Why the Droste Resolution is Bad History, Bad Planning and Bad for Berkeley. Category: Not Visible from The Berkeley Daily Planet berkeleydailyplanet.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from berkeleydailyplanet.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
If I had a hammer
It is possible to build houses cheaply in the Bay Area
But the construction has do be done elsewhere
T
HE BUILDING at 833 Bryant street in San Francisco’s trendy SoMa neighbourhood will be unusual. To start with, all the inhabitants of its 146 units will previously have been homeless. Its constituent parts will have been prefabricated, constructed miles away and fitted together on-site like puzzle pieces. Most unusually, the project will have been cheap to build, at least by Bay Area standards. A report by the Terner Centre at University of California, Berkeley found that, once completed in July, the project will cost 25% less per unit than comparable ones.
Taplin Pushes to Increase Inclusion
After ending exclusionary zoning and moving forward to legalize fourplexes, Berkeley is still pushing for a more inclusive city. In a huge step toward that goal, Councilmember Terry Taplin is sponsoring a 100% Affordable Housing Overlay modeled on Cambridge’s recent measure.
Taplin’s move is transformative. Berkeley and other cities can best advance economic and racial inclusion by facilitating the citywide expansion of 100% affordable housing.
I promoted Cambridge’s Housing Overlay as a national model in the paperback edition of Generation Priced Out, and wrote about its October 2020 passage. I have repeatedly encouraged other cities to enact such an Overlay. The strategy getting increased national attention. On March 11 Harvard’s acclaimed Joint Center for Housing Studies holds a free webinar on the Overlay’s importance; it’s a great chance for those in other cities (Denver? Los Angeles?) to learn of the policy’s advantages.
Berkeley City Council members unanimously approved a “Resolution to End Exclusionary Zoning in Berkeley” this week, according to a report in Berkeleyside, denouncing the city’s history of racist land-use policies while declaring their intent to change its zoning rules over the next several years. The resolution, which does not actually change the city’s policies, notes that Berkeley was the first city in the United States to adopt a single-family zoning policy, in 1916. It traces the history of redlining and other exclusionary housing policies, like a 1973 Neighborhood Preservation Ordinance which banned multifamily housing in many areas, to show that the city’s zoning policies still perpetuate racial segregation.
Photo: Pete Rosos
The Berkeley City Council unanimously denounced the racist history of single-family zoning in the city on Tuesday night, beginning a two-year process to change the city’s general plan and introduce more multi-unit housing in every part of the city.
Read our live-tweets from the City Council meeting on housing
As council members emphasized repeatedly during the late-night meeting the approved Resolution to End Exclusionary Zoning in Berkeley is just a document of intent, meaning it’s largely symbolic and doesn’t immediately change any city zoning rules. That’s a much longer, involved process that requires multiple handoffs between the Planning Commission and the City Council, and is slated to be completed by the end of 2022.