Calculations by applicant for 2211 Harold Way project do not accurately reflect their potential profits from their proposed development.
Calculations by applicant for 2211 Harold Way project do not accurately reflect their potential profits from their proposed development.

Extra

Updated: Suspect in Berkeley Homicide Had Previous Shooting Arrest

Scott Morris (BCN)
Wednesday October 07, 2015 - 11:08:00 AM

A suspect in the fatal shooting of a Stockton man in South Berkeley Tuesday night was also arrested in connection with another shooting in the same place last year, Berkeley police confirmed today. -more-


Berkeley Murder Suspect Arrested

Scott Morris (BCN)
Wednesday October 07, 2015 - 10:52:00 AM

A Stockton man shot in South Berkeley on Tuesday night has died from his injuries and police arrested a suspect in his death this morning, Berkeley police said. -more-


Shooting in Berkeley on Russell Street Tonight

Bay City News
Tuesday October 06, 2015 - 09:36:00 PM

A man was shot in Berkeley tonight, according to police. -more-



Page One

Updated: Revised Pro Forma Proves that Harold Way Project Profits Will Be $89-145 Million--Berkeley's Benefits Should Reflect This

James Hendry
Tuesday September 29, 2015 - 10:11:00 AM

Under Berkeley’s Measure R, developers were given an “entitlement”, not a right, to build three tall buildings in Berkeley up to 180 feet in height if they provided significant “community benefits.” On September 30th, Berkeley’s Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB) approved a claimed $14.5 million “community benefits” package as a condition of approving construction of the 302 unit, 18-story Harold Way Project, located at the site of the current Shattuck Cinemas. The level of “community benefits” was based on the developer’s claim, never verified by ZAB, that total profits from the building would only be $26 million. Instead, based on more accurate numbers, profits are more likely to be in the range of $89 to $145 million, over three to five times the amount relied on by ZAB. These profits occur AFTER the costs of both keeping the Shattuck Cinemas and ensuring that the project uses union labor are included, two of ZAB’s major claimed community benefits. These are “walk-away” profits, one-time profits received by the developer selling the property soon after it is completed, not profits collected over the life of the building.

To download a revised Pro Forma which accurately analyses this project, click here.

ZAB’s decision will be appealed to the Berkeley City Council for reconsideration in the next two months. The amount of community benefits could likely be increased by at least $10 to $20 million to promote affordable housing, encourage arts and culture, and assist in the relocation of the Habitot Children’s Museum being displaced by the project, while still guaranteeing ample profits (in the 5% range) that the developer believes necessary to construct the project. One hopes the Berkeley City Council will set the correct level.

The profit levels of $89 to $145 million are based on a revised economic analysis of the Project, using more accurate numbers provided to the Berkeley City Council itself in 2015, as well as the developer’s own numbers from other filings. Differences in the level of profit include significantly overstated land costs, omission of revenue sources, and overstated costs.

Incorporating these more accurate and realistic numbers it is concluded that;

  • Profits would be at least $89 million, over three times the amount of profit estimated by the developer;
  • This profit could be realized immediately upon the sale of the building once constructed or soon after occupancy;
  • Profits from the Harold Way Project could be as high as $145 million if the Project were to charge rent at the high-end of the Berkeley market as it is likely to do;
  • For an initial total investment of $173 million (most of which will be financed with short-term construction financing), the developer could sell Harold Way for somewhere between $263 million to $318 million, representing a return on investment of 50% to 83% within the next 2 to 3 years.
In exchange for this level of profits, ZAB’s current proposal does not seem adequate as;

  • All of these profits remain available to the developer even AFTER including the total cost of using union labor and keeping the existing theaters on-site; These two items comprise $9 of the $13.5 million of ZAB’s claimed “community benefits”
  • The developer benefits from the use of union labor due to their superior skill-set, improved labor relations and a better built, higher-quality building; and
  • Retention of the theaters is primarily mitigating a harm, rather than providing a new benefit to Berkeley.
Although the Berkeley City Council requested ZAB to “independently evaluate” the level of community benefits (even for projects already in the planning pipeline) to ensure “a reasonable relationship to the value generated by the project” ZAB never conducted this analysis. Throughout the process, numerous parties requested it to do so. -more-



Public Comment

New: Open Letter to the Berkeley Board of Library Trustees

Helen Rippier Wheeler
Wednesday October 07, 2015 - 10:54:00 AM

I am a long-time Berkeley resident and card-carrying library user.

My latest (2013) book publication is not in the BPL collection, although my 1997 Women & Aging; a Guide to The Literature has apparently survived. I have served on the Berkeley Housing Authority and as a North Berkeley Senior Center volunteer, and I was a founding member of Save Section 8.

My qualifications to impose the following counsel include: BA Barnard College (Foreign Areas Studies: Latin America, Spanish); MA University of Chicago (human development); MS and doctorate, Columbia University (library information science and media). Prior to receipt of the doctorate, I was employed in library management. Following receipt of the doctorate, I began to teach at graduate and undergraduate levels. I was a presidential appointee to the American Library Association's Committees on the Status of Women and on International Relations; I was elected to Council (the ALA governing body) by membership. You may not consider this an expression of interest in serving on a BPL Director of Library Services S&S Committee.

I disagree with a previous Library Director who declared that a library board is no place for a professional librarian! On a Director search and screen committee-yes! Community representation is essential in both cases. I have made 3 attempts to ascertain the "official" version of who/what constituted the [Jeff Scott] Search & Screen Committee, if indeed there was one, leading to the cover-up.

An immediate independent investigation is essential to the restoration of public trust. Complete transparency into what happened, when and who were/was responsible. The investigation needs to be completely independent of current management, who worked with the former director. Public desk librarians must be returned to their book selection, budgeting, and weeding duties and responsibilities; 34 specialist librarian voices reflect better Berkeley's diversity than managers plus 4 helpers! The Moratorium on Weeding cannot be lifted until the 34 librarians are returned to their selection and weeding tasks, which are components of affirmatively managed collection development and maintenance. An affirmatively managed library director search & screen process is essential to the restoration of public trust, i.e. to restoration of a Berkeley PUBLIC library. The Library Board, which is appointive, should have at least one professional librarian on it. -more-


New: Barfing Up the Wrong Tree

Christopher Adams
Monday October 05, 2015 - 10:38:00 AM

Many speakers at the last Zoning Adjustment Board hearing regarding the towering apartment building at 2211 Harold Way, most of them young and prodded to attend by the Bay Area Renters Federation (BARF), spoke in favor of building the proposed luxury apartments that they themselves could not afford. One young woman was very frank: if the rich live in the new building, then she will be able to afford the less expensive apartments they abandon. This is another way of stating the trickle-down theory of housing, the idea that any housing will increase the supply, and if the supply increases, prices will fall. That theory failed the Econ 101 test when I was in planning school in 1969, and it still fails it. -more-


Close GITMO

Tejinder Uberoi
Thursday October 01, 2015 - 11:22:00 PM

Almost 14 years have elapsed since President George W. Bush opened the United States camp at Guantánamo Bay in a hasty response to the September 11 attacks. Most of those interned had nothing to do with terrorism but were swept up on orders from the White House to demonstrate that progress was being made in the nebulous ‘war on terror’. The writ of Habeas Corpus and the Geneva Conventions were suspended and our government engaged in hideous acts of brutality (renditions, torture, assassinations, . .). No effort was made to exercise due process. Afghan tribal disputes were settled by persuading American military that their enemies were Taliban fighters in exchange for bundles of money. -more-


Narendra Modi’s Visit

Jagjit Singh
Thursday October 01, 2015 - 11:11:00 PM

It’s puzzling why the Indian media has devoted so much newsprint to Narendra Modi’s visit. Largely forgotten is the uncomfortable truth that successive US governments barred him from visiting the United States over his role in anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat while he was chief minister. Modi has never apologized or even explained his reasons why he allowed 3 days to elapse while the killings took place. -more-


New: A Plea to Change Our Mental Health System

Patricia Fontana
Monday October 05, 2015 - 11:11:00 AM

Another school shooting frays our communal nerves. While tragedies involving violence grab the public’s attention, there is a quieter story that plays out in homes across the nation. Frequently, and out of public view, families watch as loved ones deteriorate before their eyes, spiraling deeper into delusion and dysfunction. As they lurch from crisis to crisis, family and friends are helpless to intervene; frustrated by a system that gives them few options. -more-


Syria & ISIS

Tejinder Uberoi
Monday October 05, 2015 - 11:01:00 AM

In another odd twist to the Syrian war, Vladimir Putin has decided to lend his support to a much weaker Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. It is a pity the United States, Britain and France misjudged the Syrian dictator’s staying power and failed to support a Russian proposal to end the fighting in 2012 after peace talks started between the regime and opposition. -more-


Please, enlighten! your plan to build back the nation's lost glory?

Romila Khanna
Thursday October 01, 2015 - 11:10:00 PM

How will our next president activate the economy without raising taxes on rich people and big corporations? Do we think that by levying a flat tax on the lowest income groups, upper class citizens, including the new president, will find peace? How on earth can such heartless people pray to God for his mercy? How are they able to sleep at night? I hear would-be presidential candidates declaring that cutting Obamacare will give a big lift to the economy. -more-


Remembering Stanislav Petrov Day

Jack Bragen
Thursday October 01, 2015 - 10:55:00 PM

It means a lot to me that in September of 1983, we were on the brink of global destruction from a narrowly avoided nuclear war. -more-


Critique of the BNC Sept 16 forum

Steve Martinot
Thursday October 01, 2015 - 11:05:00 PM

This is not a report on the Sept. 16 Forum organized by the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council (BNC) in South Berkeley, but a critique (unfortunately partial) of its content. No apology for length would be sincere. If it is too long for you, skip to the end. . -more-


Editorial

The Sun Sets Over the Berkeley Hills

Becky O'Malley
Friday October 02, 2015 - 09:23:00 AM

There was a remarkable sunset on Wednesday night. As I came up Martin Luther King towards Old City Hall, looking southeast, I could see the hills behind the Berkeley Community Theater bathed in an amazing rose-colored light—in fact everything to the east of MLK was tinted pink. Sunsets for those of us who live in Lower Berkeley are not the splendid views of the Golden Gate which our Upper Berkeley friends enjoy, but instead the subtler eastern reflection of the sun going down in the west.

Inside, from the former council chambers where the Zoning Adjustment Board meets, you could still see the candy-colored hills through the deteriorating Beaux Arts casement windows. The Hancock/Bates regime has allowed the formerly grand building to fall apart, like most of Berkeley’s civic patrimony, but it’s still a beautiful wreck, and the gorgeous view of the sunset only made its decay more poignant.

Someone in the audience waiting for the meeting to start suggested that people should look out the windows. Someone, maybe me, said, see what we’re going to lose if the board votes the wrong way tonight. Someone else, developers’ shill Mark Rhoades in fact, said No We’re Not.

It’s true that from the Maudelle Shirek Old City Hall building second floor windows you can’t exactly see the area behind the Berkeley High campus which will be dominated by the 18 story monstrosity Rhoades has been flacking, but his project is the camel’s nose in the tent. It’s only a matter of time, if the trend continues, until it will no longer be possible for Berkeley flatlanders to lift up their eyes unto the hills as they’ve always done. But not to worry—by the time that happens Mark Rhoades and Joseph Penner will have departed the scene with their thirty pieces of silver. -more-


The Editor's Back Fence

You Saw It First in The Planet: Councilmember Capitelli Makes Out Like a Bandit
on Police Chief's House Deal

Friday October 02, 2015 - 03:12:00 PM

Berkeley Councilmember Laurie Capitelli and/or his firm profited from a real estate commission on the city's loan of half a million dollars to new Police Chief Michael Meehan.


Zelda Bronstein covered the story in the Planet first in 2012:

Councilmember/Realtor Capitelli and the Police Chief’s $500,000 House Loan from the City of Berkeley
-more-


Columns

EATS, SHOOTS 'N' LEAVES: Berkeley politics: Corrupt business as usual

From Richard Brenneman's Blog
Monday October 05, 2015 - 09:43:00 AM

In Berkeley, a town where developers are kings and poor people are being gentrified out of existence, genteel sleaze is the order of the day, as we noted recently. -more-


New: ECLETIC RANT: Syria, What's Next for the U.S.?

Ralph E. Stone
Monday October 05, 2015 - 11:03:00 AM

The U.S. finds itself between a rock and a hard place in the Syrian civil war. Russia has deployed warplanes and tanks to a base near Latakia, Syria in support of President Bashar al-Assad's Syrian government. In the meantime, Iran ground troops have arrived in Syria. These troops would be backed by Assad's Lebanese Hezbollah allies and by Shi'ite militia fighters from Iraq. Russia would provide air support for these ground troops. -more-


ON MENTAL ILLNESS: Rethinking Responses

Jack Bragen
Thursday October 01, 2015 - 10:58:00 PM

Schizophrenia and bipolar are both illnesses that can worsen the tendency toward anger. This is more so for someone who refuses treatment. However, despite being medicated, a schizophrenic or bipolar person can have a worse than average temper, because of how our brains are built. Therefore, in order to exist among people, we must work to remain as peaceful as we can and we must learn to avoid getting verbally abusive. -more-


Arts & Events

Around & About--Philharmonia Revives Scarlatti Serenata After Three Centuries

Ken Bullock
Thursday October 01, 2015 - 10:51:00 PM

As an opener to the season celebrating Nicholas McGegan's 30th year as music director of the Philharmonia Baroque, the orchestra will perform yet another of the remarkable musical rarities they're famous for, something more and more prevalent in their programming: Alessandro Scarlatti's lavish serenata, La Gloria di Primavera, composed in a month and performed an unusual three times in 1716 to celebrate the birth of Duke Leopold, heir to the Hapsburg throne in Vienna, whose father, Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, had only recently acquired the Kingdom of Naples as part of the settlement of the War of the Spanish Succession. But Leopold died a few months later, and the work fell into obscurity, performed only in London five years later as a commercial venture by the composer's brother, Francesco. -more-


KORTY & CUT-OUTS at Berkeley City College on Friday, October 9

Karen Jacobs
Friday October 02, 2015 - 10:30:00 AM

John Korty, the only American filmmaker to have won major awards in dramatic, documentary and animation work, will tell how it all started, fifty years ago, with scissors, paper and yarn. His first film, ANY MANY AND MAN, was about new math for children. Next, BREAKING THE HABIT was a satire on giving up smoking. And after doing many number and letter spots for CTW, he invented THELMA THUMB, a miniature super-woman. -more-


Around & About--Theater & Literature: Notes on James Keller's 'Who's Afraid of Marcel Proust'

Ken Bullock
Thursday October 01, 2015 - 10:53:00 PM

From the celebrated madeleine crumbled into a cup of tea that brings back lost memories of childhood, to the narrator--only once referred to as Marcel, sign of his identity with the author--in a rage crushing Baron Charlus' hat as Charlus replaces it calmly with one of many more ... and tells Marcel how much he cares for him, to the idea coming to Marcel of the book he wants to write--the same book the reader is plowing though ...

Playwright James Keller performs a very unusual solo act--unusual because it focuses on taking the audience through Proust's seven volume masterwork, rather than avowing the performer's own dedication to and identity with the book--of a tour through 'In Search of Lost Time' (Remembrance of Things Past) by Marcel Proust, framed by an arragement of flowers that recall "Proust's cathedral of hawthorn"--and his asthma--and the screen for the 180 slides that accompany Keller's delivery, setting the elaborate stories he gives us a gloss on, not like gossip, but like a farsimpler version of what Proust does, as his own Virgil, guiding himself and the reader through the inferno, the purgatory and paradise of his memories, his discovery that they must be involuntary, taken off guard when least expected, so they may briefly live again ... -more-


The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution At the Shattuck Landmark and Piedmont Theaters

Reviewed by Gar Smith
Thursday October 01, 2015 - 10:49:00 PM

Emmy-Award-winning director Stanley Nelson has made a great film. For anyone who lived in the East Bay during the Sixties, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution will revive some powerful memories. Running nearly two hours, this documentary serves up a seething, brim-full cauldron of radical history, memorable images and gritty interviews with radicals, reporters, supporters, cops, informers and more than a dozen Panther survivors. Among those interviewed: Bobby Seale, Kathleen Cleaver, Jamal Joseph and Emory Douglas (the cartoonist who became the Party's Minister of Culture and created the indelible caricature of a pig outfitted in a police uniform, surrounded by buzzing flies).

-more-


Back Stories

Opinion

Editorials

The Sun Sets Over the Berkeley Hills 10-02-2015

The Editor's Back Fence

You Saw It First in The Planet: Councilmember Capitelli Makes Out Like a Bandit
on Police Chief's House Deal
10-02-2015

Public Comment

New: Open Letter to the Berkeley Board of Library Trustees Helen Rippier Wheeler 10-07-2015

New: Barfing Up the Wrong Tree Christopher Adams 10-05-2015

Close GITMO Tejinder Uberoi 10-01-2015

Narendra Modi’s Visit Jagjit Singh 10-01-2015

New: A Plea to Change Our Mental Health System Patricia Fontana 10-05-2015

Syria & ISIS Tejinder Uberoi 10-05-2015

Please, enlighten! your plan to build back the nation's lost glory? Romila Khanna 10-01-2015

Remembering Stanislav Petrov Day Jack Bragen 10-01-2015

Critique of the BNC Sept 16 forum Steve Martinot 10-01-2015

News

Updated: Suspect in Berkeley Homicide Had Previous Shooting Arrest Scott Morris (BCN) 10-07-2015

Berkeley Murder Suspect Arrested Scott Morris (BCN) 10-07-2015

Shooting in Berkeley on Russell Street Tonight Bay City News 10-06-2015

Updated: Revised Pro Forma Proves that Harold Way Project Profits Will Be $89-145 Million--Berkeley's Benefits Should Reflect This James Hendry 09-29-2015

Columns

EATS, SHOOTS 'N' LEAVES: Berkeley politics: Corrupt business as usual From Richard Brenneman's Blog 10-05-2015

New: ECLETIC RANT: Syria, What's Next for the U.S.? Ralph E. Stone 10-05-2015

ON MENTAL ILLNESS: Rethinking Responses Jack Bragen 10-01-2015

Arts & Events

Around & About--Philharmonia Revives Scarlatti Serenata After Three Centuries Ken Bullock 10-01-2015

KORTY & CUT-OUTS at Berkeley City College on Friday, October 9 Karen Jacobs 10-02-2015

Around & About--Theater & Literature: Notes on James Keller's 'Who's Afraid of Marcel Proust' Ken Bullock 10-01-2015

The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution At the Shattuck Landmark and Piedmont Theaters Reviewed by Gar Smith 10-01-2015