Local activist Becky O'Malley blames developers for the plan. "Speculators hiding behind the smart-growth banner have started drawing their bullseyes on attractive viable cities like San Francisco and Berkeley," she says.
My, my, and who is benefiting from the current situation? The landlords who due to housing shorttages can demand higher rents and hide behind 'grassroots activism' and 'environmentalism' to prevent increase of housing supply that would lower their rent income. of course, those dopey berkeley hippies have not yet figured that out - hence their knee jerk reaction against anything thaht smacks of a "big city" or "economic development."
wojtek
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Unfortunately, my ex isn't speaking to me at the moment or I could find out which of these is accurate--she used to work in the City of Berkeley planning dept.
But, at a guess, I suspect the benefits are the opposite of what Wojtek thinks and fall in line with the O'Malley quote above.
Here is the reasoning. There is no more housing and the rents are always at their maximum. The controlled expansion of rental units benefits landlords in a very tight and over priced housing market. So I suspect there are probably several groups of landlord-developers who probably pushed their ideas onto the planning dept through the so-called neighborhood councils. If they can get the zoning changed for higher occupancy rates in key locations, then they would stand to make a bundle by tearing down smaller two and three story flats and building higher on existing lots. This was the direction that the general campus and downtown area was headed in the Sixties, when it was stopped by the current zoning restrictions and height limits that were passed in the Seventies.
The same kind of pressure to expand dates at least to the Twenties and the very first city plan on record. You'll never guess what the first plan was about--widening the streets, releaving congestion, increasing parking, and increasing the available rental units. None of the street widening was done and no parking was added. They paved over the existing brick, cobble stone and gravel and left the streets otherwise intact.
This isn't to deny that landlords are not benefiting from the current situation--they certainly are and have for years. But the growth of profit in rental units has been over for some time. So some form of slow growth would build back profit growth in existing real estate. Also a lot of places are owned now by property management companies.
The real problems of beneficial commercial and light manufacturing development with the potential of skilled jobs and local tax revenue is still illusive. Meanwhile the largest employer, the University has no obligation to conform to any of the city regulations and plans and of course pays no local taxes because it is state property and immune to local regulation.
Other less know problems are the slow and certain disappearance of older black neighborhoods as long time residents die or sell off their houses and the equivalently slow and certain erosion of black business districts which have been starved for city support and services for years.
And the schools. They managed to squeeze some state money out for meeting 'earthquake' standards and rebuilt several elementary schools and remodeled the High School. But all these projects have been years in the making, moving in the most ridiculously slow crawl imaginable.
The most rational way to deal with the entire spectrum of local problems is to unify the bay area under a large scaled plan and intra-urban governing body that coordinates all the municipal services and their tax basis and re-distributes the loads of transportation, housing, business, industry, and school districts. This of course will never happen, but that is the solution.
But hey, the salmon are still running off Ducksberry reef. I caught four last weekend, threw one back (22") and gave two away to my warehouse buddies who got skunked again. My tiny freezer is so full of salmon, I had to start smoking it. Some is smoking right now on the back porch--life is just plain misery here.
Chuck Grimes