Extra

These Berkeley brown shingles are victims of the Downtown Plan pushed on us by Tom Bates and Laurie Capitelli, both of them funded by outside developers and real estate investors, and the Bates-Capitelli majority on the city council.

Our graceful, beautiful older buildings are being displaced by monstrous, utilitarian structures, such as the university is putting up on the right, at Berkeley Way and Shattuck. The whole block will be made lifeless by an out-of-scale institutional building (though earlier generations of university leaders succeeded in building beautiful buildings on our UC Berkeley campus). And of course another outrage is 2211 Harold Way, both out-of-scale and inappropriate in our historic downtown and irretrievably ugly as well. No new buildings should go up in Berkeley unless they actually meet rigorous energy efficiency and aesthetic standards.

This election will decide the future of our city. I hope people will realize that.