Bill reveals lots of hypocrisy
The Berkeley City Council went on record Tuesday solemnly urging the governor to declare homelessness a statewide emergency while noting its own “comprehensive” efforts to grapple with the housing shortage. At the same time, the council formally objected to legislation that might allow new apartments to encroach on the ocean of asphalt surrounding the North Berkeley BART Station.
The pair of resolutions neatly captured the hypocrisy behind California’s housing crisis, with officials loudly deploring the inadequate supply of homes while digging in against any substantive expansion thereof. Facing a not-in-mybackyard outcry from homeowners enjoying skyhigh, scarcity-inflated property values, even a city as purportedly progressive as Berkeley won’t willingly sacrifice parking lots to environmentally sound, transit-friendly development.
“There’s incredible irony
in the fact that cities opposing the bill ... are at the same time decrying the housing and congestion crisis,” said Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, an author of the legislation. “It’s classic NIMBY-ism.”
Chiu’s bill with Assemblyman Tim Grayson, DConcord, expected to reach the Assembly floor this week, would encourage affordable and market-rate housing development on vacant BART property and limit cities’ power to obstruct it. While BART aims to host 20,000 units by 2040, progress has been halting not only in Berkeley but across the system. Less than a tenth of the hopedfor units have been completed under the agency’s transit-oriented development program.
Judging by some cities’ reactions to the Chiu-Grayson bill, AB2923, that’s no accident. Berkeley’s council narrowly voted to join Hayward, Concord, Lafayette and the League of California Cities in opposing the legislation. Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín, who is among the bill’s detractors, insisted that he “strongly” supports housing at the North Berkeley station but wants to retain “control over shaping our future.”
The bill’s impact on that vaunted local control, however, is incremental, especially compared with the likes of state Sen. Scott Wiener’s SB827, a sweeping bid to promote dense, transit-accessible housing that was killed in committee last month. AB2923 would affect a total of a few hundred acres occupied mostly by surface parking lots, Chiu said, and it wouldn’t prevent any development, including parking: “When you look at the overall landuse authority of these cities, it’s a drop in the ocean.”
Given local officials’ opposition to such a moderate measure, their supposed support for housing sounds as empty as a jealously guarded parking lot.