Street Trees on San Pablo Avenue: Berkeley is Leafy Green, Emeryville is Sun Blasted and Bleak

Emeryville's San Pablo Avenue Failure: 

Optimizing For Cars Means Fewer Trees 

Means Diminished Public Space 

Means Less Pedestrians 

Means Less Citizen Engagement

Means Less Local Economic Activity 

Means Civic Failure

Infrastructure of the 1995 San Pablo Avenue Beautification Project:
Street lights, bricks & ample left hand turn lanes.
Trees are allowed but not encouraged.

News Analysis

Twenty eight years ago, the City of Emeryville embarked on a visionary $4.1 million San Pablo Avenue Beautification Project, to create a pleasant pedestrian-centered boulevard out of a grimy and drab busy thoroughfare. Up the street in Berkeley, there was no big initiative, though it has always been a tree-lined road with a landscaped median; standard Berkeley stuff.  Here in Emeryville, all of San Pablo was reconfigured with the 1995 beautification project; a new raised median was added and many trees were planted.  Emeryville seemed to catch up with Berkeley, and then some; the project also included brick pavers on the sidewalks and pedestrian oriented street lamps.

Twenty eight years later, the trees (what’s left of them) have matured. Taking stock of our $1.4M infrastructure project--how have we done? We've failed– because, baked into the revitalization project was a guiding philosophy that beautification and pedestrian improvements shouldn't in any way impede traffic or commerce. The median is mostly the province of motor vehicles---long left turn pockets at each cross street.  Some take up the entire block, in both directions, leaving no trees at all. Other left turn pockets stretch half a block, leaving a two foot wide median, enough for a shrub or two, but not trees. 

The city also specifically chose species that remain small, so as not to hide billboards and signs on businesses, at the request of short-sighted local and national merchants. 

In Berkeley, sylvan, mature trees arch over San Pablo, forming a canopy in places. It's helped Berkeley attract locally serving retail shops to a place pedestrians linger, as if it were a destination in and of itself, not a corridor to a more pleasant place elsewhere---completing a virtuous cycle of good urban design.  Emeryville can’t seem to attract any locally serving retail on San Pablo Avenue without city subsidies, such as Arizmendi’s Bakery.  Here, we must provide financial assistance or risk our commercial spaces falling vacant or being gobbled up by fast food and national chain stores 

Compounding the lack of median trees in Emeryville, most of the trees planted in 1995 have since been replaced by saplings. Whenever developers remodel or replace a building, out come the chainsaws. City Hall allows this as despite our Urban Tree Ordinance, street trees aren't valued here.

So there you have it, clear to see. Travel the length of San Pablo Avenue from University Avenue in Berkeley to 39th Street in Emeryville.  But be sure to have your sunglasses handy when you reach Emeryville.  Here the street is sun blasted and hot in the summer while in Berkeley it's cool and shaded.  The divergent values can be easily seen with one transit.  One city prioritizes public space for pedestrians, the other for a swift vehicular pass through.

Street Optimized For Cars
Typical road diet in Emeryville: long left hand turn lanes, no room for trees.

Street Optimized For Pedestrians
Typical street scene on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley.  Large trees on both sides reach over to
large trees in the median to make tree tunnels.  Not possible with long left hand turn lanes.

San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley: Dappled Sunlight, Pedestrian Friendly
It's much cooler than Emeryville and much more inviting for small locally serving retail shops.

The Biggest Fight Emeryville Residents Are Ignorant of But Should Know About

 'YIMBY California' and 'Our Neighborhood Voices' Battle It Out For Control Over Emeryville

The Battle is Unheard For Most Emeryville Residents

It Should Be Loud

No Coincidence The Fight Is Quiet

News Analysis

The most fateful and far reaching story in Emeryville not currently being told is the quiet but tenacious battle for Emeryville’s housing policy fought between two outside organizations: YIMBY California and Our Neighborhood Voices.  The internecine battle between two disparate visions of the public’s role in public policy has been taken up by our City Council members serving as proxies.  Council member Kalimah Priforce serves as the dissenting voice representing the democratically focused grassroots push for a ballot initiative supportive of local housing policy advanced by the group Our Neighborhood Voices (ONV) versus the other Council members who are more or less represented by the corporate dark money funded lobbying Goliath, YIMBY California.  Notably, the YIMBY side (Yes In My Backyard) is trying to forward anti-democratic government housing deregulation and also to stop the ONV ballot initiative slated for November 2024.

YIMBY, flush with billionaire money and fronted by the authoritative lobbying giant YIMBY California, has been working to derail local democracy for housing policy using several strategically placed California legislators in its orbit, notably State Senator Scott Weiner.  Here in Emeryville, YIMBY California has two agents on our City Council, Mayor John Bauters and Vice Mayor Courtney Welch, both of whom receive support from the organization.  A public records search revealed Vice Mayor Welch received $2000 cash outright from YIMBY California, drawn from its ‘victory fund’.  

In a controversial action and illustrative of the clout YIMBY California now has in our City Council chambers, Mayor Bauters and Vice Mayor Welch led a drive to appoint Sacramento’s YIMBY California Policy Director and new Emeryville resident Ned Resnikoff to our Housing Committee.   Perhaps no single action surpasses that in terms of showing how our City Hall has been rolled by an outside business lobbying organization.  

Housing Committee Appointee
Ned Resnikoff
YIMBY California's Policy Director
With the Council majority's help
he leapfrogged onto our Housing
Committee after moving to Emeryville
only two months earlier.

The YIMBY organization seeks to take away our own democratically crafted housing policy and override our General Plan.  Specifically, we are supposed to be getting parks in trade for all the new housing developers are building.  But because that would cut into the profit margin of developers, Mayor Bauters, Vice Mayor Welch and YIMBY California want to make it so developers will be off the hook and the people left without a green respite from all the massive density coming Emeryville's way.  Oblivious to hubris, Mayor Bauters felt so strongly that we should override our General Plan and let developers off the hook for providing park space, he came right out and said it at a City Council meeting.

Our General Plan protects us against an onslaught of rental only housing, the most profitable kind of housing development to build.  The General Plan provides that Emeryville build ownership housing over rental housing.  And so YIMBY and their City Council sycophants want to override our General Plan to help the developers maximize their profits by building nothing but rental housing towers.  Families build wealth when they own their own homes, especially people of color and working class families.  This fact has been shown to be not impressive to the City Council majority despite our General Plan's recognition of this basic principle.

Also left unsaid by the YIMBY supporters on the City Council is the inconvenient truth that Emeryville doesn't need more housing (affordable housing excepted).  Whereas the greater Bay Area region does in fact need more housing, here in Emeryville, we have been using defacto YIMBY policy here for more than a decade, even before YIMBY was born.  The Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), of which Emeryville is a dues paying member, conducts jobs/housing needs assessments every few years and every time, unlike our neighboring cities, Emeryville is shown to supply more than 100% of ABAG recommended housing.

Brentwood City Council member
Jovita Mendoza
She helped form Our Neighborhood Voices.
Ms Mendoza is concerned for Emeryville
and its YIMBY driven trajectory.

For its part, YIMBY supporters, fearing popular pushback over the lopsided billionaire corporate funded bully image, have begun to steal progressive language to try to confuse voters.  Some have expressed a ‘supply and demand’ argument to claim housing will become more affordable if we just give in to developer’s demands to take over municipal housing policy.  But Our Neighborhood Voices backer Jovita Mendoza cautions against buying all the YIMBY talk of trickle down hosing affordability, “Housing affordability has become a sound bite that Sacramento pretends to care about. Since 2016 there have been over 100 bills that have made housing more expensive and gentrified our POC and low income families she told the Tattler.  Ms Mendoza, a Brentwood City Council member, says she has been following what YIMBY California has been doing in Emeryville with interest.  She said Emeryville residents should be aware of what is happening [here] and they should “take back control over land use and let democracy come first” adding, “That is exactly what the Our Neighborhood Voices initiative will do”.

The local democracy movement, a popular grassroots presence in California, seeks to protect local housing policy by allowing cities to continue to decide for themselves what’s best.  The movement is using Our Neighborhood Voices to forward the ballot initiative process to stop the YIMBY California money juggernaut; people power versus corporate power.  A supporter of local democracy, City Councilman Priforce told the Tattler, "YIMBYism and their real estate lobby-backed gentrification strips away people-powered efforts to create real affordable housing rather than trickle-down luxury market-rate rentals. Restoring that power back into the hands of neighborhoods that can hold their local officials accountable is Local Democracy - taxation with authentic representation”.  Councilwoman Mendoza concurred, “There should be no more giveaways to campaign donors at the expense of the people, she said.  “Let’s stop the gentrification that is occurring as we speak in areas like where I grew up in Oakland and Emeryville and let people build the types of cities they want to live in, she added.

Mayor John Bauters and Emeryville Housing Committeeman Ned Resnikoff were contacted for this story but they both refused to comment.