Extra

I was in Tim Walz country (Minnesota) when I saw the book Gunflint Burning: Fire in the Boundary Waters by Cary J. Griffith sitting on top of the stack of books at my sister’s house. Gunflint burning is the story of the Ham Lake Fire, the largest fire in Minnesota history in almost a century. 

If you have ever canoed and portaged through the Boundary Waters, then you know how uniquely beautiful and serene the experience is. I did the trip decades ago with my then boyfriend. Out on the lake completely by ourselves we stopped to take in the spectacular beauty. It felt and looked as though the earth curved off from this miraculously special place. 

Stephen Posniak, who loved the Boundary Waters, on May 5, 2007, two days into his twenty-seventh solo annual trip into the Boundary Waters, in a moment of carelessness accidently ignited the fire that burned an estimated 75,551 acres of forest, with a cost over $11,000,000 in resources, It destroyed so much that some told the author Griffith it was just too painful to relive, even through talking about it. 

More than one thousand firefighters, volunteers and others responded to the call to fight the Ham Lake Fire. 

Griffith is masterful in describing wildfire as a beast that is eating up whatever is in its path. 

Any casual trip into the Berkeley Hills reveals yards, gullies and hillsides filled with highly flammable vegetation leading to densely packed housing, all of which makes a tasty meal to feed the fire beast. 

I doubt that any of the younger crowd that spoke at the July 23 special meeting on the Middle Housing Ordinance in favor of adding housing by increasing density in the high fire zones in the Berkeley Hills have any appreciation of the beast that wildfire is, how a moment of carelessness, a wayward spark, can ignite a fire that eats everything in its path until it runs out of fuel. 

A young woman who has never that I recall previously attended the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission meetings in the years I’ve attended stood up for non-agenda comments on August 7, 2024. She spoke about how she had attended the city council meeting on middle housing and that older people from the hills were talking about fire and opposing adding middle housing in the hills when her friends needed housing. 

She insinuated through her comments that opposition to adding housing in the fire zones was a ruse by existing property owners to bolster their own selfish interests. She didn’t believe the hills were actually that hazardous, and said housing should be built in the hills so her friends would have places to live. 

The comments from the young woman pushing for approval of increasing density in the hills, the fire zones, didn’t move any commission action at that meeting. 

Through the evening we learned from the young woman’s comments she had lived in Berkeley three year, and that is exactly the problem. 

She wasn’t here in 1991 nearly thirty-three years ago when the Berkeley Oakland Firestorm exploded on Sunday morning, October 20^th , destroyed 2,843 single-family homes, 437 apartments and condominium units, took the lives of 25 people and 150 suffered non-fatal injuries. 

Anyone who experienced that day is unlikely to forget it, especially the people who were trapped in traffic trying to evacuate, abandoned their cars and ran for their lives with the fire billowing around them. Others of us watched the fire move down the hills not knowing if it could be stopped and heard the frightening fire survivor stories from co-workers, friends and neighbors in the days that followed. 

I wonder if she read Fire Chief Sprague’s letter to the Berkeley City Council on the middle housing zoning and fire risk, watched the films and followed the references from Sprague’s letter or for that matter if any of the people commenting at the July 23 City Council meeting for treating all of the City the same and increasing density in the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones (VHFHSZ) read his letter. https://tinyurl.com/ye27ra3e 

I doubt any of those commenters at City Council dismissing fire risk actually grasped that fire in the Berkeley Hills is cyclical in nature and at thirty-three years since the Oakland Berkeley Hills Fire in 1991 we are pushing our luck. 

Of course, I’ve learned as an RN that people , even when confronted with irrefutable science and facts, have an immense capacity for denial. 

After the meeting, in the brief exchange I had with a member of the Berkeley Fire Department, asking what he thought, got this answer: “she isn’t interested in the science.” 

When Kathy Kramer (organizer of the annual native plant garden tour) and I took a drive through the VHFHSZ to look at vegetation especially along the expected evacuation routes, nearly the entire area along our drive was filled with what looked more like kindling than what would fall into recommended steps for home hardening to reduce fire risk. 

You can find the list of recommended native plants for VHFHSZ on the Bringing Back the Natives Fire-Hazardous plants and fire-resistant native plants webpage. https://www.bringingbackthenatives.net/fire-hazardous-plants-fire-resistant-native-plants 

To make what Kathy and I saw that day even more alarming, my walk partner, who lives in the WUI (Wildland Urban Interface) on the very edge where housing ends and wildland starts, shared with me that in a recent evacuation exercise/drill she couldn’t get out and down the hill. That was in optimal conditions without raging fire and panicked drivers trying to evacuate. 

Changing the VHFHSZ from a mix of highly flammable vegetation to fire-resistant native plants is a momentous task. The Berkeley Fire Department is trying to get on top of this through inspections and the Berkeley Fire Safe Council has done a miraculous job of clearing flammable eucalyptus debris, but there is still so much to be done. 

A frequent phrase heard on adding and increasing housing density is that it is necessary because “my children can’t live here” or “my friends can’t live here” as if the 10.5 square miles of land in Berkeley is the only place in the world to live. What was interesting in my recent trip to Minnesota and all the other trips over the years was that I never heard anyone whining about where their children or friends couldn’t live. 

Fire was just part of the backdrop to what played out at the July 23 City Council special meeting on the Middle Housing Ordinance. It started at 3:30 pm, was supposed to end at 5:30 pm and ran over to 8:42 pm. 

I read the late posted “Revised Agenda Material for Supplemental Packet 2” from planning manager Jordon Klein, that stated, “Staff recommend delaying action to adopt the Middle Housing Zoning Ordinance…” but I didn’t quite believe there would be no action so I attended in person to what I believed would be a historic city council meeting. 

By the time the meeting started, there were over 100 in attendance and most everyone spoke. It broke out as young versus old, meaning under 40 and people with gray hair. There was resentment over the long history of restrictive covenants, wealth in the hills and redlining in the flats. There was the continuing divide of race and class between hills and the flats. There was the demand that if density is going to increase then it should be across the entire city. There were calls of racism as the real reason for exempting the hills from increased density, not fire. 

The very real unaffordability of housing hovered over all of it. 

It was former Councilmember Lori Droste who brought the Missing Middle Housing concept to the table as the answer to housing affordability. Middle Housing, defined as duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes, was supposed to be more affordable by the very nature of adding more units to a single parcel and neatly fitting into single family home neighborhoods. 

Missing Middle Housing was presented as addressing racism and the remnants of redlining and bringing equity by eliminating single family housing zoning, even though it has been that same single family housing zoning that protected the historic San Pablo Park Black neighborhood. To this day single family housing provides the more modestly priced homes in West Berkeley which has the highest percentage of persons of color in the 2020 census. 

At the August 10 Berkeley Neighborhoods Council meeting, Chip Moore, Chair of the Planning Commission, was invited to speak on the Middle Housing Zoning Ordinance. Moore (who is Black), expressed his reservations on the Middle Housing Zoning: “They [proponents of middle housing] are using racism as a way to defend bad public policy…this is not real…they want you to shy away from this argument and I think it is despicable that they are using redlining to justify this…”. 

Councilmembers Bartlett, Robinson and Kesarwani attached their names as sponsors along with Droste when Missing Middle Housing appeared on the city council agenda on February 26, 2019 (vote to continue), on March 26, 2019 (vote to hold over to April 23) and on April 23, 2019 when it was finally passed as a referral to the City Manager after which it landed at the Planning Commission. 

Missing Middle Housing fell to the back shelf with the pandemic and other priorities. In the intervening years on February 23, 202Z, City Council voted to end single family zoning and to allow multi-family housing throughout all residential neighborhoods, with small scale developments in formerly single-family zoning neighborhoods and low-density neighborhoods. 

In 2023 Berkeley submitted its Housing Element for the years 2023 – 2031 which is the state required document and exercise to define Berkeley’s plan for adding the assigned Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) of 8,934 dwelling units which Berkeley expanded to plan for 15,000 units. 

Each regional governmental group receives a bulk number of new housing units which are divided up and assigned to cities within a region. Berkeley is part of the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) of which Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin is President. 

Interestingly, Richmond which is just up the road and has nearly three times the amount of land (33.7 square miles) was assigned by ABAG just 3,614 dwelling units. ABAG has their formulas. https://www.ci.richmond.ca.us/DocumentCenter/View/66913/6th-Cycle-Housing-Element_Certified?bidId= 

In 2023, Middle Housing was revived and brought to the Planning Commission for discussion by city staff on November 1, 2023 to refine the recommendations to send to City Council.  

The name Missing Middle Housing is used to give the impression that besides middle size housing being missing, when middle housing is built it will be affordable to middle income and low-income households. 

The entire theory ignores the price of land. The more units that can be put on a piece of land, the more valuable that piece of land becomes, which in turn hikes the rent and sale price of units. It is why when a modest single-family home is demolished and replaced with two or more houses they each sell at market rate which is over $1,000,000. 

At the start of the Planning Commission public hearing on Middle Housing on April 3, 2024 Laurie Capitelli (alternate for the evening for Blaine Merker) was still on the middle housing as “affordable” page until he was informed by other commissioners that middle housing was about increasing the number of units not affordability. 

April 3 was the evening that John E. “Chip” Moore, the Planning Commission Chair, was absent and Barnali Ghosh, vice-chair, chaired the meeting. It was quite a scene. In the nearly ten years I’ve attended Berkeley City meetings, I’ve never seen anything like it. Ghosh was intent on not allowing Commissioner Elisa Mikitin to speak. Ghosh interrupted her, spoke over her and even called on city staff to stop Mikitin from speaking. Staff stayed out of it. 

Despite Mikitin’s concern not being on the table, she remained calm, making her point that if there wasn’t some kind of staging/priority setting to encourage density in single family home districts that normally escape the impacts of upzoning (increasing housing density with bigger taller buildings covering more of the land on a lot/parcel), i.e. North Berkeley, the modest more affordable homes in West Berkeley would be the target for demolition and replacement. 

The Planning Commission voted 7 to 2 (Ayes: Andrew, Capitelli, Marthinsen, Twu, Hauser, Ghosh, Noes: Mikitin, Oates, Absent: Moore) for one to 50 dwelling units per acre in Lower Density Residential including the Hillside Overly the VHFSHZ and 20 to 80 dwelling units per acre in the Middle Density Residential and to change the language to say “building intensity can range” instead of “building intensity will range” under land use classifications. 

The upzoning vote by the Planning Commission would increase the number of units in current low density neighborhoods with a range of 1 to 10 units to up to 50 units per acre and multi-unit neighborhoods from 20 to 40 units to up to 80 units per acre. 

Middle Housing Zoning does not include the downtown which is zoned separately and is seeing a surge of high-rises like the 26-story 456 unit building on Oxford and Center, before the Zoning Adjustment Board on September 12, 2024. The Southside next to UC Berkeley Campus has already been upzoned. 

In anticipation of the city council vote on Middle Housing Zoning, Commission on Aging commissioner Phyllis Orrick, who self-proclaimed as a YIMBY in her Sierra Club Northern Alameda County Executive Committee bid (she won), invited Karen Parolek to present examples of middle housing to the Commission on Aging on March 20, 2024. While Parolek was introduced as a Planner representing Berkeley and is the chair of the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission and a member of Walk Bike Berkeley, Parolek is the co-founder and President of Opticos Design, Inc., a nationally engaged architecture and urban design firm which specializes in missing middle housing. Parolek is not a city employee. 

Her presentation included photos of fourplexes with spacious lawns and other designs that blended into local architecture. Spacious green lawns can be seen driving north on Claremont Boulevard off Ashby and Claremont Avenue, but most of us are living in already very dense neighborhoods. I measured the narrowest distance between the wall of my house and the wall of my neighbor, the duplex next door. It is 5 feet 7 inches. 

In fact, the map included in Fire Chief Sprague’s letter shows nearly the entire Fire Zones 2 and 3 as dangerously dense which places Berkeley’s Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones in the highest risk category in addition to the topography and highly flammable vegetation. 

Mayor Arreguin partnered with Councilmember Kesarwani before the July 23 council meeting on Middle Housing Zoning to draft a proposal. It was a smart move, as without gaining Kesarwani as a partner the ordinance likely would have passed with Kesarwani and Humbert joining Taplin Bartlett and Lunapara who all voted to move forward instead of abstaining. 

The Lunpara/Humbert motion exempted the Hillside Overlay R1-H (Fire Zone 2) until after the evacuation study is completed by the Fire Department and accepted the maximum densities recommended by Arreguin and Kesarwani. 

R-1 – 40 units/acre – Resulting in 5 units on a 5000 square foot lot 

R-1A and R2 – 50 units/acre – Resulting in 6 units on a 5000 square foot lot 

R-2A and MU-R – 60 units/acre – Resulting in 7 units on a 5000 square foot lot 

If your eyes glaze over and your brain goes into shutdown with these numbers, just know Jordon Klein, Director of Planning and Development stated in his introduction to City Council on July 23, “Council is being asked to consider new objective standards to facilitate the production of multi-unit projects in low density districts where those projects are currently not allowed.” 

The bottom line is that this is about opening every neighborhood to multi-unit development that has not already been upzoned. 

There has been considerable information provided by the Fire Department in documents and presentations on the impact increasing the population and building density in Berkeley has on the capacity of the Fire Department to provide services. 

The evacuation study being completed for the Fire Department is not just evacuation. It is also emergency access and will include when completed late this fall according to the information provided at the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission the capacity to assess the impact of how changing the configuration of a street will impact evacuation and emergency access. 

The Berkeley Hills are not the only areas of the city with narrow streets creating trouble in the event of an emergency, whether it is access for emergency medical services, response to fire or evacuation. 

If public safety has a place in planning and decisions, any further upzoning or changes to the configuration of city streets should be on hold until the evacuation study is completed. 

Middle Housing Zoning is coming back for a City Council vote, We need to keep our eyes open and our email pens ready.