Emeryville's General Plan Overturned to Bring Gay Hating Fried Chicken Fast Food

Do You Remember 'Memorability'?  

Emeryville's Planning Director Says 'Memorability' Is No Longer A Thing, Forgettability Is Much Better

News Analysis

After months of remodel construction and with a grand opening slated for early April, Emeryville’s General Plan is being used to facilitate another fast food restaurant by skewering its provision to create a “memorable city” regardless that the new restaurant is one of a chain of 2709 locations nation-wide. 

The new automobile centric, fast food, national corporate chain restaurant, the Georgia based, Christian, gay hating Chick-Fil-A will “contribute to the well-being of the surrounding neighborhood and community” and it will “create a sense of place, a memorable place” according to the City’s Planning Director Charley Bryant.  The buoyant language Mr Bryant is using for this restaurant is held over from the findings that permitted the building of the previous fast food chain, Panera Bakery with its 1562 world wide locations at the same East Bay Bridge Mall 40th Street site.

Workers were caught last week cutting
branches of off site public street trees
that were blocking the corporate logo.
Emeryville police were summoned but
there were no arrests or citations.

Back in 2012 when the Panera Bakery corporation sought approval from Emeryville to construct the building, the City had just recently finished its new General Plan that would protect against this kind of retail use owing to its “memorability” clause.  At the time however, Mr Bryant hurdled over that problem by insisting that a memorable mural would be painted on the south side of the building as reported in the Tattler.  

However, after the gay hating fried chicken corporation recently destroyed the mural as part of their remodel, citizen complaint again invoked the memorability problem.  How could a fast food restaurant with 2709 locations be considered memorable?  Mr Bryant explained to the Tattler the gay hating chicken place would still comport with the General Plan because the mural had been photographed before it was destroyed and it has been re-created on an ink jet printed banner.  The banner would be hung on the south side of the new building in the same area as the original mural he said.  That would take care of the memorability requirements he said....but not the incessant Tattler inquiry.

Since then, the Planning Director has retracted his earlier statement about the printed banner.  Now Mr Bryant is telling the Tattler, as it turns out, memorability is not really necessary after all, regardless of what the General Plan says.  This leads to questions about the hoops Panera had to jump through in 2012. 

Panera Bakery had to pay the artist to paint the mural at the insistance of the Planning Director in order to provide political cover because without it, a fast food building would have been seen as torpedoing the General Plan right after the Plan had been freshly certified by the City Council.  Ten years later, now it seems Mr Bryant is making a calculation the public doesn't care about trying to create a memorable city anymore and that love of gay hating fried chicken will make Emeryville citizens forget all about their General Plan.  Once this newest fast food restaurant opens, a precedent will have been set and the door will be open to all manner of forgettable national franchise chain retail stand alone buildings for Emeryville.  Ideas of creating a memorable city will become quaint, traded for gay hating fried chicken and other fast food restaurants waiting in the wings.  Wings?  How about another burger franchise? 

The memorable city idea was a noble idea, vetted as it was by the people of Emeryville in a series of public scoping session meetings years ago when we were collectively trying to imagine a city we wanted to live in.  The demise of the noble idea was not democratically vetted, rather, it was simply taken away by the Planning Director and the City Council majority.  Ultimately though, our city is becoming just like every other city because the people failed to keep a watchful eye out over their government.  The fault is ours.  All is not lost however.  We may not get a nice place to live but at least we're going to get some delicious fat and salt in the form of gay hating fried chicken in the deal.

The "memorable" mural that was offered up to get a fast food bakery restaurant for Emeryville.
Now it's no longer needed according to the City's Planning Director.  Memorability is no longer
a thing for Emeryville he says.  Why have memorability when you could have forgettability?

City Took Away Housing That Would Have Supported CVS

Blighted CVS – Thank City Hall’s Leading Lights from Twenty Years Ago

By John Fricke

Once upon a time, there was a small town with a not so nice street.  To protect the innocent, let’s call this town, Pottersville.  

The not-so-nice street was called San Pablo Avenue, and on one of its blocks there were a number of contiguous properties that were occupied by a grimy Kentucky Fried Chicken, a greasy spoon called, Broom Bush Café, some residential units, and a moribund paint store.  The Best and the Brightest down at City Hall decided that this block of San Pablo Avenue needed to be destroyed to save it.  

Having designated virtually all of Pottersville as a redevelopment zone, City Hall’s big thinkers came up with a plan: they demanded that the private property owners sell their parcels of land to the city government (at a generous price).  The city government would consolidate the contiguous parcels, raze everything, and turn the whole thing over to a developer who would create something better: retail shops that fronted on San Pablo, surface parking, and townhouses in the back. 

To the neighbors living nearby, including this correspondent, the plan seemed like not a bad idea.  Who wouldn’t mind getting rid of the decades-old KFC with its rotating bucket on a pole (which had long since stopped rotating).  The Broom Brush Café had been there for some time, but the area needed more housing.  The paint store was bumping along, but who could argue with progress?  A profit-oriented developer was on the case.  What could go wrong?

City Hall’s alchemists held community meetings, displayed renderings of the future “Promenade”.  No longer would the parking spaces front on San Pablo, they said.  The new businesses would have entrances that would be right on the street, thereby ‘activating’ the street with pedestrians.  The nearby neighbors dreamed of neighborhood-serving retail that they could walk to.  City Hall’s bright lights said new retail space would feature tall ceilings, a smart facade, not another big-box retail monstrosity.  (Never mind that Pottersville’s big box nirvana was brought to you by the same usual suspects. ‘Meet the new boss . . .’)

The existing property owners took their payouts and left.  (Broom Bush Café relocated to Berkeley.)  But even before construction began, the promises started to go south.  The housing would not be built right away, first the retail, they said.  The Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise cut a separate deal with City Hall – it would reopen at a new location right down the street.  And the neighborhood-serving retail was merely a bait-and-switch.  Even though City Hall now owned the land, it made no demands on the developer in terms of what types of businesses would be selected as tenants.  

Then, the developer rolled out the hit parade of proposed future tenants: IHOP, Panda Express, Longs (which demanded a liquor license), Hawaiian BBQ, and Quizno’s Subs.  

Neighbors and I organized a full-throated opposition.  We attended numerous city council meetings, we wore stickers (“Mom and Pop, not IHOP”).  I argued that the city was within its legal right to exercise final approval over tenants.  The city attorney took a different legal position, namely, that the city council had given away the store to the developer, and needed to give away more.

The know-it-all experts in city hall tried to explain – while talking slowly and not using any big words – that the developer had incurred large costs in constructing the new retail space, and that he needed to charge high rents to recoup his investment – only the national fast-food chains were in a position to pay at that rate.  Translation: we should feel the developer’s pain.  

Had my second-grade teacher, Mrs. McGuinness, been on the scene, she would have asked all the miscreants down at city hall to get out a piece of paper and a pencil, and write, twenty times, First Do No Harm.  

Although we were unable to close the barn door on IHOP, over the course of several city council meetings, we pressured the city council to find neighborhood-serving retail for the remaining retail space that was slated for Panda Express.  When Arizmendi expressed initial interest, we organized a community meeting to court the Arizmendi people (mainly, Jacques Kaswan) who had reservations about San Pablo Avenue.  We then persuaded the city council to subsidize the rent for five years so that Arizmendi could get on its feet.  

And what about the townhouses? Pixar cast a roving eye across its vast sea of surface parking spaces, and fixed its gaze upon the land slated for the townhouses.  When Pixar came calling, City Hall quickly struck a deal to ditch the townhouses and sell the land to Pixar.  Was Pixar planning to use the land to house some of its employees?  Not.  Pixar paved it over and striped more surface parking spaces for its car commuters.  The Pixar superblock got even bigger.  

Why did CVS close last fall?  Was it done in by the pandemic?  By the steady stream of shoplifters?  By the ‘challenges’ associated with San Pablo Avenue?  

CVS’s demise was foreordained over twenty years ago when the rocket scientists down at City Hall napalmed the block and then caved to their handpicked developer and to Pixar.  The one success story, Arizmendi, arose despite city hall’s genuflection to the developer, Pixar, and fast food nation.  

So, dear reader, the next time you walk along the Promenade, averting your eyes from the blighted black hole that was once CVS, don’t reach into your pocket looking for Zuzu’s petals.  They disappeared over twenty years ago when the brainiacs down at City Hall decided that they knew best.  

John Fricke is a sometimes Tattler contributor, longtime Emeryville resident, father of three, husband, lawyer, and former member of the Emeryville City Council.  He is currently spending a year living in Berlin.

Emeryville's Development Policy in Spray Paint

Here's What Happens When City Hall Fails to Protect Resident's Interests

Emeryville residents living in the San Pablo Avenue corridor, dismayed at the deterioration of their neighborhood by vandals who have been targeting the abandoned CVS Pharmacy building are now being told the City of Emeryville is powerless to stop it.  Graffiti is festooning the facades, vegetation is collapsing down onto the sidewalk and plywood panels have been ripped down.  The debasement of the neighborhood comes despite all the taxpayer money spent to improve and beautify the San Pablo streetscape because of a lack of will to hold businesses and developers to account by the City of Emeryville.

CVS quit Emeryville and closed down the business last September, leaving the building unattended and the City of Emeryville has no legally binding agreement from the Rhode Island based corporation to keep the property in decent shape upon their departure.  Emeryville’s Community Development Director Charley Bryant told the Tattler in December he is aware of the blight conditions at CVS but he is powerless to stop it, “We’re working with them” he has repeated since then, apparently hoping the corporate pharmacy giant will feel sorry for us and voluntarily clean up their property.  

City Hall is powerless because there is no one there that would rise up to hold a developer to account when approval is being sought for a proposed development.  A legally binding contract with teeth would hold developers to keep their property up to community standards after a client or the development corporation itself abandons the building.  But that would be considered a government constraint on a developer, something this city has not been comfortable with. 

Eventually, the property will be sold and some new developer will probably tear down the blighted monstrosity but until then, Emeryville residents will have to get used to their neighborhood brought low by a City Hall that works in the interest of business more than residents.  It's shown in Emeryville's development policy written in spray paint.

Vegetation is collapsing onto the sidewalk: ADA violation.

A look inside Emeryville's CVS Pharmacy building  
Editorial: It's warm and dry in here while outside people without homes huddle in the wet and cold. If developers abandon buildings and refuse to keep them up, Emeryville should take them over by eminent domain and provide a safe warm dry place for people without homes.