Editorials

Editorial: Turning a Deaf Ear to the People’s Voice

By Becky O’Malley
Tuesday June 13, 2006

Have you ever had the feeling you’re sitting up on a hill observing two high-speed trains headed towards one another on intersecting tracks, with a collision all but inevitable? That’s the picture we’re getting of the ongoing interaction between Berkeleyans eager to preserve the city’s historic buildings and those who’d like to tear some of them down in order to make way for “progress,” variously defined as mall-type chain stores, lots of condos downtown, big new hotels or lebensraum for UC expansion.  

The chain store romance started during the reign of Mayor Shirley Dean. At least two potentially charming downtown store buildings were remodeled to suit the taste of corporate clients, both now long gone. Gateway Computers pulled out of Berkeley and of retail altogether. Edy’s ice cream parlor, the kind of attractive longstanding downtown business that today’s planners can only wish for, was essentially demolished by a scandalous building process that amounted to fraud on the city’s inspection procedures, to be replaced by a flash-in-the-pan dismally unsuccessful outpost of the Eddie Bauer corporate empire. It stands empty today.  

The Big Ugly Box movement, which is just now transitioning from faux rentals to the much-more-profitable condo phase, was kicked off by the Gaia Building, whose investors have made millions from the extra floors generated by developer Patrick Kennedy’s promises, promises for space devoted to cultural pursuits—promises which have been broken again and again. Gaia took the place of an old dairy building, one of Berkeley’s oldest, which would have been an ideal spot for the kind of restoration and re-use that make towns like Monterey tourist attractions. Another Kennedy coup was demolishing the University Avenue Victorian home of one of Berkeley’s founders.  

Starting in the Dean period, now-gone City Manager James Keene took aim at the city’s 25-year-old Landmarks Preservation Ordinance. He and his allies in the Planning Department and city attorney’s office used the excuse of an easily fixed minor inconsistency between the ordinance and the state’s permit streamlining act to generate a draft of a complete re-write intended to make it much easier to demolish historic buildings. The Landmarks Preservation Commission (I was a member for seven years) worked hard to produce an acceptable compromise, but just as it was finished the composition of the City Council changed and it was never enacted. 

When Mayor Tom Bates and Councilmember Laurie Capitelli took office with the financial backing of development interests, they elevated previous skirmishes to a full-bore war on historic buildings. Bates’s much-touted Task Force on Permitting and Development had few other significant outcomes, but it did eventually lead to another draft of a new landmarks ordinance which was even worse than those which preceded it.  

At a public hearing, more than 40 citizens spoke against his draft, while only four people, all allied with building interests in some way, spoke for it. But Bates and his allies on the council are seldom deterred by public opinion. Livable Berkeley, a development-lobby front which might have been named by George Orwell, has made its wishes known in letters and at behind-closed-doors meetings with the mayor and councilmembers. It now appears that they’ll get what they want, and soon.  

Some community members who support historic preservation have been predicting this outcome for months. They’ve now successfully circulated petitions for an initiative measure which will submit the existing LPO, which has served Berkeley well for many years, plus the few small changes necessary to conform to new state law, to the voters for approval in November. If the initiative wins, it will place the ordinance out of reach of politicians, which might be a good idea.  

But the “official” historic resource supporters at Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association haven’t yet taken a position on the initiative, probably because some board members are worried that megabucks from developers will be dumped into the campaign against it. There are no limits on campaign contributions for initiatives, as there are for candidates. Patrick Kennedy’s Sacramento mother-in-law, for example, contributed $5,000 to the campaign which defeated a height limitation initiative a few years ago, a purchased victory which is now cited as Berkeley’s endorsement for ever-taller buildings. If the LPO enactment is defeated in November because citizen supporters are outspent, it might be spun as a vote against preservation.  

A Livable Berkeley stalwart sent out an e-mail last week, widely copied around the Internet, which predicted that “…there will be an active campaign committee established to defeat the initiative, which will …work as a political wedge issue, in the words of one non-mayoral politico ‘separating the rational NIMBYs from the paranoid NIMBYs’ (and requiring Zelda to embed with the paranoids)… I will probably work actively for that campaign, which will succeed. Developers will line up to contribute….”  

The double-talk lexicon of flaks for the building industry is hard to parse sometimes. Do we believe that Tom Bates really wants to run for office as the Anti-Preservationist, or that opponent Zelda Bronstein wants to run as a “paranoid NIMBY”? It’s not clear just what a “rational NIMBY” might be, or why such a person would vote for the candidate opposed to preservation of historic resources. Even paranoids have enemies, of course, and sometimes they’re the same enemies as those of their more rational associates. But if the Bates-controlled City Council really does pass the latest bad draft of the emasculated LPO, or an even worse one rumored to be in the works, it will at least give voters of all stripes who believe that re-using our historic buildings is sound public policy some clear choices in November.