Public Comment

The “David Brower Center and Oxford Plaza,” intended to replace the city-owned parking lot at Oxford Street and Allston Way, recently received a key City Council endorsement. That’s noteworthy because this six-story development embodies admirable environmental and housing-equity goals.  

Also, because you’ll be paying for it for a long, long time.  

This Brower Center project’s cost has skyrocketed over budget faster than a Pentagon contract. Subsidizing it has already eaten up much of the city’s housing funds—displacing more practical proposals.  

And because this misconceived prestige project’s nonprofit developers have no collateral, the funder of last resort for future cost overruns is: us. Taxpayers. So let’s take a look at this folly, and the many layers of irony that underlie it. It’s a rare case study of how everything that can go wrong in Berkeley planning, sometimes does. 

Irony No. 1 is the Brower Center’s origins. Back in the 1990s, Berkeley’s most vigorous private developer—and some smaller imitators—figured out a sure formula for tricking city officials into approving buildings that were misplaced, too large for their surrounding zoning, and too skimpy on parking (therefore cheap to build). 

First, give the building a pseudo-ecological name memorializing whatever wild spirit it offended. (Much as exurban developers name their subdivisions “Deer Creek” after they’ve destroyed deer habitat and creeks.) Second, “greenwash” the structure by making exaggerated claims about its alleged environmental benefits. Finally, throw in a dollop of affordable housing, to help offset the city’s bungling of state authority for comprehensive rent stabilization. (Everyone likes to pay low rent.) 

After getting tricked into approving several of these oversized developments, city councilmembers and commissioners began to hate themselves. They realized they could stop being tricked by private developers. 

They could just use the same formula to trick themselves. 

Thus, they cooked up the “Brower Center.” It would be named after Berkeley native David Brower—the giant “Archdruid” of modern environmentalism who rebuilt the Sierra Club, then founded at least three other significant environmental groups.  

It would offer subsidized office space to green groups, whose officers were happy to endorse it. (They were tired of commuting to San Francisco. Plus, everyone likes to pay low rent.)  

It would provide more than a dollop of affordable housing. And it would displace one of downtown Berkeley’s last surface parking lots—a sight that the car-haters behind this project couldn’t abide. 

Irony No. 2 was naming this behemoth development after David Brower. As a longtime Sierra Club member, I finally got my first (and last) chance to hear the Archdruid speak a few months before his death in 2000. His speech included the reflection, “My life has been one giant fight against developers.”  

Brower’s other lectures regularly included a more pointed epigram: “I’d like to declare open season on developers. Not kill them, just tranquilize them.” If the Archdruid were alive to see what Berkeley is doing for developers in his name, he’d spin in his grave like a wind turbine. 

Irony No. 3 is what we’ll lose by building the Brower Center. Some of the last breathing room beside the UC campus will be replaced by yet another tall structure. A friend calls this progressive hemming-in of the campus’ remaining green space “like building medieval ramparts.” 

Although parking lots might not win environmental certifications, they are a form of open space. And building on the Oxford Lot will kill several graceful, mature eucalyptus trees. The great urban-planning theorist Joni Mitchell anticipated these losses in her 1970 musical dissertation “Big Yellow Taxi” (lyrics slightly altered): Don’t it always seem to go / That you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone / We paved Paradise / And gave up a parking lot 

Taxpayers will indeed give up this public land to developers—for free—in return for a promise to restore the public parking underground. We’ll also forfeit parking revenue for an estimated “two years” of construction (which is likely to mean much longer). 

Irony No. 4 is one Berkeley invention that won’t win a Nobel Prize: the car-free parking lot. When told that their new office/cultural and housing/retail complex would generate many new vehicle trips per day, the Brower Center’s car-hating authors were adamant about replacing only the Oxford Lot’s current 105 or so parking spaces. 

Downtown merchants pleaded for a second underground parking level, with an equal number of new spaces. They said that downtown had lost some 600-800 parking spaces since 1995. But they got nowhere. 

Irony No. 5 is how the city’s “Transportation” Commission responded a year ago to bad news about that car-free parking lot. Consultants estimated that the new buildings would generate up to 97 additional vehicle trips per day. The commission responded by reaffirming the one-level limit. (This commission’s name always belongs in quotes, because Berkeley has a “Transportation” Commission the way Orwell’s Airstrip One had a Ministry of “Truth.”) 

One level of underground parking is what six city councilmembers endorsed this May 16. Adult supervision by staff did at least add 41 new surface parking spaces to serve the 97 new units of housing. Meaning that everyone loses: the car-haters will have killed only a net 64 of the surface spaces they despise. 

Irony No. 6 is how our City Council made this project’s two proposed buildings—rising six stories and four stories, respectively—conform to existing zoning that limited them to three stories. Inspired by David Brower, did they fearlessly force developers to bend to the popular will? 

Nah. They just changed the zoning. 

Irony No. 7 is who will end up occupying this monument to city groupthink: city staff reported on May 16 that to help fill in the project’s bottomless cost overruns, the office tower’s tenants might not be subsidized environmental nonprofits at all. They might be for-profit businesses that can claim some tenuous link to environmentalism or “social equity,” plus UC departments. And every square foot leased to UC goes off the tax rolls, costing taxpayers even more. 

Any questions?  

The “David Brower Center” may yet be canceled as its financial improbability becomes more obvious. But if it is built, it will serve the same function as those “Deer Creek” subdivisions: It will forever exile the Archdruid’s pesky, uncompromising spirit from his birthplace. 

Michael Katz is a Berkeley civic watchdog.