Public Comment

UC Berkeley staff is making the rounds of Berkeley’s City Council and commissions presenting its Long Range Development Plan (LRDP). After its presentations, UCB staff have gotten a lot of critical comments, for example, being accused of attempting to devour Berkeley and turn it into another Irvine, CA, with its ghastly array of glass-box high rises. UCB’s Project #1 was skewered, a proposal to build a multi-story housing and commercial block on Oxford Street between University Avenue and Berkeley Way, which would unnecessarily destroy three historic buildings and displace residents of 1921 Walnut Street – a rent-controlled building with many longtime tenants. 

UCB plans a public-private partnership for the project, teaming up with the Prometheus Real Estate Group. Remember them? Spending many millions, they were the fourth largest contributor fighting the passage of the rent control initiative, Proposition 21. 

Seemingly UCB will bend over for any predatory corporation to deal with its budget deficit created by its ill-fated investment in a new (now empty) football stadium with luxury boxes that never produced a profit and the added deficit created by the COVID crisis. In its scramble for cash, UCB is monetizing land it’s purchased in Berkeley outside the campus boundaries. 

This is not new behavior for UCB. To wit, the “BP Building” was built by UCB one block over on Oxford and Hearst. Joining up with a predatory, gross-polluting oil company seemingly did not present an ethical dilemma for Cal administrators. 

Why not go for a trifecta? One block away from Project #1 is University Hall at Oxford and University, certainly in need of replacement or seismic upgrade. UCB could probably court the Sackler family who assuredly is in need of some image-burnishing. It would be perfect – a predatory pharmaceutical corporation, Purdue Pharma, the bank roller of another new building. 

These three blocks represent a local version of the corporate excesses of the current, and soon to exit kicking and screaming, federal executive branch. UC Berkeley could help keep the greed game alive of the several real estate moguls in high places that made billions on the mortgage crisis. Trumpism could live on symbolically here in Berkeley. However, renaming at least that stretch of Oxford Street to “Greed Street” would be an appropriate reminder of what is the true drift of the University’s “public-private partnerships.” 

People's Park Historic District Advocacy Group has an alternative that would bring the city, the university, and the South Campus community together to preserve and improve the park as both an important historical site and an important neighborhood open space. People's Park, which is Project #2 of UCB’s LRDP, is a historical landmark and thus under city policy should be protected from development. For details, go to peoplesparkhxdist.org.