Public Comment

An Open Letter to a New Councilmember

Charlene M. Woodcock
Sunday February 03, 2019 - 11:01:00 AM
Twice at the Berkeley City Council public hearing on the appeal of the development at 2190 Shattuck, groups of students, including several ASUC officers, smiled and posed for selfies in front of the council dais, displaying their 'Fuck a View' slogan facing supporters of the appeal.
Twice at the Berkeley City Council public hearing on the appeal of the development at 2190 Shattuck, groups of students, including several ASUC officers, smiled and posed for selfies in front of the council dais, displaying their 'Fuck a View' slogan facing supporters of the appeal.

Dear Rigel Robinson,

I was hoping that the presence of a recently-graduated student on the council would contribute to more clarity about the consequences of ending federal housing programs, of providing tax cuts for the rich, and of the extravagant mining, transport, and burning of fossil fuels over the past 150 years.

So it was a great disappointment to see your failure to understand the basic economic issues around new large-scale building projects in Berkeley, especially 2190 Shattuck. You and the students you recruited simply served as tools for achieving greater profits for a private developer who has no interest in providing the housing Berkeley urgently needs. You voted to give him the public space above the site in the middle of the campus-to-Bay viewshed around which the campus design was oriented. And he will benefit financially by charging high rents for that view, far higher than most students can afford. It is not the view of the Golden Gate Bridge, as the ill-informed students thought; the Golden Gate is the landmark along California’s coast of the entrance into the San Francisco Bay. When more enlightened, less profit-driven people designed cities, they were often organized around a significant viewshed. Beautiful urban design and the importance of commons, shared public spaces, were once understood to contribute to the public good.

As I said in my comment, Reagan’s trickle-down theory of economics has served only to transfer more wealth from the middle class to the very rich. To imagine that building housing for the rich will somehow result in housing for students is delusional. Building more market rate projects in no way provides more affordable housing. Rather it helps to drive up rents across the city. It crowds out longtime Berkeley residents and brings in new, wealthier residents. The city Downtown Plan prohibits permitting new buildings that change the demographics of the downtown, so approving this project puts the city at odds with the Downtown Plan. The in-lieu fee is much too small to aid construction of affordable housing. The solution is for Berkeley to cease inviting for-profit, market-rate projects such as this and instead to find sites for inclusionary housing and engage non-profit developers to provide housing for students, families, and below-median-income workers. Who will house the people employed at minimum wage by those who can pay $5,000 a month rent for this building and for whom valuable space is allocated for their cars even though the project got LEED points for being next to BART?

Of course it should be the responsibility of the university to provide housing for the students it accepts, but instead the university hires ever more well-paid administrators who have little understanding of the mission of the university or the obligations it has to its students. Since 2011 UC Berkeley has employed more administrators than professors. Such misuse of our tax dollars should be the target of student organizing, not ill-informed demands on the city council.

There are no affordable units planned for the 2019 Shattuck project. The much-touted $15 million in-lieu fees is just a drop in the bucket for any future affordable housing project. It will not be paid until this project is completed, three years or more from now and over a period of several years then. A responsible city councilmember could have demanded that the building plan be revised to include at least 50% below-median-income units. It barely meets the obsolete LEED Gold energy efficiency standards, when Berkeley should be requiring zero-net energy of all future building projects. It is your generation that will be dealing with the careless waste of resources and destructive accumulation of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. The city council is dealing with issues that affect future generations. Moni Law, who spoke out of her daily experience of trying to find housing for people in Berkeley, laid out the issues very clearly. You need to connect the dots.

An 18-story private building in downtown Berkeley that does not serve the needs and interests of Berkeley residents and taxpayers is unjustifiable at this stage of income disparity and the onrush of climate disruption. A huge building that will not house those who most need housing among our residents forced out by rising rents and that does not meet the most rigorous energy efficiency standards is not acceptable. We must do much better than that.