``I think about this every time I drive in Berkeley, a tortuous exercise, since 90% of the streets have barricaded access...'' joanna
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Well, I agree, but that's one of the trade offs. I don't like it either, but the neighborhood I live in made those decisions twenty years ago. It came up of renewal, I voted against it, but the barrier system passed again.
Anyway, now that I am home, I can stretch out a little. James sets up a kind false question, build or not build housing. The implication is that `housing' is some single family dwelling, perhaps in clustered units, with open space. Either a yard or a block commons of some sort.
One interesting thing about Berkeley is the larger than usual diversity of housing needs, that reflects the diversity of the people who live here. This became apparent in this community planning process described in the other post. For example there are a lot of older people in Berkeley, some who are about ready to sell their house and move into some more supportive housing. So there are a variety of senior housing options, from large apartment buildings to small clusters of adjoining units. The more elderly and or disabled often choose the large apartment system because it also offers meals, attendent care, emergency medical support, etc. Those who need these services can also move to the small cluster units and get meals on wheels, use the city emergency attendent/transportation system, but they have to pay for it. Some choose to stay in their house and have the place modestly adapted with a city loan for ramps, widening doorways, etc.
At the other end of the housing spectrum are the 35-40k students who attend UCB. Again a range of options is available. The UCB dorms, which are central towers clustered around a dinning common---that ring the university campus, then off campus cluster style apartment co-ops, then the various apartment buildings like those that surround my place, and finally small houses rented with multiple roomates.
The single family house with a single two parent family and kids is a minority here. Most of the houses that were originally built with that kind of life style in mind, are now divided up into flats, at least in this nieghborhood. There are also oversized mansions near the hills up by Claremont. Because of their wealth, they weal an unrepresentative amount of power in city government, but this is mostly a nuance in relation to the City and University, because most of their property is up in the hills near campus. Down toward the bay are the track home styles of the 1920s-40s, small, stucco, single story homes which make up most of the poorer black, hispanic and asian neighborhoods with families. Most are owned by the family who lives in them, but not all, and I found a great little house down in the deteriorating industrial section when I was first married.
The point here is that there is no single housing need, and hence no single housing solution.
For example, I don't like living in a house. Even when I had a wife and kid and house, I didn't like it. I preferred our smaller apartment. It was easier to maintain, it was closer to both my job and my wife's and my kid's school, since it was about three blocks away from city hall, a block down from Berkeley High, and around the corner from the local elementary school. Our house on the other hand was just beyond walking distance from anything, so we had to drive to our jobs, drop the kid off at school, and do our shopping by car.
There is something very civilized, very sociable, and very political about living, working, and being near just about everything. I am not sure it could be planned that way, since the various places I've seen that were planned that way, were awful. It is as if the planners had lost touch with the real conditions under which this kind of living are made civil. It is highly urbanized, yet it isn't really a city in the LA, NYC, or Chicago meaning of the word. On the other hand really large cities almost always have a system of neighborhoods that some how evolve to produce very similar results. San Francisco is full of such places, and main downtown or near downtown Oakland is too. As a kid in LA we moved around the general metro downtown area and always found similar neighborhoods.
What made the waves of suburbanization so awful was there was no reason to live there---except gaining the single family home as an ideal---while escaping the conflict, noise, pollution, races, mixes of class and ethnicity. In the US the later waves of suburbanization amounted to industry and business flight to cut the fixed costs of building, taxes, utilities, unions, urban building codes, and so forth. Buying an orchard near a freeway was cheaper than urban re-development for office complexes and production facilities. However, I think that might be changing as former industrial sections crashed and some businesses moved back.
I don't really have a point, except to suggest that some process that includes the multifolded interests of both people, business, and public institutions find somekind of common set of goals and are made to put their economic bottom line in a secondary role. Businesses will certainly have to be forced into this, but that's what government is for. Time to become good citizens, boys. And people will need subsidities to make up the difference between their wages and their housing needs. It could be worked from the top, forcing more equitable wages out of capital, and from the bottom with housing subsidities.
What bothers me are these corridors like the kind that have developed between the Bay Area and Yosemite for example, especially between here and the central San Joauqin Valley. There is a freeway system that connects here and there and over the last twenty years small agricultural towns (the Tracy, Manteca, Escalon corridor) which were doing just fine as agricultural communities, have experienced a tremendous transformation. They have been turned into a vast linear sprawl of industrial parks and track houses along this freeway system. Virtually all the economic growth of the larger region has been focused along these once agricultural places. The important point is, they have under gone this transformation for only one reason. Land was relatively cheaper out there, than back here. It was simply more profitable to develop these meaningless, empty sprawls than it was to revive the urban cores that surround the San Francisco Bay.
It would have been no problem to regulate the obvious need for growth and building by cooridinating state policies so that these agricultural areas remained under limited growth focused on their own local needs, and force the entrepernueial spirit to come up with creative ways to revitalize the urban decay. The urban cores were eventually re-developed, but it was too late and more or less in the wrong direction---too much over priced commerical space and too little moderate income development. It should have been relatively easy to see how to accomplish these goals that would have indeed served local needs both in the old Oakland ghettos and out in the Tracy truck farms. But the political vision and will were not in public office.
As regards who lives out in Tracy? It is just white flight carried to the next exponent. People who grew up in suburbs, choose suburbs. They like driving. They don't mind getting on a freeway to find the umteenth exit and wonder through the next strip mall lining absurdly wide streets to find a franchise pizza place and eat. They like wondering around looking for a perfect Mexican food joint that somehow managed to survive as an independent out near the vast junkyards and used tire processing plants in the middle of a once productive almond orchard--fragments of which still remain as decor for the surrounding tracks of disfunctional families living on cable tv, junk food, and SUVs, while their kids go pyschotic and waste half the local high school football squad.
If that's what they like, okay by me. History will be unkind, but then they don't care, and niether do I.
So, just to pull the snot card out. I enjoy my very small apartment with its twelve foot ceilings, build some time around WWI, with its beautifully sculpted interior trim, its hand applied plaster walls, very high windows, magic morning light (it looks like something from Paris because it was influenced by that sensibility). I like hearing the traffic. It makes me feel part of some larger community. I know that Cody's and Moe's along with almost half a dozen other bookstores are a quick walk up the block, that Doe library and the rest of UCB campus is less than ten minutes walk from my computer, that my bank is between me and four movie theaters, that my job is five blocks away, that my neighbors are a law student, a weirdo street artist on welfare, and an Orthodox Jewish gardiner---we talk a lot about Judaism, history, Israel, and gardining.
My land lord is/was a Chinese peasant farmer of somekind who moved here in the 80s. I knew his son who went to Berkeley High School, and then went to SF State in journalism and became a photojournalist, camera man for some network station in LA. It isn't just Arthur, my land lord's son. This kind of place breeds creative and committed people, and if not that, then interesing to say the least. I've seen it happen over and over.
I've often thought about Alexandria, Venice, Florence, Amsterdam, or any of a dozen other small cities that produced people like these in volumn. Of course Berkeley isn't fourteenth century Florence or Amsterdam in the radical enlightenment that made neighbors of Spinoza and Rembrandt, but it's close enough for me. Imagine a working class that produced, oh, I don't know, how about the violin or the harsicord or turned to the book trade of publishing errant manuscripts. (BTW, Berkeley has huge number of churches, synagoges, temples, etc) There's a reason that foriegners come here. They feel welcome, at ease, and I enjoy seeing them on the streets. It makes me feel like I am part of the world---well, because through them, I am part of the world.
If I lived in almost any suburb I've ever lived in, I would never have these everyday treasures.
Yes supposedly the internet and computers achieve all that, and yet they don't. I am not talking about some virtual world, but the concrete one. And in the concrete universe, it is exposure to other people from other places with different ways that plays the pivotal role. I don't know how this simple fact makes itself the central engine of a civilized life. I just know that it does.
CG