Erin Rhoades: “Just say No” to save the new downtown Berkeley plan
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The Berkeley Downtown Area Plan was passed by the Berkeley City Council on a 7–2 vote on July 14, 2009. As expected, opponents of that plan have already initiated a petition drive seeking a referendum to cancel the plan. According to the Berkeley Daily Planet, if at least 5,558 valid signatures of registered Berkeley voters are collected and turned in to city officials by Aug. 20, the City Council has the option of either invalidating the Downtown Area Plan itself or putting a referendum on the November 2010 ballot for voters to decide if they want the plan implemented.
In Berkeley recently received an email message from Berkeley resident and New York Times bestselling author Ayelet Waldman endorsing a letter she received from Liveable Berkeley Executive Director Erin Rhoades which asks people not to sign the petition now being circulated in opposition to the Berkeley plan. With their permission, we are reprinting Ms. Rhoades’ letter and Ms. Waldman’s introduction here.
Glory, have we had bad weather and good food here in Maine. Ribs from local pigs. Ice cream and milk from local cows (my kids think the milk tastes like milkshakes – we’re in heaven unless we all get E Coli and die). Vegetables from friends’ gardens. Honestly, it’s a culinary wonderland. And let’s not forget the fried clams and lobster rolls.
But I’m not writing to make you feel bad. If you don’t live in Berkeley, just delete. Seriously, this won’t interest you. But if you do, and you agree that downtown Berkeley is a monstrous blot on our city, that’s is a sinkhole desperate for some decent urban planning, then please read the attached email. It was written by someone who knows more than you and I do, and forwarded by an architect whom I trust.
I’m telling you, I love our town, but I am so goddamn sick of the myopic vision of some of its more vocal (and colorfully-dressed) citizens.
Here’s the letter:
Dear Friend,
I’m writing to ask your help to revitalize Downtown Berkeley.
It’s an easy request. You don’t have to contribute any money, join any group or attend any meeting.
All you have to do is NOT sign the petition now being circulated to cancel our new Downtown Area Plan. And tell your friends to also “just say no.”
After four years of community-wide effort, seven of our nine Berkeley council-members (Anderson, Bates, Capitelli, Maio, Moore, Wengraf, Wozniak) voted to approve a new plan for Downtown Berkeley which would help turn around a downtown stuck in failure.
Our new Downtown Area Plan will revitalize Downtown Berkeley. It encourages more Downtown residents and more affordable housing, supports a pedestrian plaza on Center Street, enforces new green building standards and provides for much-needed street-level amenities to make the Downtown more enjoyable. It’s also essential to Berkeley’s Climate Action Plan because it supports more residents living downtown near transit and daily-needs shopping — essential to our environmental leadership role as a “climate smart” city.
In Downtown Berkeley today, commercial vacancy rates have topped 16%, almost all retail businesses continue to struggle, and only one new affordable apartment building has been completed in years. We need to do better, and the new Downtown Plan will help big-time.
For many years the people now opposed to our new Downtown Area Plan have also opposed all previous attempts to accommodate more people in Berkeley — even though that’s just what we need to BUILD an equitable, diverse and environmentally responsible future for our city.
This time their scare tactic is “Manhattanization:” the specter of “greedy corporate developers” crowding our Downtown with a forest of “huge skyscrapers”.
What’s actually in the new Downtown Plan is something different. It limits “tall” additions over the next 20 years to a maximum of one or two buildings for conference-oriented hotels or housing, plus no more than 6 other medium-height buildings — 2 of which could be office buildings and at least 4 residential. It asks for significant returns from developers for public amenities, including public open spaces in the Downtown. This potential growth over twenty years is constrained to a district that takes up less than FOUR PERCENT of Berkeley’s land – existing zoning limits would still apply everywhere else.
The conclusion the City Council reached is clear: the only way we can turn around Downtown is if we can house more residents and workers in new green buildings to support LOCAL-oriented shopping and services. Given that commitment, when is doing nothing the “better and greener solution” for Downtown, as the petitioners claim?
If the referendum succeeds, four years of hard community planning work would be thrown away and improvements for Downtown would be put on hold again. How would that help make Downtown more successful?
Please join the Council majority, Assemblymember Nancy Skinner, environmental and labor groups and many of your own neighbors in opposing this unfortunate and short-sighted attempt to freeze Downtown Berkeley in failure mode. Say NO to the petition — and say YES to a better and greener Berkeley in years to come.
Please help further by forwarding this message to your Berkeley friends and neighbors. And, let me know if you have a little time you could contribute in the next 3 weeks to help defeat this petition.
Best,
Erin Rhoades
P.S. If the petition gains enough signatures, the required election could cost the city more than $200,000 — money needed for many more important things in these tough economic times.
Yours,
Ayelet Waldman
You can read more about the referendum campaign here. Kriss Worthington, who represents District 7 on Berkeley’s City Council, voices his Top Ten Super-Sized Flaws of the Downtown Area Plan.
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I like the idea of a lot of people living downtown. But I’m skeptical that expensive condos will attract residents. If you can afford an expensive condo and you’re young and single, you’d live in San Francisco or maybe an Oakland loft. If you can afford an expensive condo and you have a family, you probably live in the East Bay because you want a bungalow with a lawn, or an aerie in the hills, not a condo in the heart of things. Do you think the New York Times bestselling author who summers in Maine is going to move her family downtown? Not a chance.
On the other hand, good, quality $800-$1000 per month apartments would attract a lot of people. It would be great to have some Dutch-style public housing in which all people from all socioeconomic ranges live side-by-side in the same buildings. But I don’t see that happening with this plan, which seems to be yet another variation on “attract the rich and let their shopping trickle down” plan that has made the urban U.S. so boring and crappy.
If the petition gets enough signatures, it does not require the city to hold an election. It just requires that if the City Council does wish to go ahead with the plan, they will need to hold an election. Or, they can go back to the compromise/consensus plan that the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee spent two years to create (which then the Planning Commission and the Council significantly re-wrote). Please see Kriss Worthington’s “Top Ten Super-Sized Flaws of the Downtown Area Plan” letter here: http://greendowntownberkeley.org/?p=34
Ms. Waldman should kindly go to heck, if you catch my drift. The business situation downtown is bleak, that’s true. If you think the problem underlying that is insufficiently permissive zoning or tax breaks for developers, though, you’re nuts.
In terms of the built environment what we have downtown is a freakin’ gem. We are sitting on gold, in that respect. What we have in terms of rent levels, public transportation, and the cost of doing business generally – a disaster.
Council is tempted in this development direction because it is comparatively easy for them to play around with zoning (and reap campaign contributions) yet hard to deal with the real problems. Not only does this item deserve enough signatures to get on the ballot, it deserves to pass *soundly*. No, not merely *soundly* but *resoundingly*.
You wanna develop? Why don’t ya come down here around, say, Sacramento and Ashby and while you’re at it, turn a mindful eye towards public transit.
-t
I’m still not fully versed on all of the facts of this debate, but I agree with Ryan Shaw that the last thing we need is more expensive condos (there are already some being built right now, on Center, behind the Wells Fargo building). I’d love to live in downtown if they made some nice, but affordable, apartments. I’d rather not turn downtown into some gentrified playground for the Berkeley elite.
I as an architect, support the new Downtown plan. It’s a good mixed-use program with strong density that I think will be beneficial to the city and give the center of town a center of gravity it currently is missing. I think the development plan is pretty interesting and not just the swath of condos that the opponents paint it to be. I really hope this goes forward in some version of its current incarnation.
As a long term observer of (and participant in) the street life in Berkeley I would add the observation that if you want downtown to thrive, regardless of and preferably without extensive new development, three key steps will do the trick:
1) Improve the heck, hopefully in mostly privatized ways, out of intra-city public transportation. Pulling up the light rail lines years ago was a big mistake. BRT won’t quite fix it. We need a way to make it second-nature convenient to get quickly and conveniently between the several business districts of town without needing to hop in a car.
2) Encourage transit-connected mass-scale parking at the periphery of the city.
3) Encourage economic development in South and South West Berkeley – roughly speaking west of Shattuck and north of Oregon.
Amsterdam, perhaps, offers a decent paradigm.
And, Diane, it’s not just condos, certainly, but who do we expect to be the users of this new construction? What part of the economy are they supposed to come from? How does this benefit the rest of the City? The plan seems like a cruel joke / absurd fantasy. One can imagine a vibrant downtown with the proposed built environment but at least this one has trouble imagining building that environment leading to vibrancy.
-t
Some background: The plan that the City Council approved is quite close to the plan recommended by the DAPAC. DAPAC was a group of 21 people — two appointed by each Councilmember and the mayor, plus three from the Planning Commission (or maybe it was two from Planning and one from somewhere else, I forget). DAPAC involved an excruciatingly long public process, with dozens of public meetings over more than two years at which citizens gave their input. In the end, they came up with a plan that DAPAC members supported in a final vote of 17-4, which is as close to consensus as you are going to get in Berkeley. (My wife was one of the DAPAC members, and voted for the plan). But some individual chapters of the recommendations had much closer votes, including a bare majority for the chapter about building height limits: some people think the numbers that were eventually included are too restrictive, others think they are too permissive. At one point it looked like the City Council was going to throw out the recommendations and go with something much more permissive, but lots and lots of people spoke at the Council Meetings about the issue, and Council got the message and eventually supported something very close to the DAPAC recommendations.
To put it in a nutshell, an extremely long, painful, public process led to a set of recommendations. The Council has now approved a plan very close to what that process generated. There is probably nobody in Berkeley who likes every element of it, but that is the nature of democratic decision-making about complicated issues.
I probably agree very little with Erin Rhoades — whose husband is a highly paid property developer in Berkeley, by the way — but I agree with her that people should not sign the referendum petition. The People have spoken, via the DAPAC process, and the City Council has gone along. Rejecting the outcome is not going to lead to a better process next time, nor will it do anything to relieve the development pressures that have led to the inclusion of some elements that the pro-referendum group doesn’t like.
The plan is not great, but different groups disagree on the specific ways in which it is not great. Realistically, we’re not going to come up with a better process or a better plan if we throw out the thousands of hours of work that went into coming up with this one.
So: don’t sign the referendum petition.