The University of California at Berkeley is about to do something stupid. Nothing in the same league as, say, giving Michael Milken an MBA or forcing its faculty to sign loyalty oaths, but any grad student in its urban and regional planning department could warn outgoing Chancellor Robert Berdahl of the folly he is about to indulge in.
As part of a historic plan to expand its teaching, research, and administrative capacity, the university has announced a proposal to build a hundred units of faculty housing in the hills near the Lawrence Hall of Science, wiping out a grove of eucalyptus trees and whittling away at the unique belt of parks and forest land that stretches from Tilden Park to the Oakland-San Leandro border. God knows we need more workforce housing, but any fool can tell you that scarring what’s left of the East Bay’s open space and choking narrow access roads with up to two hundred more cars flouts the very values such housing is meant to preserve.
Andrea Pflaumer lives near the proposed housing project and has emerged as one of the opposition leaders. Pflaumer and two other neighbors recently wrote to UC Berkeley officials, laying out some very sensible objections: increased traffic would endanger bicyclists who cruise through the treacherous, serpentine roads; and the university has no obligation to compensate the city for straining its aging sewer and storm drains. Unfortunately, many of their other points were just plain silly. In case of an crisis, they wrote, that land is needed as a staging area for a temporary hospital run by the Red Cross. Since the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory is decommissioning its nuclear particle accelerator, Pflaumer suggested using that land as faculty housing, despite the fact that the federal government would never let that happen. They even doubted that housing is really a problem in the East Bay — ignoring inconvenient facts like real-estate prices and immigration projections. Finally, Pflaumer argued, you never know when terrorists might blow up the lab. “If there were a terrorist attack on Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, we need a buffer zone between the existing neighborhoods and university property,” she says.
As a rule, NiMBY opponents of development are selfish, petty jerks. Pflaumer isn’t one of them — the university’s plan ignores every basic tenet of smart growth, and she’s right to fight it. But Pflaumer suffers from the second NiMBY character flaw: the willingness to use any argument, no matter how specious or fraudulent, as long as it serves her ultimate goal. “It was like throwing spaghetti to the wall and seeing what sticks,” she concedes of her strategy. “Sometimes you have to be alarmist to get people’s attention.”
Unfortunately, Berkeley residents no longer can afford this tactic. This faculty housing fight is just the first skirmish in what will be a sixteen-year town-gown war over Berkeley’s future. The university is about to embark upon a massive campaign of construction and development, building office towers, administrative complexes, and parking facilities that could indelibly change the face of the city. If Berkeley residents want to influence any part of this ambitious plan, they must abandon their old methods, pick their battles, and act like grownups. Nothing less than their credibility — and their city — is at stake.
In April, UC Berkeley officials released a draft of its 2020 long-range development plan, a blueprint for spectacular growth. The plan calls for the construction of up to two million square feet of new facilities, roughly half of which will arise off campus. To accommodate the flood of new students born during the demographic boom known as “Tidal Wave II,” UC Berkeley will build 2,600 new dorm beds. Officials project that they will have to increase their parking capacity by 30 percent, adding as many as 2,300 parking spaces in the immediate campus area. It’s a remarkably assertive document, one that aims to reshape the heart of the city. Unless Berkeley’s leaders find a way to nudge this plan in the right direction, the streets will gridlock, whole square blocks may be taken off the tax rolls, and the downtown landscape will be blighted by glass-and-steel behemoths that would please Le Corbusier’s black heart.
The university has rarely demonstrated a capacity for elegant or prudent development; in fact, its cocktail of incompetence, arrogance, and antipathy to anything that gets in the way of accommodating the automobile virtually guarantees a new spate of modernist urban planning problems. In the late ’90s, as the housing crunch forced armies of incoming students to crash on couches, Berdahl imperiously refused to acknowledge there was any problem at all and greenlighted the plan that dedicated the better part of a square block, right in the middle of Southside, to a parking complex. It took a tent city of students camping outside the chancellor’s mansion before he agreed to discuss any housing strategies.
Today, the university’s policy remains unambiguous; when it comes to choosing between housing and parking, housing always loses. By state regulation, the university’s housing and parking departments cannot draw from UC funds and must finance construction entirely on student rents and faculty fees. This naturally puts the two departments at odds, as each competes for scarce land and cash. In 1999, at the height of the housing crisis, university officials implemented a new policy. For every parking space converted into dorms, housing officials had to pay the parking department almost $21,000. This virtually guaranteed the survival of even surface-level parking lots — by far the least efficient use of scarce land — while stifling the construction of new dorms.
Meanwhile, when the university builds office space off campus, it has historically been free to dictate construction terms to the city, regardless of its impacts on the rhythm of urban life. When UC officials announced plans to build a three-story office building at the corner of Oxford and Hearst, they initially included an underground parking garage to offset the strain on surface street parking. But in the middle of the design process, they abandoned the garage, leaving future employees with no choice but to join the downtown parking crunch. In addition, the university never paid any mitigating fees to deal with the problem — as far as UC was concerned, the city was on its own. UC Berkeley planner Janet Brewster claims they killed the parking in part because of neighborhood complaints, but according to Dave Blake, who sits on the city’s design review committee, the supposed concern for neighborhood relations was a sham, and it was all about the cost of underground parking. “There were just two people who were up in arms because they wanted something to complain about,” he says. “There was nothing we could do about it, because it was given to us in this advisory way. They just come before design review as a courtesy.”
But UC Berkeley’s days of reshaping the city with impunity may be coming to an end — and just in time for the great town-gown wars to begin anew. East Bay Assemblywoman Loni Hancock is pushing a bill that would fundamentally change the way the universities build in their host cities. If the bill passes, whenever a UC building project identifies significant impacts on city infrastructure, university officials must sit down in a public hearing, identify how much it will cost to deal with the problem, and either cough up the money or explain — before a crowd of potentially angry citizens — why they can’t afford to. Berdahl and his successors will still be able to cram projects down their neighbors’ throats, but now at least they’ll have to do it in public.
Spokeswoman Abbie Lunardini claims that UC opposes the bill because it could force the system to pay cities excessive amounts for problems it didn’t create, but she was murky on the details and didn’t seem to know the law. Hancock insists her only goal is to force universities to deal with their host cities in good faith or otherwise look arrogant. “I think it would be embarrassing for a public agency to say, ‘It’s your problem,'” she says, adding that the bill passed the Assembly with ease. “One of the reasons we’ve got bipartisan support for this bill is that one of the Republican members who represents Chico said, ‘Oh, I get it. Like when CSU Chico expands and increases traffic, and they won’t even help us pay for the traffic light. ‘”
Indeed, barring a Schwarzenegger veto, UC Berkeley may well have to sit down in the light of day and explain its expansion process to the people it actually affects. In the past, public shame has had a surprisingly powerful effect on the university. Today, thanks to the persistence of student housing activists, UC Berkeley has more than 1,000 beds of housing in the pipeline. Two years ago, university officials balked at issuing an “ecopass” that let its employees ride the bus for free — an eminently sensible idea, since it would reduce the university’s own need to build parking. But after employees presented Vice Chancellor Horace Mitchell with a petition containing 1,700 signatures, he compromised and is finalizing a deal , however imperfect, with AC Transit. If Berkeley residents learn how to strategically apply pressure, they too can subtly change campus priorities.
But the key word here is strategic. For too long, reactionary NiMBYs have hijacked the planning process in Berkeley, stifling the most modest and sensible apartment complexes with petty complaints and trumped-up appeals to the city’s historical heritage. Today, Mayor Tom Bates and UC Berkeley officials are working to build a downtown hotel, convention center, and new home for the university arts museum — a project that will flood the city’s coffers with tax revenue, transform the ugly half of Center Street into a wonderful new arts and retail corridor, and establish a constructive tone for future town-gown relations. But a small cadre of nit-picking harpies has swarmed around the proposal, using absurd ad hominem attacks to denounce it at public meetings and in the pages of the Berkeley Daily Planet. In search of allies to help her fight against the hills housing project, Andrea Pflaumer has lately been talking to members of the Committee to Minimize Toxic Waste, that tiresome group of hysterics who endlessly carp about Lawrence Berkeley Lab — not to get anything done, but merely to hear themselves squawk.
If she wants the university to take her seriously, Pflaumer would do well to be more choosy about the company she keeps. Indeed, so could every reasonable Berkeley resident. If Hancock’s bill passes, the university will finally be forced to deal with its neighbors in good faith. If the neighbors expect any progress with the university, they had better learn to do the same.
