Public Comment
Critique of the BNC Sept 16 forum
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. .
As intended, the forum was informative. It went back over material previous BNC forums had offered, though in some greater detail. But that is not what was needed. It gave voice to local activists addressing the impending problems. But it offered nothing in terms of political perspective. Nor did it break through any of the political mythologies that hold back much of the current activism. It provided no avenues for people to become active. In a word, it was politically useless, at a time when events demand more than that.
First some general descriptive observations. (cf https://youtu.be/bUn_DY8nVZg)
On one panel, there were three activists from the South Berkeley neighborhood. They all spoke about the overriding need for affordable housing, so that a resident population won’t become a mass of refugees fleeing a war imposed by developers and landlords. On another panel, there were three activists who had been struggling for years against the industrial pollution of West Berkeley by Pacific Steel Castings and Berkeley Asphalt plant. They all spoke cleaarly about how, in response to their facts, figures, and case studies of pollution’s ill effects, the city had done nothing. It hadn’t even enforced its own use permits.
A panel on Telegraph Ave. briefly became a battelground itself over the plight of two zones, north and south of Dwight, and the ability of people to avoid speaking to each other by shifting at will from one zone to the other. South of Dwight, two enormous projected buildings promise to destroy the appeal of the area by steamrolling residences and commercial attractions, and clogging streets and sidewalks. The fourth panel was the BNC panel, which presented detailed statistics on the present state of development and new construction, a history of the struggle for affordable housing (including the fate of rent control, and the erstwhile efforts of the city to use the abused Housing Trust Fund). A city councilmember on that panel said he wants to go to Sacramento to demand amendment of the Costa-Hawkins bill that undermines urban rent control efforts.
Three solutions were offered for the extreme problems described. One was to sign up with the BNC, so that its arguments at council and commission against development would speak with a larger voice. Another was to read the BNC on-line newsletter, so that when people went to council or commissions, they would have more facts and a more persuasive argument. And the third was to support the councilmember on proposals he intended to make in council for the benefit of the neighborhoods.
The neighborhoods, especially in South Berkeley, have already been demanding something more tangible, something which breaks with that tradition. What the neighborhoods face is gentrification, a major shift to high income residency, with concomitant dislocation of the present residents. Protest movements have been addressing city council and the commissions to stop this process (at present, focused on the Harold Way building). Neighborhood surveys and conferences have clearly said, “we want a moratorium on market rate housing, until the need for affordable housing is met.” And council has clearly indicated that it is not going to do that.
The traditional solution is the following (quotes and paraphrases):
- “The city needs to look for different ways of providing affordability.”
- We need to do more homework to find out what other cities are doing.
- We have to pressure the Planning Dept. to take sesriously the Adeline surveys.
- The legal process for stopping development is to go to the commissions and the ZAB, or community meetings with the developers.
But these traditional solutions ignore ignores the fact that the city is the problem, which more residents and neighborhoods are recognizing. That recognition appeared in this form:
- The people will go through the motions, and the city will do what it wants anyway.
- Council has failed.
- The city council vote is always 6-3 in favor of the developers.
- Sometimes the city gives money to relocate.
- Can we at least get a guarantee that former long-time residents will get first shot at the new housing.
There is anger and despair in this present moment. And a tremendous fear of dislocation. To suggest that what people must do is go to the city council begging for surcease is to miss the tenor of this moment. With all the ideas extant about neighborhood organizing, alternate political structures, and other perspectives that position people in a “first person plural” sense, to marginalize those perspectives behind information and city council hearings is to simply render the problems described as objects in the distance. The communities represented in the panels were there as museum pieces, to speak about their past and their problems as if on display. No analysis of the organization problems they face was on the agenda.
Ironically, the forum opened with very strong statements by community activists, one of whom said very clearly that gentrification was a war against the people. Others added that though it was imposed by developers and landlords, the city was accessory. Yet in the wake of information and story, the forum only ended with the sentiment, “we must make stronger statements to the city.” In the face of a "war," that is to miss something. It ignores those who bear witness that the city isn’t listening. When West Berkeley residents set up their own air quality monitors to test for chemicals, and took data to the city, they got nothing. When experts in four different areas took facts about faults in the Harold Way building to commissions, the plans still got a rubber stamp. Where was the first person collective sense of political power that could deal with this?
If the people are beset by a war not of their own choosing, then what is needed is an army with which to defend themselves – a euphemism for strong neighborhood organization. And that is what is now forming. There have been three huge meetings in the Adeline area organized by a city front group (Idea Center), and one large meeting organized by Friends of Adeline which the city almost coopted. It is in those meetings that the moratorium has been demanded. There was a large forum last Spring in West Berkeley in which these same problems were broached, and at which various neighborhood organizations were introduced to each other, as embryonic modes of local resistance. It was six months earlier that the BNC had organized a forum downtown in which the same informations had been given as in this one. Where was any recognition that a real build-up was going on?
Were all these meetings, in which hundreds of people participated, to be thought of simply as niceties? If a first person sense of the political exists in the neighborhoods, then they are the ones who should have been running the forum. Insofar as that was not on the forum’s agenda, it was politically irrelevant.
There were actual organizers on some of the panels. There were actual organizers in the audience. But nothing was said in the entire forum about how neighborhoods should or could organize themselves. The presence of Friends of Adeline, with its vision statement, was the closest it came.
Instead, there was that old “we’ll do it for you” paradigm. But that is a bankrupt notion, because those who will do it “for the people” will only be representatives speaking to representatives. They will only see their way to using city structures and rules and hearings with their endless commentaries, which are now clearly recognized as useless. “We’ll do it for you” also implies, “if we can get enough people signed up, we’ll be able to speak in a strong enough voice to make them listen.” That partakes in the same bankruptcy of representation.
The city has sidetracks, "studies," future hearings, more hearings, meetings organized to get “input from the people,” etc. As sidetracks, they revolve around one idea, which is the center of the city’s thinking. "You the people come to us and we will fix it." That is not a step toward anything being fixed. It is a step toward “you the people come to us and we will listen.” And neither is believable because we know what the next step is. It goes, “you the people come to us and speak, and that will be your participation in the process.” And that step only leads to the final step, which goes, “if only fewer people came to the council meetings and the commission hearings, we could get some work done.” There you have the disconnect.
We saw this disconnect in operation in hearings on the police brutality during the Dec. 6, 2014, demonstrations. Hundreds came and spoke. When the police report whitewashed what it had done, it offered no accountability for the injuries done to people. And it even refused to admit that its militarist strategies had been pre-planned (cf. FOI requests), though its entire report belied that denial.
What kinds of excuses are we going to get when the construction on the Harold Way building gets started, and technicians take a look at the weaknesses in the foundation of the hotel, “suddenly discovering” some uncontrollable water drainage so that the theaters can’t be built. There will be reports and hearings and more disconnect.
It is now time that the term “democratize” be given concreteness. We need to democratize the planning procedures; we need to democratize the permitting procedures; we need to democratize the police; we need to democratize neighborhood governance.
What does the term “democratize” refer to? It refers to the process whereby those people who will be affected by a policy not only get to vote yes or no on the policy, but to define the issues the policy addresses, how it addresses them, and how it is articulated in terms satisfactory to those who will be affected by the policy.
To "democratize" means organization. It means people taking control of their own destiny – including forums about that destiny. There was no attempt at organization for this forum. No leaflets in the neighborhood, no calls for people to put forth who they want to be on the panel. Ms. Ritchie actually sat there and instructed the BNC as to the desirability of handing out flyers.
What are the organizational forms that will give a neighborhood the power to establish a moratorium on market rate housing in Berkeley before it is too late? Where do we start, if the Idea Center has coopated resident "participation" in planning the “Adeline corridor,” and now that the city has given the Planning Dept. directions to start making plans for the “San Pablo corridor”?
Anything short of neighborhood dialogue on how people can organize themselves (not simply express opinions and desires) to take democratic control over their collective destiny is missing the point. In that sense, the forum was politically useless.
We need local organization in the neighborhoods for the following:
- Neighborhood assemblies that can send people to sit at the planning tables for individual projects.
- Neighborhood asemblies that have the right to say what can get demolished in their neighborhood, and what cannot because they need it.
- Neighborhood assemblies that can demand that before the city acceeds to ABAG requirements, they be taken to the neighborhoods that will be affected by them, with the power to reject what is detrimental to the neighborhood.
- A network of assemblies that can demand the following:
- That the hospitals not move out of town (as they are planning to do).
- That the money to be used to beautify the city for the proposed new high income residents in the proposed new developments be spent instead on local public transportation, on a network of small buses run on a non-profit basis that take people all over town.
- That the university be charged for the city services that it uses, so that the money can be spent on affordable housing.
- That there be a moratorium on market rate housing, so that Berkeley does not fall into the same kind of crisis we see happening across the bay in SF (massive evictions) – which means housing for the homeless, and a barrier against housing speculation that is warping real estate values.
