of surgery to one of my assigned patients. It was 1970,ggg three years before the first CT scanner was installed in the U.S. In 1970 surgeons performed “exploratory” surgery. The physician told my patient he was sorry, she had an aggressive cancer that had spread. There was nothing he could do, it was inoperable. It was terrible news, a death sentence. After the doctor left the room. My patient turned to me and said, “Isn’t it wonderful, my doctor told me I am going to be just fine.”
