Page One

Full confession: I live on a Transit Corridor in a house without a backyard, so I sympathize with people who complain when their blocks are designated as urban sacrifice zones. Many of Berkeley’s Transit Corridors (translation: bus routes) have actual humans living right on them, or near them. The Amazing South Shattuck Flying House in the last Planet, though on the 43 bus route in a commercial zone, is surrounded by homes. Streets like my street became Transit Corridors in the first place because residents of Neighborhoods (translation: side streets) didn’t want cars (or, godforbid, buses) mucking up their lovely blocks. The barrier explosion of the early seventies re-routed all that nasty traffic onto just a few streets (MLK, Ashby, Sacramento, Sixth, University, San Pablo, Shattuck), and their residents were told to shut up and smell the diesel. 

Now, however, they’re being asked to sacrifice still more. The powers that be (translation: builders and their pawns) have decreed that open space in Santa Rosa is better than open space in Berkeley. If you don’t agree, you’re obviously a dreaded NIMBY (translation: Not In My Back Yard, a slogan coined by the victims of the Love Canal toxic waste scandal, but expropriated by developers to disparage anyone who doesn’t like their projects). 

What’s wrong, you might ask, with backyards? In these pages, we’ve been featuring splendid art created by Berkeleyans like Marcia Donahue in their back and even front yards. The series is a tribute to my late mother-in-law, the artist Mary Holmes, who always wanted to do a book about home-based art called “Yes! In My Back Yard!” but never got around to it because she was too busy making art. Berkeley yards are home to many of these treasures and other wonderful gardens. Everyone can enjoy them. I pass maybe 30 fantastic yards in my 20-minute walk to work. 

Berkeley is the third densest town in the Bay Area, the 15th densest in the country. Yet residents of south, west and central Berkeley living on or near transit routes are being assaulted by self-righteous preachers who tell them that it’s their civic duty to accept still more crowding. 

Such urban evangelists typically live in nice single-family houses in the hills, or at least the foothills, of North Berkeley, or perhaps in Piedmont. Sometimes they’re even Architectural Historians, self-anointed priests of haut-design who deride the modest frame Victorians which are the historic resources of the flatter parts of Berkeley. 

Some have second homes in nice places like Bolinas or Soda Springs or even Paris. One business school professor who is an investor in a University Avenue multiplex is rumored to own five or six houses around the world, in addition to his architect-designed home in the hills. 

They are often healthy folks in the prime of mid-life, equipped by genetics and luck to ride bicycles and go backpacking in the mountains. But what about Berkeley residents who have a hard time getting out of town to see nature, and who can’t use bicycles for transportation? 

I’m talking here about the 60-something guy with arthritic knees, still working two jobs, who wants a little cookout in his South Shattuck yard on a Sunday night. Try telling him he can get from his Hayward job to his Antioch job and home again using ever-shrinking AC Transit. He needs that old car and a place to park it near home if he’s ever going to have enough free time for his cookout. He doesn’t deserve a three-story dormitory built right up to his lot line, stealing the sunshine from his tomato plants and the privacy from his, yes, Backyard. It’s  

the worst kind of elitism to say that bicycling or hiking is morally superior to gardening, barbecuing or just sitting on the front porch on a nice evening. (And no, this is not an invitation to go off on meat-eating or air-pollution, though it will look like that to some fanatic Berkeleyans.) 

The mantra of Affordable Housing is sometimes invoked as an excuse for the Cram-‘em-In theory of urban design. That’s a topic for another day and more statistics. For now, let’s just say that “affordable” housing, contrary to what many of us used to think, doesn’t necessarily mean low-cost. To be continued.