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Seven-story ‘monster building’ is unacceptable 

Editor: 

On Tuesday, July 24, the Berkeley City Council will consider development proposals for the publicly owned Oxford Parking Lot (on Oxford Street at Kittredge). Although a moderate recommendation from the Planning Commission will be on the table, the Council may receive last-minute proposals for a structure as high as seven stories. Our Councilmembers need to hear that any such monster building is unacceptable on this sensitive site, which provides crucial breathing room for the UC campus’ edge. 

City officials and private parties have suggested many components for a future Oxford Lot structure: affordable housing, performance space, and offices for a proposed “David Brower Center.” All are legitimate goals that deserve to be accommodated somewhere in Berkeley. But whether they belong on this particular block depends on the price that the public must pay in lost open space, trees, and views to the hills. 

A seven-story building here would flatly violate Oxford Street’s zoning, which sets a maximum height of three stories with bonuses up to five stories. It would also violate the City’s carefully written 1990 Downtown Plan, which establishes Oxford Street as a firebreak between an expanding downtown and the campus’ traditional role as a green sanctuary. Indeed, the Downtown Plan includes statement after statement calling on the city to maintain “visual openness” and “visual access to the hills” along Oxford. 

Building a seven-story tower here would also require killing several graceful, mature trees that currently grow on the site. Worst of all, killing trees and blocking hill views in the late David Brower's name would desecrate the memory of this longtime Sierra Club leader —whose passionate defense of nature led his biographer to call him the “Archdruid” of modern environmentalism. After years as a Sierra Club member, I was privileged to finally attend a speech by Brower not long before his death last year. The Archdruid rarely minced words, and his speech that day included this (now ironic) reflection: “My life has been one long fight against developers.” 

The City’s Planning Commission has offered the Council a sensible proposal to move the Oxford Lot’s existing parking underground, while accommodating housing and the Brower Center in a new five-story structure that would comply with the zoning. And the Brower Center’s backers are sensitive to David Brower’s legacy: their proposal calls for “a welcoming, humane workspace that makes as light a ‘footprint’ on the landscape as possible.” 

Councilmembers need to hear that nothing higher than five stories should be built over the Oxford Lot; that a lower building would be welcome; and that any structure should include a generous front setback to preserve public space, views, and campus breathing room. Indeed, what better place for a David Brower Memorial Park — at least a small one? 

Finally, if a responsibly scaled project won’t “pencil out” on this sensitive site, the Council need make no apology for building absolutely nothing there — and for redirecting plans for high-density housing (and nonprofit office space) to the city’s major transit corridors. 

Michael Katz 

Berkeley 

Thanks Dona Spring for watching city planning process 

Editor: 

Regarding 2700 San Pablo Avenue.  

I have just reviewed a videotape of the May 8, ’01 Berkeley City Council meeting in which Council voted on the appeal of the proposed 2700 San Pablo Avenue development by Patrick Kennedy and Rev. Gordon Choyce. The Council voted 5 - 2 in favor of accepting a project which had not even gone through the preliminary planning process! The project accepted on appeal was not nearly the same as the one denied by the Zoning Adjustments Board. Councilmembers Dona Spring and Kriss Worthington voted against the appeal of the bastardized project.  

I feel high praise is due Councilmember Dona Spring not only for her vote but for her singular vocal opposition to what she considered was the acceptance by the Council of an end-around-run by the developers to avoid thorough review of this project. Ms. Spring also objected to the fact that, although the public hearing had been closed to input from both the developers and the public, developer Patrick Kennedy was invited by some councilmembers to then further sell his project to the Council.  

Believing that the hearing was closed, neighbors opposed to the development left the Council chamber and thus were frozen out of any of that discussion. Councilmember Spring also vigorously challenged City Planner Marc Rhoades, advocate for the project, on what appeared to be his misrepresentation of fact regarding planning staff’s position on a previous development that had been before the Council.  

Thank you Councilmember Spring for your strident vocal opposition to the perversion of the city of Berkeley planning process and for sincerely supporting the community’s right to be active participants in an uncorrupted planning process.  

Peter Teichner 

Berkeley 

Organizing and  

awareness builds 

our community 

Editor: 

Marion Syrek’s advice in her July 19 letter, to struggle at home is obviously correct. But it’s not a choice between going to the site and standing on line or staying on the job and talking with fellow workers — and there’s an issue in itself, but later. 

To do both is good, and necessary. To do either is also good and necessary. 

One of our serious problems is our concern with “The Answer.” We give lip service to the understanding that there is no one answer, and yet we, who struggle for a society in which we can all give all of us marvelously satisfying lives, we nevertheless find actions by our fellows to be the wrong ones. 

One very positive aspect of being on line — in Gothenburg, in Geneva, in Quebec and on the picket line, at schools and government and job sites — everywhere self-appointed owners meet to decide how to run our world, is the community we build among us when we do it. We who go to these anti-treaty rallies spend a lot of time working out governing processes that show us the world we want to build — that show us how to begin to facilitate organizing for us in ways that speak for all of us — to bring unity with our diversity. 

I hope everyone who is at all able gets a chance to participate with action organizing to feel and see what I’m describing. This is the church that brings us all mutual empowerment and joy, here today, now, and every day that we do it. It’s not the drugged out movement of the 60s and 70s. It’s extremely bright, alert, and searching and researching — very well informed and very much turned toward each other to check out in what directions we want to go, together. 

Norma Harrison 

Berkeley