Sherwin Williams Developer Charts New Course; Skips City Hall

Developer Skittish About New City Council Majority, Bypasses City Hall

Telephone 'Push Poll' Suggests 
Ballot Initiative In The Works

'Supply and Demand' is the New Boss

News Analysis/Opinion
You know it's a new day in Emeryville when a couple of developers can't stroll into town and easily pull a favorable vote out of a compliant City Council, greasing the skids for a huge flawed housing project with practically no community benefits but lots of negative impacts for the residents.  A new day indeed...that kind of thing in the old days could be done with impunity, without the developer even breaking a sweat. But now after Emeryville citizens elected a new progressive Council majority...well, Joe Ernst and Bruce Dorfman, the developers of the Sherwin Williams project, the giant 100% rental residential proposal slated for the Park Avenue neighborhood, are charting a different course to get their project approved.  Starting with a city-wide telephone poll, it would appear they'll be taking their case directly to the people of Emeryville, ending in a voter's ballot initiative on the project, bypassing the newly resident friendly City Council majority and City Hall's pesky planning documents.

Ernst & Dorfman are starting with this...

If you have a telephone land line and you live in Emeryville, you've probably already gotten the call (or soon will); EMC Research, an Oakland based telephone polling and corporate PR company has lately been barraging our town with phone calls paid for by the Sherwin Williams developers.   They've probably called you around dinner time with their classic 'push poll' about housing, to see if you're aware of the law of supply and demand and how Emeryville hasn't built enough housing over the years and about how the low housing supply is why the rents are so high here.  Ostensibly the poll is asking us our opinion on the Sherwin Williams project but it's also pushing us toward the developer's position.  It's a terrible situation with the high rents in Emeryville they agree, but not to worry these pollsters tell us, help is on the way; the developers of the Sherwin Williams site are here to fix all that with their 100 unit per acre 100% rental project.  The Sherwin Williams project will drive down rents in Emeryville the law of supply and demand and the developers tell us in the push poll.

But like Washington's endless phony free trade deals touted to help average working Americans, we're left wondering; if they're right, why hasn't all the housing we've already gotten in Emeryville (and all the free trade deals in Washington) helped yet?  We keep building and the rents keep going up.  In fact, the more we build, the faster the rents rise.  What about the law of supply and demand the developers keep reminding us about?
And why are the developers of Sherwin Williams paying so much money to call Emeryville residents to poll us on this?

Emeryville Doubles RHNA

Supply and Demand
Build enough and eventually
the cost of housing will come down.

Emeryville has been on an apartment and condo building binge over the last 20 years.  We've built so much housing here, we've doubled what the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) recommended to keep pace with needs.  ABAG's calculations of how much housing is needed is compiled in an official assessment called the Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA, pronounced reena).  The law of supply and demand would assert all this new housing should be lowering the price of housing in Emeryville but in fact the price has been going up...way up.  This is because developers, who want to maximize their profits, have been building only luxury rental apartments recently and that's had the effect of raising rents elsewhere in town....everywhere in town.  What the developers of Sherwin Williams are selling us is simply more of the same.
The strange correlation between building more housing and rising rents has been documented in a recent city funded nexus study on San Francisco housing.  That study shows how counter intuitively, when developers build luxury units, an exponentially rising number of affordable units are needed to keep the city's housing affordability numbers on target.  It has to do with an exponentially rising number of service people needed to cater to the demands of the wealthier people moving in.  The study shows how if the city demands say 15 percent affordable set-asides, then every market-rate building adds more demand for affordable housing than it supplies. That means every new building actually makes the housing crisis worse. 
The counter intuitive notion of more housing causing higher rents creates a space for developers to assert the intuitive but false canard of supply and demand.  
And yet the supply and demand adage keeps running up against reality; everyone now sees how we keep building more housing at a frenetic pace and the cost of housing goes up, also at a frenetic pace.  
Perhaps the developers will tell us Emeryville's double RHNA is the problem....what we really need to drive down rents is quadruple or quintuple RHNA.  A 50 story apartment tower on every parcel in town ought to do the trick.  Emeryville is to become a battle ground...a sacrifice zone in deference to a thick-headed meme put in the service of profit maximizing developers. 

Ballot Initiative on the Way?

...and they hope to get this...

Mr Ernst and Mr Dorfman's  problem was revealed to them in the City Council residential building moratorium vote last February.  While the developers won the fight against the moratorium because it required a super majority of four votes on the City Council, they're now left exposed; the Sherwin Williams project needs a simple majority to pass, three votes out of five.  The moratorium vote clearly showed them they won't get three votes for their flawed project.
We don't imagine Mr Ernst and Mr Dorfman are paying for the telephone poll to try to convince the progressive Council majority they must sacrifice Emeryville to the supply and demand god.   Clearly that's a non-starter.  Their only option is to call a special election (paid for by the taxpayers) to try to convince the citizens it's in their interests to bypass the City Council and overturn Emeryville's General Plan and go all in with their proposed Sherwin Williams housing project.

...in order to overturn this...

The election will likely at least partially be about the abstract supply and demand idea since the Sherwin Williams project as proposed is so clearly not in Emeryville resident's interests.  Maybe our patriotism will be called into question: we've got to do it for the greater good.  But that's an argument the Republicans in Washington have been trying to make for the last six years...we've got to go with austerity because deficit spending is no good they've told us.  Social security must be cut, aid to poor families must be stopped in order to balance the budget.  Americans have rightfully rejected that lie from the Republican Party and we think Emeryville residents won't buy the patently false canard of supply and demand coming from Ernst and Dorfman or any other developers.  The developers have a right to force a special election if they can muster enough signatures, it's true.  But we'll have the right to say NO to turning Emeryville into a sacrifice zone.  We've already done our regional duty by building twice the recommended housing.  Ultra density comes with ultra problems and we're not thinking about abstract memes...we're thinking about our town and how to make it a livable place.

...ultimately getting them lots of this.

Post Moratorium Debate, a Flawed 'Market Place' Development Moves Towards Approval

Mayor's Secret Plan For Better Housing Gets First Test

News Analysis
A huge residential apartment development proposal is just now rounding the corner in Emeryville, heading into the home stretch, headed for approval at City Hall.  It's the massive multi-phase 'Market Place' project on Shellmound Street with its 456 100% rental residential units, 70,000 square feet of retail and 1345 structured parking spaces.  Being all rental, this housing project is similar to most every other residential development project approved in Emeryville over the last many years.  It's also counter to what Emeryville residents say they want from new housing projects.

What's noteworthy about this project is that it's the first development proposal coming up for approval after a controversial residential building moratorium idea was proposed by the City Council but then rejected by Mayor Ruth Atkin and Councilwoman Nora Davis last February.  The three vote Council majority sought the moratorium to carve out time to strengthen the City's planning documents after so many years of flawed developments approved under the existing documents.  Lacking a four vote super-majority, the moratorium idea failed leaving only Ms Atkin's plan to fix Emeryville's weak planning documents.  However, Mayor Atkin has yet to reveal her plan to fix the problem, tantalizingly offering only "a moratorium is the wrong way to go about doing this".

Artist's Conception: Market Place Development
Featuring lots of deluxe White People.

For their part, developers aren't interested in waiting to hear about the Mayor's plan to stop flawed residential development; they're rapidly moving ahead in Emeryville.
One of the last three major residential developments left in Emeryville (the other two being  at the Sherwin Williams site and the 'Nady' site), the Market Place received approval for the first of its five parcels from the Planning Commission on May 28th.  The remaining four parcels are being presented rapid fire at subsequent meetings for the Planning Commission's approval.

A high density development, the Market Place project has the following characteristics identified by the public as being undesirable for future Emeryville residential development proposals:

• 100% rental, no for sale units
• No affordable units
• Automobile dependent
•  Not family friendly
• No guarantee for locally serving non-formula chain retail
• Exacerbates Emeryville's existing bad ratio of residents per acre of park/open space

The bullet points above are taken from goals highlighted by Emeryville's planning documents.  The Market Place project runs afoul of the following City Hall documents:

• The General Plan
• The Housing Element
• The Family Friendly Design Guidelines

After a 25 year building spree has left only three sites to get housing right in Emeryville, residents know the kind of housing development found in the Market Place proposal is flawed.  A contrite Mayor Atkin assured everyone she agrees the residential development that's been built over the last many years has been flawed.  Regardless of the fact that as a five term Council member, she herself has voted for all that flawed development, Ms Atkin has assured Emeryville residents now she gets it and this time she will deliver a Market Place development in line with what the residents have said they want.  However time is running short for Ms Atkin's plan to take shape and it appears with the vote to approve the first Market Place parcel already having been cast, the Planning Commission is simply doing what it has always done with regard to project approvals.  At this point, Ms Atkin's plan will require the Planning Commission's first vote on the Market Place be overturned.

The Planning Commission will continue to approve the project on a parcel by parcel basis and the City Council will vote on the final development agreement for the Market Place project sometime probably in August.  Watch this space.

President Richard Nixon
In 1968 before the election, Mr Nixon indicated he 
had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam.  
Strangely, he refused to give details on the plan.  
The war continued on.

Mayor Ruth Atkin
She intimated she also has a secret plan:
 to bring better housing to Emeryville.
Like Nixon, she too has not given any
details for how it will be achieved.  
We hope for the resident's sake, it 
works out better than Nixon's plan.

Moratorium Victory Pyrrhic for Developers, Mayor

Onus Now on Developers, Mayor to Deliver on Housing

Family Friendly, Affordable, Ownership Housing

Opinion/News Analysis
Champagne glasses may have been clinking as giddy developers relished their victory in beating back the 45 day residential building moratorium in the Emeryville City Council chambers in a special meeting on the Friday before last.  But as the sun rose Saturday, aching heads from over-imbibing were undoubtedly made worse by the realization that the victory isn't all it seemed to be for developers in Emeryville, indeed theirs is a pyrrhic victory.   Because now they're going to have to deliver their residential development projects to the Council for approval, and they're going to have to impress the new progressive majority...the same three Council members that said YES to the moratorium.

Mayor Ruth Atkin
in Hot Seat
We're going to deliver
affordable family friendly
housing MY way, the
empower developers way
(strange it hasn't
worked up 'til now).

The developers have a little 3-2 problem;  Asher, Martinez, Donahue versus Atkin, Davis.  That's the new guard versus the old guard.  It's a problem for them because while a 4-1 super majority is needed for a building moratorium, to approve a specific development proposal, there needs only to be a simple majority.

Councilwoman Jac Asher got it right when she said from the dais, developers themselves would benefit from a moratorium.  The new majority is big on planning in our city and they intend on updating City Hall's regulations to make them comport with planning documents (and the resident's values).  A moratorium would have provided time and a space to do that.  Developers would have benefited because they would have known ahead of time, how to craft a project that would stand a chance of being approved by the new majority.  Now, they have no idea and onward they're going to march forward with project proposals that will not be approved, wasting their time and money.

Generally, it's a good idea to work with and co-operate with the people that lord power over you.  That's a lesson Emeryville developers are going to have to learn the hard way.

Build Our Way To Cheap Rent?
Integrity is not big with developers.  They lashed out at the moratorium with a disjointed and absurd idea; planning is not needed or even wanted they say because if a town plans how to develop, that will drive up rents.  Emeryville is in no position to get what it wants because the town's hands are tied; developers must be put in charge to keep rents low.  Not mentioned by them is the fact that they keep building luxury apartments (because that's how they maximize profits) and rents will not be lowered this way.  In fact rents will be pushed up around town.  Also not mentioned is why this deregulation idea of theirs has delivered precisely what they now say is no good; high rents (and lack of family housing).  This argument of theirs is just more lies on their part and those citizens who spoke out, forwarding the bogus low rent meme, are tools for this shameless developer money grab.

Mayor Atkin In The Hot Seat
The Mayor, Ruth Atkin, who threw in with the developers with her vote (as did developer's perennial favorite Councilwoman Nora Davis) now has a heavy burden to bear.  Having won, she's going to have to make sure her way, the anti-moratorium way, delivers the kind of housing we want and need.  Councilwoman Jac Asher and her colleagues had their idea how to do it but Mayor Atkin shot that down.  Now Ms Aktin is in the hot seat .  Emeryville residents want affordable housing, ownership housing and family friendly housing.  Ruth Atkin now has to see to it it gets done that way.  Ms Atkin, it's worth noting, never explained why her way, the same way we've been developing this town for a generation, hasn't worked up 'til now.  For their part, developers laid it on thick and heavy at the Friday special meeting; they will deliver affordable family friendly housing if only the moratorium is defeated.

"I just think this [the moratorium] is the wrong way to go about doing this" Mayor Atkin said as she killed the moratorium.  Let's see how she does, doing it her way.

Residential Building Moratorium Loses at City Council

Moratorium Vote Fails 

Even though 3 Vote YES 

& 2 Vote NO

Tonight the Emeryville City Council voted NO in a special meeting to a proposed 45 day residential building moratorium in a three to two vote even though three Council members said YES.  A moratorium vote in Emeryville specifically requires a super majority of four votes.  Developers turned out in force from around the Bay Area urging a NO vote after many promised to amend their former bad ways and start building better projects.
Council member Jac Asher brought the moratorium at the last Council meeting citing a disconnect between what Emeryville residents want and what City planning documents demand versus what is actually being built by developers.    Of chief concern is family friendly housing and more affordable housing.  Council members Dianne Martinez and Scott Donahue agreed with Ms Asher while the old Emeryville guard, Nora Davis and Ruth Atkin said NO to the moratorium.
 Ms Asher said the City needs time to reconsider how to bring policy to best deliver what the residents are asking for.

Developers pulled out all the stops trying to turn the tide against an increasingly agitated City Council.  Many of them said they WILL start delivering family friendly housing from now on if the Council would just not pass the moratorium.  One developer stood by his guns claiming there's no way the Council can force family friendly housing.  City Attorney Mike Biddle quoted from federal housing policy stating a family can be comprised of only one person making the whole notion of family housing moot.

The majority of speakers said if the City pauses for 45 days to consider how livability should figure into policy, housing prices will go up and we have to instead pick up the pace of building to keep rental prices low.  Emeryville residents need to stop clamoring for livability and join the region in the push to maximize density everywhere for the good of everybody was the message.  The idea being promulgated is we can build our way to cheap rent if we are willing to let developers call the shots.  Emeryville, they said has been remiss, the City has not been building nearly enough housing.  The word "crisis" was bandied about by several anti-moritorium speakers.   It appeared to be a case of "get the government out of the way of progress".

Invective and superlatives were thrown around by the throng of developers;  the moratorium is a "shockwave", 'unfair", "punishing", and it "puts us in jeopardy"... if a moratorium were approved it would "hurt the City's [pro developer] reputation" they said.
But it was Councilwoman Nora Davis who was the most animated.  The moratorium ordinance is, "one of the worst things I have ever looked at" she told the overfilled Council Chambers.  She didn't stop there, "It's a fraudulent document" she said adding Sacramento will cut off funds to the City were it to pass.  She reserved the most virulent ire to the timing of the issue, noting the City Council shouldn't try to conduct policy at times when developers will be inconvenienced and any Jews among them would be burdened, "It's an insult coming Friday night before a three day weekend.  And it's the Sabbath" she said.  Developers were forced to hold off on starting the long weekend for three hours while the Council voted NO to the moratorium.  Presumably, the Jewish developers made peace with God before exiting the Council Chambers, victorious.

Talk of Emeryville Building Moratorium Brings Threats of Lawsuits From Outside Business Interests

In the wake of Emeryville's game changing recent election, the Emeryville City Council is considering implementing a temporary moratorium on residential development to carve out enough time to prudently discuss the City's regulations regarding this type of development.  City Hall has been barraged by residents upset at the massive scale and impacts of several proposed projects all coming before the Council at once.  The idea that even a pause would be considered is causing outside business interests to act as if their hair were on fire.  Threats of lawsuits have already erupted that Emeryville residents would have the temerity to consider rethinking the pro-development paradigm in the town.

From the San Francisco Business Times:

Battle brewing over proposed Emeryville residential building moratorium

Feb 11, 2015, 2:38pm PST UPDATED: Feb 11, 2015, 3:53pm PST

Reporter- Roland Li

San Francisco Business Times

Email  |  Twitter

The Emeryville City Council plans to vote Friday on a proposed moratorium on residential construction, a move that has drawn criticism from public policy groups and developers and could lead to legal challenges if it passes.

If at least four of the five Emeryville council members vote to approve the ordinance, approvals for projects seeking entitlements would be frozen for 45 days. The meeting will be held at 5 pm at Emeryville's Civic Center, 1333 Park Ave.

The City Council would have an option to extend the moratorium following another vote. It wasn't immediately clear if the ordinance would also extend to projects that have already received building permits. Multiple requests for comment to the city attorney, Michael Biddle, weren't returned.

       

The moratorium is a sign that Emeryville, a historically pro-development city, is being swept into a regional housing debate in the face of severe affordability issues that every city in the Bay Area is facing. A moratorium on housing is unprecedented in the Bay Area, opponents said, though residents in Foster City in San Mateo County recently called for just such a move.

Jac Asher, the Emeryville City Council member who proposed the moratorium, said it would give the city more time to study housing issues and develop policies. A draft of the ordinance is expected to be ready Wednesday night, said Asher.

“Issues like family-friendly housing, affordability, ownership have been concerns in our city for a long while. Time and again these issues are talked about as priorities and designated as such in our planning documents," said Asher. "We need to ensure that our plans and goals are well-aligned with our policy-making. The moratorium provides staff time to do an analysis and report back to council."

Ruth Atkin, the mayor of Emeryville, agreed, saying “there's a lot of frustration about the rents going up and up. We've had some high-profile people being displaced."

For example, Emeryville's poet laureate had to move out of the city because of increasing rents, she said. Atkin said that the city would like to see larger apartments for more families and also support more for-sale units rather than apartments.

Atkin said three major projects would be affected by the potential moratorium: redevelopment of the Sherwin Williams factory site, AvalonBay's 6701 Shellmond St. and the Public Market mixed-use project. The first two projects total 720 units and it's unclear how many units might be included in the Public Market project.

For the rest of the story click HERE

City Council to Consider Building Moratorium

Residential Housing Projects May be Put on Hold in Emeryville

Starting Immediately

The Emeryville City Council voted unanimously last night to direct the city staff to craft language to hand down a city-wide residential building moratorium for at least 45 days with provisions to extend that time.  The proposal was initiated by Councilwoman Jac Asher who cited recent resident exasperation at the rapid pace of apartment building in town, saying of the action, "We need to hit the pause button."

The moratorium is being pursued for all aspects of all residential development proposals in the approval process.  Ms Asher said the areas of concern that residents have been vocal about include unit mix, family friendliness, ownership vs rental and out-of-date 'density bonuses' granted to developers that are encoded at City Hall.  The Councilwoman also noted the scale and the speed at which new projects are coming at the Council combined with the sense that the community feels the last parcels of fallow land should be more carefully considered contributed to her decision to call for a moratorium, "If we have anything on our side, it's time" and "People want us to do better" she added.  Mayor Ruth Atkin agreed, postulating, "We're seeing these large projects not meet community needs."

City Attorney Mike Biddle said after 45 days an extension to the moratorium could be granted if certain findings could be made and he said building moratoriums can be extended up to two years maximum.

The Council agreed to vote on the moratorium at a special meeting to be convened on February 13th at 5:00.