Features

Doomed to Fail: Parking Lot Under Brower Center By JAMES DOHERTY Commentary

Friday March 11, 2005

Jared Diamond, author of Pulitzer-Prize Winning book Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Society, states unequivocally that one of the greatest risks humanity faces is clinging to recipes of the past that worked well for decades, but can no longer work under changed circumstances of the present and future. Collapse, his latest work, hints at a critical failing in the planning/design process in Berkeley. 

This term also characterizes with near perfection the situation with the proposed David Brower Center (DBC), to be built on top of the current site of a banal asphalt surface parking lot in the heart of downtown Berkeley. 

The City of Berkeley and several distinguished environmental groups are teaming and hoping to build a small city of affordable housing units, small retail storefronts, and nonprofit office space at the Oxford site in downtown Berkeley. The structure itself is designed to meet rigorous standards of green and sustainable building practices, hopefully even qualifying for U.S. Green Building Council LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum certification.  

Unfortunately the entire project is based on a foundation that reflects the thinking of a bygone century. The entire structure of the deal is predicated on the basis that parking for private passenger automobiles, which worked pretty well in Berkeley in the 20th century, will be the foundation for this 21st century project. With the specter of oil depletion and runaway price increases for the remaining and rapidly declining global reserves of petroleum indisputably on the immediate horizon, the team of Berkeley city officials, a private affordable housing developer known as RCD (Resources for Community Development) and a coalition of wonderful environmental groups, are all lining up to support a project with a 20th century design, five years after we have crossed over the turn of the spigot, er, century. 

Although the building site is in an active earthquake zone, and putting parking underneath high rise structures such as the proposed DBC is the best-known way to compromise a building’s ability to sustain and survive an earthquake, the proposed DBC—which I have nicknamed the DBEC, for David Brower Epicenter—is becoming a lightning rod for controversies regarding Berkeley’s automobile dependency and related perceived shortage of parking stalls for that dependency. It is an unfortunate fact that few citizens of Berkeley, and even members of environmental groups, have come to understand that the very concept of the urban private passenger automobile, whether greenwashed or not, is obsolete in the 21st century. 

The determination Berkeley, and its distinguished citizens such as members of the Downtown Berkeley Association (DBA) are showing to lock this project into becoming an underground parking lot as well as a center for sustainability is an excellent demonstration of Jarod Diamond’s assertion that societies can and will destroy themselves with ideas of the past that worked well in the past but are doomed to failure in the future. 

I believe this project could go forward much faster and with a much better investment in our non-fossil fueled but earthquake prone future, by spending the $5 million the underground parking garage expense represents, on light rail connecting the DBC to the Berkeley Marina, via Allston or Kittredge streets. These streets flank the building site, (and lead almost directly west barely one mile to a beautiful new streetcar-sized walk and bike bridge over the bayfilled, gridlocked, and quake vulnerable highway 80). Those two Kittredge and Allston blocks of crumbling, petroleum based asphalt could easily become free downtown real estate to support the project, by eliminating their current use as one-block ending streets. This would also make possible a car-free-zone flanking north, west and south exposures of the David Brower Center. 

This could expedite restoration of ferry service to the Berkeley Marina, as well as avoid a host of issues that the DBC plan as proposed and unveiled Jan. 19, violates: building guidelines and requirements as expressed in the current but hopelessly auto oriented Berkeley municipal codes and Berkeley General Plan. To proceed with the current plan, variances will have to be sought and obtained to accept substandard sidewalks widths for pedestrians, construction near, or even directly atop protected Strawberry Creek, and a menu of many other thorny issues. 

No one wants to notice the fabulous openable windows the developer is so proud of allowing for this huge proposed development, will open out to intake the exhaust of hot SUV tailpipes which by this absurd design will regularly gridlock and surround this high density proposed development. This makes a mockery of the LEED standards which apply to the building only, but have no bearing on locating same building directly above an underground parking lot surrounded by already jammed streets of honking, smoking, oil, gas, and profanity leaking private internal combustion vehicles. 

Yet the environmental groups to be headquartered here have raised almost no objection to the inclusion of cars-as-usual in what is so obviously 20th century thinking of what the 21st century cannot become. Environmental groups also seem locked into thinking in 20th century terms for the future, and the debate around the almighty automobile has become not whether it can succeed in the future (it can’t) but just how green private cars can become. The following appears in the 1991 book Autogeddon, by Heathcote Williams: 

 

The pollution-free car is as green as pus: 

its heat creates drought, 

Killing even those  

who never aspire to a car. 

...A mother collecting her children from school 

In a car covered with worthy stickers 

Expressing ecological concern 

Innocently understudies Mother Kali 

With her rosary of skulls. 

 

I have to close with reference to some words of Walt Kelly, which David Ross Brower so often cited, and which seem to have become the motif for this entire absurdly auto-oriented project: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” 

I am in favor of streetcar and ferry restoration, as well as state of the art bicycle parking and pedestrian and disabled facilities. My vision is a wonderful and wildly popular car-free zone flanking the David Brower Center on its north, west, and south sides. The cost of a mere one mile streetcar run to the Berkeley Marina from the DBC is about $10 million. The cost of not doing this is incalculable, but the cement underground gridlocked parking lot in the current proposal, is about $5 million, with costs of cement manufacturing and bulldozing the site unknown until after it’s done, sort of like the alleged new bay bridge. And the cost of keeping Strawberry Creek cemented under the tailpipes is the cost of recreating free running creek elsewhere. 

I humbly and modestly take off my hat, which is a bicycle helmet, and beg the City of Berkeley, and Resources for Community Development, to vision a sustainable future for the David Brower Center and redraw it along these expanded auto-free lines. Seek the extra $5 million needed for the streetcar run, from the Water Transit Authority, private donors, and a host of other sources. It can be done.  

I realize I am begging, hat in hand, for a refund on reality, and I fit right in with the homeless street beggars and their chances, too. 

 

James G. Doherty is CEO of APT Enterprises. 

 

,