Opinion

Once in a while the New Times chain allows a good article which doesn’t follow the company line of cowboy libertarianism to slip past the editors of one of its magazines. The latest East Bay Express has a piece that’s well worth a read, even though it could have benefited from the services of a fact-checker in spots. Writer Eliza Strickland has capably documented the sad fate of the much-publicized Fruitvale Transit Village, where not much in the way of retail commerce has managed to take root, despite attractive design and millions of dollars in government subsidy. It should be a lesson to everyone who has hallelujah’d for the gospel of smart growth, one of whose tenets is that we can bring back the apartments-cum-retail design that worked pretty well in the streetcar suburbs at the turn of the 20th century. -more-

The news reports about California’s weather at the end of 2005 and its consequences in many communities around here, coupled with the downpour on Monday, the first workday of 2006 for some of us, have inevitably engendered out-of-control metaphor formation. Here in Berkeley we have no major river to overwhelm the city, which they have in Napa. We have little fresh hillside construction to create landslides as they do in Southern California. Granted, our antique storm drains and aging utility wires create a few flooded intersections and short-term power outages, but by and large Berkeley can seem like an island in the storm most of the time. As it does, by and large, in the storm now gathering on the national political scene. -more-