San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Create an island of opportunity
Change never comes easily in Alameda, an island with low crime rates, decent schools and neighborhoods with a smalltown feel in the heart of the Bay Area. This was a town of 78,000 that once had an epic fight over whether to allow its longdormant Art Deco Alameda Theatre to become a cineplex with an adjacent parking lot.
The theater project, overcoming provincial worries that it would draw the “wrong people” across the bridge from Oakland, proved a godsend in bringing vitality and quality cuisine to its main drag, Park Street. The town had been so bereft of dining options that the opening of an Applebee’s in the South Shore Mall attracted long lines for many months in the 1990s.
Now comes the greatest challenge yet to Alameda’s resistance to change: Measure Z on the Nov. 3 ballot. It would repeal a voterpassed charter amendment that prohibited multifamily housing. It is at once a very local issue and a microcosm of the notinmybackyard syndrome that has contributed to the region’s housing shortage and the prohibitive prices that result.
There were both honorable reasons and an ugly undercurrent behind that 1973 law. The legitimate worries included the teardown of historic Victorians and noble Craftsmen to make way for unsightly apartments on large lots in the 1950s and 1960s. The blight of that era remains evident on blocks with wellkept homes abruptly interrupted by an eyesore apartment building squeezed in between. These monuments to developer greed have not aged well.
The other reasonable concern involved plans to build 11,000 homes on the new Harbor Bay development.
Yet there is no mistaking that racial anxiety and class resentment played a role in the passage of Measure A nearly a halfcentury ago. Alameda was 90% white in 1970; it is roughly half today.
For decades, Measure A has been the third rail of city politics. The city has found some workarounds under state mandates that have enabled limited development of multifamily housing — most notably, a 1,200unit project going up on the abandoned Naval Air Station on the west end — but constraints from Measure A have effectively blocked many sensible plans along bus lines on Park and Webster streets.
So the City Council took what once would have been the unthinkable step of putting a repeal of Measure A on the ballot.
Mayor Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft, a champion of Measure Z, can readily name housing projects that have been stymied by the draconian oldschool rules.
“It keeps us from offering a wider choice of housing for people and especially smaller housing, that could be affordable to renters, or even for firsttime buyers just trying to get some equity and accumulate personal wealth,” Ashcraft said. “And that’s something that has been denied to people of color in our country, through zoning laws like the one enshrined in our charter.”
Ever so predictably, the No on Z mailers are filled with scare tactics about runaway growth, traffic quagmires, threats to neighborhoods’ quality of life and demolition of historic homes. In truth, Alameda has had a rigid historic preservation law for four decades and any project would need to go through environmental review and a decidedly strict city planning process.
Tony Daysog, the sole City Council vote against putting Measure Z on the ballot, takes issue with the premise that a halfcenturyold law is stopping development.
“At the end of the day, we are building housing,” he said, pointing to the 4,000 units that have been recently built or are in the pipeline. He also challenged the notion that Measure A has been racially discriminatory, noting that the city’s Black population, 2.6% in 1970, is about 8% today, slightly less than the countywide demographics.
Meanwhile, Ashcraft cites another reason for Measure Z: economic development. She notes that the city’s largest employers, at a business park near the Oakland Airport, are supporting it.
“They tell me that they pay good salaries, but it is still a challenge to attract and retain good employees because they can’t find housing here,” Ashcraft said. “They’d love to live in Alameda. But if ( workers) find a job closer to home, they’re gonna take it. That also happens with our teachers, especially the younger ones.”
Alameda has an opportunity to be a positive example for a region struggling with a housing crisis. Its citizens should close the chapter on an exclusionary era and vote yes on Measure Z.