It would be interesting to have an informed discussion about housing policy...''James Heartfield
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Okay. My ex-wife was a city planner and worked on the Berkeley City Masterplan for about fifteen years. The most important result, from my perspective was that a democratic process made up of neighborhood commissions of residents, business, city government, and representatives of any major institutions, like UCB need to be formed for each of the general areas of the city---and its surrounding environs.
These groups act as `the people' and as long as they have relatively equal weight among themselves, they make the general informed decisions, with the assistance of the planners on how best to develop, remodel, maintain and change the city. Their decisions are more than `citizen input', which means their decisions are more or less the final say.
So then this was the general approach in Berkeley from the mid-70s to about the mid-90s. The key to making such a system work is the planner, and her commitment to a democratic process--after all the people have to live with their decisions.
The most difficult problem with this system is manuvering developers into the process in such a way that they will be forced to see the community they intend to develop, from the commmunity's point of view, and work with that. Few developers are interested, but some are. So development is slow, torturous, highly political, but at the end of the day, you get a place that reflects its inhabitants.
So there is no `good' housing policy. There is the policy the community adopts to suit its wishs. Now some of this has to be circumscribed by larger regional concerns. In this regard, then the city officials and planners can sort out these conflicts on a larger regional system---provided they actually do represent their community.
It is very messy. But I think it works, if you have the long term patience to struggle with it.
CG