Public Comment

I am writing to address the resolution on exclusionary zoning. Since the early 1970s, I have worked in housing development, construction, and sales. I worked for the Oakland, Emeryville, and Berkeley Redevelopment Agencies in housing planning and was the lead planner for the Savo Island housing in Berkeley. After that, I have been involved in the construction of high, medium, and low-income units in Berkeley and Oakland. From that background I make my comments.

I find the title of the resolution to be staggeringly misleading. It slants the housing history in the U.S. and in Berkeley in a way that is inaccurate and unproductive. It dresses itself up as a racial equity plan when it is actually a trojan horse for wealthy real estate and tech interests. When addressing housing, we need to look carefully and be guided by facts, not false flags.

We all know that housing discrimination was an issue that was overturned by the Rumford act in 1968. During my real estate career, I have seen historic title restrictions in the Claremont area barring people of Jewish descent, had Japanese clients who had to buy their house secretly in the hills due to housing discrimination that restricted people of color from buying above Martin Luther King. I built a house next to four homes on Cragmont Avenue that were built by a white developer in the 1950s and sold only to black buyers in order to make an attempt at breaking housing discrimination. Discrimination existed but it was not caused by zoning. 

I would submit that R-1 zoning has never been a racial equity issue. Covenants, restrictions, appraisals, and lender's red-lining have been problems. The resolution confuses these with zoning. 

If you look at the census data for Berkeley from 1950, you will see that our population has been relatively stable for the last 70 years. We are an old, high-density city that has been pretty fully built out for decades. In the 1950s, our population was 70% white, 12% black or African American, and 3.5% Asian. By 1990, Berkeley was 67% white, 19% black, and 15% Asian. I would submit that many of these three groups owned their homes. Where you see a real change is in 2010, right after the financial crisis. This was a crisis that disproportionately affected communities of color. After that, the Tech sector ballooned in our area, bringing extreme income inequity. The result was housing went to those most able to buy. And that is the primary housing issue we face now, not exclusion by race but exclusion by income. To the extent that Hispanic and black communities are disproportionately represented in housing scarcity, it is an income issue. But there are many people of all ethnic and racial backgrounds who cannot afford housing in Berkeley. 

Changing R-1 zoning to accommodate higher density housing will not address the issue of income inequality and affordability. If one calculates the costs of redeveloping expensive Berkeley properties, land costs, construction and financing costs, planning and sales costs, and developers' profits, you get exorbitantly expensive rental or condominium properties, and that will not address the affordability issue. If Berkeley is interested in making housing more affordable (aka more inclusionary), we need to have a plan that addresses affordability. If we are interested in addressing climate through housing, we need to address that issue. But we may not need to address the agenda of the Tech sector to build out Berkeley to satisfy its workers. That is all that this resolution does. 

As the most densely populated small city in California, Berkeley is basically completely built out. Adding more housing in underdeveloped areas like the San Pablo corridor of the Telegraph corridor can make a contribution to the health of our city, if not its affordability, without causing density problems like traffic overload. But after that, we need some time to do Environment Impact Reports and intelligent planning to truly assess what different options might mean. We need to take a thoughtful approach because no matter what we do, we cannot solve or even contribute much to the housing affordability issue, aka the diversity in housing issue, alone. We need good federal programs to do that. The same ones we leaned on to build Savo. The ones that no longer exist. 

Thank you, Candace Hyde-Wang