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Since last fall, Berkeley Design Advocates (BDA), a group of architects, planners and developers, has been promoting its vision of a gentrified West Berkeley.  

As described in the organization’s newsletters and at its monthly breakfast meetings, the area around Gilman Street west of San Pablo Avenue would be transformed into something very like the new Emeryville—plus a ferry terminal.  

Gilman would become a regional retail strip mall anchored by the coming Target in Albany, off Buchanan just north of the Berkeley city line; REI on San Pablo; and a mid-size “box” store on the now vacant site at Sixth and Gilman streets. There would be housing—some mixed with retail—on both sides of Gilman and beyond. The street itself would be widened to four or six lanes, prettified with landscaping, and thereby transformed into a pedestrian corridor stretching from San Pablo all the way to the bay. And on the waterfront would be the ferry terminal, along with a hotel, some retail and more housing.  

The latest step in the BDA campaign to Emeryvillize West Berkeley was taken last Saturday at the Doubletree Hotel on the marina. The plan was to have a morning session in which several design teams prepared maps and schematic drawings embodying different aspects of the BDA vision. In the afternoon, the teams were to present their work to “political people and decisionmakers,” who, it was hoped, would come away “inspired.”  

These sessions did take place, but to judge from the opinions expressed by the dozen or so speakers who responded to the afternoon presentations, the overwhelming reaction to the BDA scheme was not inspiration, but aggravation. A few people embraced the concept of a commercialized Gilman Street neighborhood. But the great majority vigorously objected to the BDA’s disregard of the light manufacturing that currently occupies most of the area, and of the city’s official policy of industrial retention that is the heart of the West Berkeley Plan.  

The objections came from a wide range of sources: former City of Berkeley staff—an economist and a city planner—who helped to conceive and implement the West Berkeley Plan; current planning commissioners who support the plan’s goals of maintaining a diverse light manufacturing base and good blue-collar jobs; a longtime, major West Berkeley manufacturer; one of the owners of Urban Ore, which was forced by inflated property values to move from Sixth and Gilman to its present location at Folger Avenue; a resident of the area who supports light industry; and a West Berkeley artisan who helped organize the broad coalition of manufacturers, artists and artisans, African-American clergy, organized labor and property-owners that collaborated on the plan. In addition, two environmentalists protested locating a ferry terminal and other intensive development west of the freeway, the location of the Eastshore State Park, which was been in the making for decades. The ferry terminal, they said, belongs at the Berkeley Marina.  

Others who were waiting to voice their unhappiness never got a chance. The BDA organizers cut the meeting short, ending at 3:30 p.m. a discussion that, according to the notice in the Daily Planet, was supposed to have gone until 5 p.m.  

What’s particularly disturbing about the BDA campaign is that bigtime planning is being left to private parties who involve only those they think will be sympathetic to their cause. BDA held two private workshops in the fall, to which it invited only property-owners in the area, who stand to profit from the conversion of their land from industrial to retail and housing uses. Few of the manufacturers whose businesses are on or near Gilman Street were notified. Nor were they notified about the event at the Doubletree last Saturday. The citizens who attended the meeting found out about it through other means.  

Of course, BDA is a private group, under no obligation to alert the public at large to its doings. The City of Berkeley, on the other hand, is a public entity with obligations to the whole community, not just special interests within it. In particular, city staff have responsibility to carry out policies formulated through public planning processes and enacted into law by the City Council—for example, the West Berkeley Plan. That plan was worked out in over a decade of intensive collaboration among many varied stakeholders, and then unanimously approved in 1993 by the City Council.  

In recent years, it has become increasingly apparent that city staff have not been upholding the West Berkeley Plan’s goal of retaining light industry. Nor have staff followed through on the plan’s protections for artists and artisans, whom the Berkeley Zoning Ordinance counts as industrial. The city doesn’t even know how much industry we have in Berkeley, due to staff’s failure to do the comprehensive inventory of manufacturing space that is one of the basic tasks stipulated by the plan. If you don’t know what exists, you can’t enforce the rules that protect it. Questions have also been raised about the city attorney’s behind-the-scenes, stroke-of-the-pen alteration of the law intended to prevent gratuitous conversion of industrial space to other uses.  

With the dot-com bust, the threat of gentrification in West Berkeley now comes from the development of retail and housing not offices. We do need housing—at least affordable housing—but West Berkeley is the only part of the city zoned for manufacturing, and there are other places in town where it can go. Ditto for retail: As I said to the BDA presenters last Saturday afternoon, “You should be helping us revitalize retail in downtown and along San Pablo Avenue.”  

The West Berkeley Plan worked: Whereas other cities let their industrial sectors languish, we still have a manufacturing district. An independent consultants’ report on the local economy made last summer to the University of California stated that Berkeley’s industrial market “historically reflect[s] one of the lowest vacancy rates in the region.”  

Americans have suddenly become aware that in an industrialized world, a solid manufacturing sector is essential to a nation’s continued prosperity, and to its people’s ability to enter the middle class and stay there. Instead of ignoring the threats to our light industry and the people it employs, or, worse yet, contributing to those threats, we should be working to make Berkeley’s manufacturing stronger yet. Giving the West Berkeley Plan the respect it deserves would be a good start.  

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