Editorials

On next Tuesday the Berkeley City Council promises to devote two hours to considering what might constitute enough “significant community benefits” to justify demolishing parts of a couple of historic buildings downtown in order to permit L.A. financier Joseph Penner to squeeze maximal profit out of his fortuitious acquisition of the site, now the home of Landmark Shattuck Cinemas and the Habitot children's center.

Penner's company, with the aid of local fixer Mark Rhoades, is asking for variances sufficient to allow construction of almost a full block’s worth of luxury apartment, 18 stories tall, to lure new wealthy residents to Berkeley. 

We’re doing ourselves no favor by participating in Tuesday’s charade, trying to imagine what might compensate the people of Berkeley for allowing this monstrous eyesore—which will even intrude on the iconic view of the Golden Gate from the U.C. Campanile—to be deposited in our midst. The few ideas I’ve heard about have not been actual benefits, but at best inadequate compensation for the glaring detriments this project will cause.

And now Berkeley is being asked to beg for crumbs from the corporate table. It’s demeaning, it’s inadequate, and we shouldn’t go along with it. 

But it’s an old story. Various mythic comparisons suggest themselves. 

How about Pandora’s Box, from the Greeks? The city moms and dads are itching to take the top off the goody box, but they’ll find that a lot of bad things will fly out instead. 

Or, how about a legend from the holy books of the three similar desert religions, the story of how Jacob conned his brother out of his birthright by giving him a bowl of lentil stew, “a mess of pottage” in oral tradition? 

Wikipedia’s version: “A mess of pottage is something immediately attractive but of little value taken foolishly and carelessly in exchange for something more distant and perhaps less tangible but immensely more valuable. The phrase alludes to Esau's sale of his birthright for a meal of lentil stew ("pottage") in Genesis 25:29–34 and connotes shortsightedness and misplaced priorities.” 

Yep, that’s what we’re in danger of doing if we let the money boys sell us this project. We’re trading our historic and appropriately scaled streetscape and our beloved movies for a few leftovers from the table of the rich. 

Traditions from Africa and the first people of North America portray trickster figures who exhibit many of the characteristics of today’s developers and their wannabe local imitaters. They’re always amongst us. 

From the European tradition, we get the story of the two tailors who conned an Emperor into thinking they’d made him a gorgeous new suit, and the sycophantic populace who just went along with the game. 

“The gold trim on your new outfit is particularly charming, sir.” 

“The roof garden will be public open space.” 

But the Emperor in the story, as you may remember, is naked. It takes a fearless child to speak the truth about his “new clothes”. 

Just for amusement, I’ve engaged in a bit of gedanken experimentation to figure exactly what pig we might get in this poke. 

The German“Gedanken” in this context means “thought”—one online dictionary says that “A thought experiment is one you carry out in your head. .. an experiment that is impractical to carry out, but useful to consider because it can be reasoned about theoretically.” 

Think about it. Some downside possibilities are suggested by the admittedly inadequate environmental impact report the Zoning Adjustment Board has been offered. 

Imagine Berkeley High students at lunch, exiting from their campus just 400 feet away, crossing Harold Way at the same time as a fleet of huge construction trucks exits the site, and just to make it more exciting, think about a few cowboys from rival high schools waiting on that corner to confront their BHS foes in a fist fight. A fight, or series of fights, like that happened downtown last week, and it was somewhat unpleasant, even minus, of course, the construction site traffic . 

Nope, three or four years of demolition and construction chock-a-block with our high school—not a significant benefit. But the EIR doesn’t even talk about it. 

Or imagine one of the rich Residents of the proposed Residences at Berkeley Plaza, coming to California for the weekend from his primary Residence in Moscow or Shanghai or Saudi. Maybe he wants to use his Berkeley pied-a-terre as base camp for a visit to his wine country estate, so he hops on BART out to downtown Richmond, then catches a Greyhound to Napa….nope, pretty hard to imagine that he’s not firing up the Lexus he keeps here instead. 

It’s just plain unrealistic to imagine that dwellers in the three hundred pricey units will decide to live carless to avoid paying for garage space. The average rent is estimated by the proponents to average $3,718 per unit per month, even before sale as condos--and you can be sure that whatever Rhoades claims, they’ll be condoized as soon as they’re built. 

With an inadequate EIR, we don’t even know what we’re getting. 

Yesterday Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant issued a decision stopping a Los Angeles skyscraper project that deftly framed the issue that now confronts Berkeley as we evaluate the Harold Way plans. 

In his opinion he said that “A developer must present an accurate and stable picture of the project so that the public and decision-makers can decide whether its environmental consequences are outweighed by its public benefits.” 

The information presented so far on this proposal comes nowhere near to meeting this reasonable standard. Berkeley officials should be demanding to know more. 

Instead, we’ve gotten inaccurate and unstable descriptions of what the project might end up being from promoters, accompanied by salivating over fantasy benefits, some even coming from elected and appointed decision-makers who are supposed to be protecting the public interest. 

“Would you like a piece of pie in the sky with that mess of pottage, sir?” 

Since it’s May Day, let’s give Joe Hill and U. Utah Phillips the last word on the topic.