Editorials

Editorial: How to Vote Green in Berkeley

By Becky O’Malley
Tuesday October 10, 2006

Saturday morning at the Farmers’ Market the Green Party’s Pam Webster handed me a flyer with a picture on it of the house where I’d lived as an undergraduate. I’d forgotten just what a fine house it was. There was the big bay window of the high-ceilinged front room where we had many fine parties. The glassed-in front porch was a perfect place to store our bikes. My housemates and I had three bedrooms on the first floor, which housed three to six of us depending on whose boyfriends were in (unauthorized) residence. Upstairs in the garrett lived mysterious seldom-seen older men (at least 30 years old) by reputation jazz musicians who played for beatniks in North Beach. On the far right could be glimpsed some foliage which might have been the enormous and prolific fig tree in the large back yard. I was surprised and pleased to learn that the house’s comfortable design was attributed to a woman architect (Ida M. Legal), and that it had been built in 1889. We paid big bucks in 1959 to live in this marvelous residence: $90 a month, split three ways. The only problem: next to the picture was the ominous legend in big black type: DEMOLISHED 1963. 

I left Berkeley when I graduated in 1961. When we came back in 1973, we went to see what had happened to the old house. In its place stood a seedy (even after only 10 years) little apartment building optimistically named “The William Penn Apartments.” Clearly someone with good intentions thought he was doing the world a favor by demolishing our old building, which had survived in good shape for sixty years, and replacing it with a modern one. Now, almost fifty years later, houses like that are still considered jewels by many of their tenants at more than 100 years of age, but the newer replacements are going steadily downhill, and many of them are earthquake hazards. 

Should our house have been a “landmark”? Even by today’s standards, probably not—it was not remarkable for its time, just a solid, well-designed family home, built to last from irreplaceable old-growth redwood. The architect’s name is known, but “Anonymous was a woman,” and many good buildings probably designed to a canny housewife’s specs don’t have architect names attached. A fair number of such houses still survive in the Bay Area, some of them restored to jewel-box perfection, but many others are just hanging in there as comfortable housing that doesn’t have to rent for top dollar. The architectural features—bay windows, porches, compact yards—of these old houses are now stylish additions to the “new urbanist” McMansions that are gobbling up farmland in Fairfield, but if you live in one of these which remain in Berkeley you can have it all and walk to work to boot.  

This is the kind of house which is now designated as a “structure of merit” under Berkeley’s Landmark Preservation Ordinance, enacted in 1974 to stop the assaults on Berkeley’s housing stock of the preceding decades. Along with its partner Neighborhood Preservation Ordinance (1973), which was aimed at saving housing regardless of historic or architectural merit, the LPO has been responsible for keeping Berkeley livable. It’s ironic that the new group which is now lobbying hardest to trash the LPO calls itself “Livable Berkeley”—an oxymoron if ever there was one.  

It’s also sad that Councilmember Linda Maio, who got her start in local politics (under the name of Linda Veneziano) as one of the early backers of the NPO, is now speaking (albeit with a notable lack of fervor) against Measure J, which re-enacts the LPO as a bullet-proof citizen initiative with a few needed updates. It’s hard to understand how Maio, who’s safely ensconced in a comfortable but unpretentious Julia Morgan house in the flats, or for that matter Tom Bates, who lives in a pleasant turn-of-the-last-century frame house on the southside, could have lost touch so badly with what people still want and need—the same kind of housing they wanted when they were young. The pressure from developers who see old houses like theirs as building sites is just as bad as it was in the ’60s, but it needs to be resisted just as firmly now as it was then. Berkeley’s older housing stock is the principal source of affordable housing these days, which both Bates and Maio claim to support, and “re-use” is the greenest of housing options.  

Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to the question of endorsements for Berkeley’s first City Council district. On the one hand, Maio’s full record, looked at as a whole going all the way back to the NPO, certainly qualifies her for re-election. She’s obviously intelligent and thoughtful, well able to grasp the information which a good councilmember should understand. She’s spoken up courageously on international human rights issues, despite empty threats from bombastic partisans of one Middle East sub-faction to bury her in the next election. But since Tom Bates was elected and started his mad dash for the middle of the road, she’s been all too willing to go along with his various anti-democratic schemes. Voters in her district who know her well maintain the hope that sooner or later she’ll come to her senses, and perhaps she will.  

Her opponent, Merrilie Mitchell, is an exceedingly valuable civic gadfly. She goes to all the meetings, and if anything nefarious is up, she lets the world know about it. She’s obviously not a candidate fronted by the blowhards who threatened to bury Maio, but is her own woman all the way. Nevertheless, it might be too soon to give up on Maio, and it would be a real shame to lose Mitchell to the ranks of the elected establishment. We can’t decide between them.  

Readers of recent editorials have complained that they’ve been so subtle that it’s hard to know who we’ve endorsed. Let’s make it perfectly clear, one more time: 

First: Send money and do work for Jerry McNerney, running against the odious Richard Pombo out towards Tracy. 

Second: Vote yes on Berkeley’s Measure J, endorsed by everyone except pro-development shills as the best way to keep Berkeley Berkeley. 

Third: Zelda Bronstein for mayor, Worthington, Spring, Overman for City Council…the genuine progressive democrats in this election. 

Fourth (and this is new): No endorsement in Berkeley’s District 1.  

More to come.