Editorials

From University of California Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ’s “Campus Update”, August 24, 2021:

“Dear Cal alumni and friends:

“The beginning of the school year has always been a magical time for me — a blank sheet of paper, the first page of a novel….

Well, no, it’s not. The beginning of this school year, like those before it, is not a tabula rasa. Like every other milestone, it has the weight of history on top of it.

Mrs. Christ, described on the UC website as a “celebrated scholar of Victorian literature” seems to have forgotten some of the popular aphorisms in the liberal arts tradition, and she’s accumulated the lawsuits to prove it.

First, from Shakespeare’s Tempest: “Whereof what's past is prologue; what to come, on yours and my discharge.”

The history weighing on Christ’s cheeky plan to obliterate a City of Berkeley historic landmark, People’s Park, must be prologue to what the University will choose to do in the future. The university/industrial complex (aka public-private partnership) has had its eye on that space ever since UC condemned by eminent domain and demolished most of a residential block on the densely populated Southside. The past history Christ’s ignoring is the passionate defense of this iconic public open space, which cost one life and ensuing years of turmoil accompanied by purposeful neglect.

Something similar could happen again, but a lawsuit filed this week by The People’s Park Historic District Advocacy Group and a neighborhood group, Make UC a Good Neighbor, is intended to prevent that. 

The same two groups are also trying to stop the city of Berkeley’s precipitous capitulation to UC’s expansion plans. Students of the Book of Genesis might describe that deal as “selling our birthright for a mess of pottage”, a meal defined by Wikipedia as “something immediately attractive but of little value taken foolishly and carelessly in exchange for something more distant and perhaps less tangible but immensely more valuable.’ 

The city’s pottage adds up to a total of about $83 million over 20 years in compensation for city services, about $4 million a year, for city services which are estimated to have fair market value of something like $20 million per annum. The suit against the city of Berkeley alleges that because the deal with UC was done in secret it was a Brown Act violation and therefore void. 

Then there’s another variously attributed warning about learning from history. From a Virginia Tech website: 

“Irish statesman Edmund Burke is often misquoted as having said, “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” Spanish philosopher George Santayana is credited with the aphorism, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” while British statesman Winston Churchill wrote, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” 

It's an apt analysis, whoever said it first, and the UCB chancellor should have heard of the concept. The multiple lawsuits challenging the environmental impact reports filed by UC for the variety of planned projects the school wants to build all over the city of Berkeley provide ample illustration of the principle. 

Environmental impact reports, as specified by the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), are supposed to provide current and historic data to form the basis for predicting future effects, but one of the plaintiffs who filed last week , Berkeley Citizens for a Better Plan, (BC4BP) charges that UC offers “an unintelligible and legally inadequate EIR [which] fails to include necessary and legally required baseline data and substitutes unsupported summary conclusions for meaningful discussion.” 

Chancellor Christ displayed an incomplete acquaintance with another more modern aphorism in her Convocation message to graduating students: 

“It wasn’t long after I graduated from college that the wonderful Canadian musician Joni Mitchell sang about how ‘you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.’ “ 

Uh-huh. Yes indeed, Joni did say that. Many of us, especially if we write about historic preservation, have used that quote all too often in the past half century. 

I used it myself in the first piece I wrote for paid publication, right after I moved back to the Bay in 1973, about plans to tear down the Fox Theater in Oakland. They didn’t tear it down in the end, but I’ve had all too many chances to employ that quote. 

Mrs. Christ, deliberately or ignorantly, left out the rest of Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi. The other money quote: “they paved Paradise and put up a parking lot, With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hot spot.” 

That would be a summary of the way the BC4BP complaint describes one of UCB’s planned projects, Anchor House, which is a tasteless combination of luxury dorm and shopping mall funded by a big, big donor with questionable politics. Here’s the description: 

“The structure will be massive: 16-stories complete with paid, under-ground public parking and floors of large income-producing commercial, retail, event spaces, and offices with exclusive student residential units above. The residences, which will be exclusively available to about 700 transfer students (for a housing fee), all feature single bedrooms with small suites each of which have kitchens, in-suite laundry, and lavish living areas, as well as separate student-only fitness and yoga facilities and recreational spaces. The project will require eviction of long-term, nonstudent tenants and demolition of their rent-controlled apartment building (1921 Walnut Street) and of the Walter Ratcliff designed landmark UC Garage. The height of the structure is well above that previously agreed to by UCB or contemplated in the Downtown design plan that it collaborated in creating."  

Demographic note: “Transfer” students are often wealthy foreign students who enter with a year of credit through international baccalaureate programs. 

Or how about People’s Park? 

“The Park Project will consist of two buildings to be built on People’s Park: one large L-shaped building formed by the intersection of a 17-story mixed-use tower on the Northside and a somewhat lower tower along the Westside of the parcel; and one stand-alone lower-rise building with office space on the Southside. The low-rise building may include some supported public housing to be run by an unknown community organization. The larger tower will contain a large retail area; little is disclosed about the remaining spaces although some descriptions state they include residential, academic, and leisure areas.” 

Another big commercial space. Harvey Smith, the organizer of the People’s Park Historic District Advocacy group, characterizes UCB’s generic long-term plan as “the monetization of everything.” 

From the BC4BP complaint: 

“Instead of adding square footage for educational, research, or much needed student housing, the LRDP proposes construction of hundreds of thousands of square feet of new income-producing commercial, retail, event, and office space in these locations with incidental amounts of academic and student housing elements. 

“It intends that by 2036-37, it will have demolished over 40 landmarked and/or historic structures and landscapes on the UCB campus and around Berkeley’s predominantly Southside to make room for its planned addition of greatly increased population, student housing, educational, retail, conference, and commercial space.” 

What’s ironic is that since all these grandiose schemes were first concocted, things at UCB have materially changed. In the time of COVID, UC’s system of huge in-person lectures by famous figures is more and more dubious, as is dense congregate housing for students. The immediate future might instead be digital at home—this fall semester is a giant experiment. Monetization of the University of California might be easier online with a global audience. 

And the lawsuits keep coming. Another EIR suit challenge has just been filed by The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3299, which represents UC employees. Yesterday’s decision by Judge Brad Seligman in favor of another group, Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods, which halts student enrollment increases until adequate EIRs are completed to the court’s satisfaction, is the capstone of the whole endeavor. UCB expansion is likely to be delayed for at least two years. 

This victory will benefit all the other CEQA suits as well—except, of course, the one which the City of Berkeley bailed on. 

Too bad, Berkeley citizens—how do you like your pottage now?