Editorials

Hill Street Blues: Banksters Buy Berkeley's Downtown

Becky O'Malley
Friday December 11, 2015 - 03:21:00 PM

To the surprise of almost no one, the good citizens of Berkeley presented quarts, pounds, volumes of evidence at Tuesday's City Council Special Meeting proving conclusively that profit figures supplied by Hill Street Realty of Los Angeles, the applicant for The Residences at Berkeley Plaza (also known as the Harold Way Alley Project) were phony, perhaps fraudulently so.

The Bates Bunch voted enthusiastically to rubberstamp the project, of course.

For more factual information about what happened on Tuesday , there's an excellent professional report by Tom Lochner in the Bay Area News Group papers: Berkeley council OK's downtown high-rise project

What do I think caused the Berkeley City Council to grease the skids for this one?

“My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with facts.”

That’s what my father used to say, parodying adolescent insistence on what he thought were foolish plans.

On Tuesday night, the Berkeley City Council made foot-stamping teenagers look like thoughtful deliberators.

The announced scenario was that they would let anyone who had anything to say about The Residences at Harold Way talk just about as long as they wanted. However, councilmembers never promised to listen, and certainly not to discuss the points raised and facts presented, and they didn’t: “My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with facts.” 

An acquaintance, a veteran journalist who has covered many civic meetings, happened to watch the proceedings, which were streamed online and even now can be seen as a video on the city’s website. This person was amazed at the total indifference with which the Silent Majority of councilmembers who are controlled by Mayor Tom Bates greeted the enormous amount of evidence of chicanery in the project’s application and the financial reports which were supposed to be the basis for calculating what would constitute significant community benefits as required by the Downtown Plan . That would be Capitelli, Wengraf, Maio, Moore and Droste. 

I don’t think the councilmember from District 8, Lori Droste, spoke aloud more than three times during the whole seven hour meeting, except to say NO or ABSTAIN to every proposal made by the three functional councilmembers, Kriss Worthington, Max Anderson and Jesse Arreguin and YES to anything from Bates and his team. And when she did ask a timid question, Bates loudly announced that HE was voting no, which effectively shut her up. She might as well be a robot for all the effect she had on the outcome. 

Arreguin distributed a two page list of excellent amendments which would have mandated a reasonable accounting of the profits Hill Street Realty proposes to extract from this building, which would be one of only three extra-highrises permitted by the Downtown Berkeley Plan. Of course it went nowhere as the majority voted it down on cue. 

According to the Downtown Plan and Measure R which preceded it, these special projects should have been required to contribute significant community benefits over and above what an ordinary development on the site would offer. However by using fixer Mark Rhoades, a former City of Berkeley planning manager, this one got a sweetheart deal based on what opponents correctly identified as phony figures. 

Droste made a feeble attempt to inquire about the arithmetic behind this transaction, but she was easily beaten down by the Mayor. It’s hard to believe that District 8 voters knew that they were voting for demolition of the Landmark Shattuck Cinemas and the Habitot Children’s Museum and a substantial part of the historic Shattuck Hotel when they made Droste their second choice on the ranked ballot in the last election, but there she was, seemingly taking her marching orders from Bates on almost everything. Difficult to understand. 

Is downtown Berkeley doomed? Probably, since the boom will last just long enough to allow outside capital to replace any remnant of interesting businesses or architecture with generic ugliness. 

Can anything be done? 

There are a few alternative ideas, none of them very promising. 

1) Legal Action. There are a number of factual deficiencies in the Environmental Impact Report, and it is theoretically possible to get a judge to acknowledge them and require the City of Berkeley to reconsider the decisions made on Tuesday with the correct data before them. The main one is that proponents—let’s just use plain English here—lied about their finances on their application. In particular, they said that they’d paid $40 million for the property when it was actually recorded as selling for $20 million. The city planning staff accepted the fraudulent figures without checking them, and used them as the basis for a staff report that found that the “preservation alternative” required by the California Environmental Quality Act was financially infeasible, causing the LPC to vote to demolish a major part of the hotel building. 

This is just one example of the kind of questionable dealing that led experienced and astute Councilmember Max Anderson to agree with a commenter on Tuesday, disgustedly, that “the fix is in.” Maybe it is. But I never try to explain the Bates Council's decisions on the basis of cupidity when stupidity will also do. 

The worst thing about the whole mess is that I’ve found no real evidence that any of these suckers, including the Mayor, has even gotten paid for selling out Berkeley to the banksters. (Sad to think he sold his soul to Satan, and all he got was a lousy soccer field... ) 

The problem with EIR suits is that they are very expensive—a ballpark estimate from several respectable CEQA lawyers is $100,000. It would be hard, perhaps impossible, for ordinary Berkeley residents to raise that kind of money, especially since the Los Angeles one-percenters who are financing this venture stand to make tens of millions just by flipping the permitted site to a new developer, and they would surely spend a lot more than Berkeley citizens to defend in a lawsuit. 

And the real problem is that the deciders (the Berkeley City Council and lower commissions which they appoint) are not actually required to read EIRs before voting, and often they don’t. I asked how many members of the Landmarks Preservation Commission had read the EIR before they voted on Harold Way, and only two out of nine raised their hands. 

2)Accelerated Regime Change. Lori Droste, who won by just 14 (or maybe 16) votes in the 2014 ranked choice election, has proved to be quite a surprise to her district. There are rumblings of a recall attempt. Some would also like to recall Linda Maio, but she’s been in office for about 20 years, and conservative North Berkeley might just feel that she owns that seat. 

3) Regular Regime Change, aka electoral politics. Many would think that whatever progressive contributions are around would be better spent in the 2016 election than on a lawsuit or a recall effort. Like a frightening percentage of the whole United States, Berkeley was gerrymandered after the last census to preserve the seats of incumbents. It looks like Mayor for Life Tom Bates might finally retire, so his anointed successor, Realtor Laurie Capitelli, poster boy for developers since at least 2004, is running for mayor. If there’s any desire to replace the oldtimey Hills homeowner establishment with new blood, Councilmember Jesse Arreguin (progressive and under 30!) might have a chance in a citywide election for mayor in a presidential year when students will be voting. 

Capitelli’s designated successor lives almost outside District 5, thanks to creative boundary drawing, so Sophie Hahn, who ran before, stands a good chance of taking Capitelli’s place this time. Darryl Moore’s seat is also up in November 2016, and there’s an active search on for a good replacement candidate, though Moore is expected to run again. 

It’s hard for me to gauge what voters in the district now represented by Susan Wengraf might want from a new councilmember if she decides not to run. 

The truth is that most of Berkeley prides itself on knowing nothing about what’s going on locally, especially those comfortably ensconced in Hills District 6. Without a newspaper, it takes a little work to figure it out, and local online news sources and Bay Area-wide publications don’t seem to suffice for most. 

I number among my friends several people with academic connections who might qualify as national or international public intellectuals, but where Berkeley is concerned they’re out to lunch (a delicious gourmet sustainable lunch of course) most of the time. They’re in Berkeley (at least in the winter) but not of it. They have dachas on Cape Cod, pieds-a-terre in rent-controlled Greenwich Village apartments they inherited from their grandparents, apartments in Cambridge (either one, or perhaps Oxford) , travel plans for most summers and gorgeous views. The fact that the South Berkeley public swimming pool is filled with dirt and most of the public infrastructure is disintegrating is Not Their Problem. An intelligent and thoughtful writer that I know happened to get wind of plans for The Residences on Harold Way, and said to me in all seriousness that she thought Tom Bates Would Be Able to Stop It. 

Can anything be done about this sorry state of affairs? If readers have any ideas, I’d like to hear them, because I’m flat out of ideas myself. Send them to editor@berkeleydailyplanet.com and I’ll share them with other readers if I think they’re promising,