Editorials
What's Happening to Berkeley? How Would You Know?
Way back in the Before the Before Times, when residents of cities were sometimes called citizens and sometimes called burghers and sometimes even The Voters, many of them got their news about what was going on from what was called “newspapers”. There was a longish era of daily papers supported by readers and advertisers and a shorter era of “underground” newspapers, most of them cheaply printed free weeklies supported (kinda sorta) by ads. Now local news coverage, such as it is, is mostly provided in digital form, sometimes as offshoots of the remaining newspapers and sometimes as social media.
A recent AP article quoted a Northwestern University paper reporting that newspapers in the U.S. are dying at the rate of two a week. At the end of May there were 6,377 newspapers, down from 8,891 in 2005. About 75,000 journalists worked in newspapers in 2006, and now that’s down to 31,000, the report said.
As one of those once-upon-a-time journalists I remember a slogan that might have come from somewhere I might have worked in the Before Before: We’ll tell you what’s coming down before it lands on you.
Yeah, sure. These days, it’s much likelier that you find out what’s happening because it landed on you.
John Geluardi, who once for a while covered Berkeley for the in-print Daily Planet, used to talk about the Berkeley Two Hundred, the few locals who actually knew what was going on and tried to do something about it.
Most of the time, then and now, many if not most Berkeleyans prided themselves on getting most of their information from the New York Times and NPR. And therefore most of them proudly knew nothing about what was going on in Berkeley.
Even when several print weeklies were at their lively best in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the smug citizenry, here and elsewhere, made fun of them. Berkeleyans have always wanted to believe like Candide that This is the Best of All Possible Worlds.
The San Francisco Bay Guardian, where I worked for a hot ‘80s minute, inveighed tirelessly for years against the Manhattanization of San Francisco and the perfidy of PG&E, for which they were roundly derided by the corporate press. Yet today’s pre-shrunk Hearst Chronicle has relegated local news from all over the Bay Area to a second section which contains pseudo front pages which are relics of three sections which no longer exist. The skinny paper seldom bothers with house editorials any longer.
Tuesday featured an op-ed in the former editorial space discussing why workers don’t want to work in downtown offices anymore. What the writer doesn’t mention is that The City is increasingly dominated by dark grey wind tunnels devoid of sunlight. The former office workers much prefer to work at home in the ‘burbs, where they can sometimes even work in, yes, their Back Yards.
It's the Manhattanization, stupid. Downtown SF is fully Manhattanized—it’s all over now. Bruce Brugman, founder of the San Francisco Guardian, was right.
(Let’s not even talk about everything that’s also wrong with PG&E—it’s just too obvious, and too depressing.)
You can still learn a bit by occasionally reading what’s left of the metropolitan print daily, though it’s a mere shadow of its former self.
Wednesday’s Chronicle front page featured a uniquely stupid article wondering why nobody seems to be using the SB 9 legislation, a Sacramento special from Scott Wiener and our own Nancy Skinner and Buffy Wicks. This legislation lets property owners split single family lots to build four houses on two lots. It’s worth reading, and especially the 200+ comments it drew, several of them intelligent:
Despite uproar, few seek to use California’s new housing-density law. What’s stopping them?
What indeed? As many commenters pointed out, there was never any uproar from single family homeowners demanding the right to build second houses in their own backyards. The reporter on this story transparently got most of his information from the well-oiled and developer funded YIMBY PR apparatus, with apparently no attempt to talk to organizers of ongoing attempts to return planning control to local governments. One commenter found 6 factual errors in the short article.
My online viewing of this piece was accompanied by an ad for a pre-fab cottage you could buy for your back yard. I wonder how many of these were purchased by readers?
And yet, most residents of all those California cities which have been stripped of their power to regulate local development have no idea yet that this has happened. Certainly Berkeleyans, except for the 200, have been Shocked, Shocked when a neighbor’s bungalow has been bought by a speculator to be torn down for a multiplex.
When this happened on a residential block in the north campus area, even neighbors considered well-informed on national topics (i.e. Prof. Robert Reich and his wife) seemed to be surprised. Why did I know about the dramatic changes to local regulatory powers which have been taking place in Sacramento and they didn’t?
This week I watched the open online meeting of Berkeley Neighborhoods Council and I talked with several people who have been trying to get the word out on local topics they considered crucial. A common theme is puzzlement about the disconnect between what local voters seem to want and what their electeds do for them.
One person pointed out that on the national level that there’s strong support in polls for tighter gun regulations and strong opposition to abortion bans, and yet elected officials consistently vote in the opposite direction.
Here in Berkeley I’m reasonably sure that no one has voted, per a sarcastic Chronicle commenter, like this:
" ‘Gee, I'd like to look out of my living room window and see a window with someone looking back at me and a wall of painted shingles where the apple tree used to be!’ said no homeowner ever.”
But that’s what Berkeley’s mayor and his newly-minted councilmember majority seem to have in mind for them. Jesse Arreguin was first elected with the support of the progressive coalition that also supported Kate Harrison, Sophie Hahn, Ben Bartlett and Cheryl Davila, but he worked to dump Davila in the next election. Recently he’s been voting on land use questions with the councilmembers who are obvious YIMBY pawns: Taplin, Droste and Kasarwani, with the frequent cooperation of longtime “moderate” Susan Wengraf.
There’s a bunch of issues that the Berkeley 200 know about now, but is there any way to get the memo to the rest of us?
A few examples of what some know, but many don’t:
- Some are outraged that the city has signed a 15-year contract to deface our public spaces with huge light-up billboard devices that can suck up data from users’ cell phones.
- Some think that “place-making” in the Hopkins shopping area is turning into place breaking, with screwy lane-changes which will doom the retail businesses whose customers need parking.
- Others worry that the biotechnology industrial development next to Aquatic Park will be fatal for migratory birds if bird-safe glass is not use.
- Some know that Arreguin and UCB are hand-in-glove regarding the destruction of the People’s Park Historic Landmark.
- Film buffs mourn the loss of Downtown Berkeley’s cinemas.
- Many wonder why no low-income housing and no family housing at any price point are coming out of Berkeley’s Big Ugly Box boom. They see that it’s just producing dorms for Luxury Students and temporary dwellings for tech workers who no longer want to Bart to offices in San Francisco.
- Last night a sizeable crowd showed up on Zoom to express their opposition to a consultant’s proposal to “monetize” the native plant restoration area at Cesar Chavez Park by making it a commercial stage.
- And, and, and….
We have about 1000 regular subscribers, to whom I send emails with links to articles a couple of times a week, plus several thousand more regular readers who go on their own to our home page.
There are other sites focused on Berkeley, some of which even have reporters, which might reach tens of thousands more. The Chronicle probably still has some subscribers in Berkeley, but their coverage of Berkeley has been hopeless for years, even though a sizable number of their reporters have always lived here.
But really, folks, there’s an election in November. Will most voters know anything about city issues by then? Sadly, I doubt it.
