School District and City Withhold Public Documents from Tattler & the Public

Public Better Off Being Ignorant Says City Attorney & School District

Opinion
Emeryville's City Attorney has ruled that documents in the possession of the City and the School District outlining meetings of public officials that took place behind closed doors will not be made public according to a letter recently received by the Tattler.  The City Attorney, Michael Biddle, ruled that the release of the documents would harm the public now and that the public would be further harmed later because government officials would not be able to engage in "robust" behind closed door discussions necessary for good public policy formulation.

One of the documents, a major traffic study regarding the new Emeryville Center for Community Life (ECCL), was requested by the Tattler in April from both the School District and the City.  Both refused to provide the document in response to a California Public Records Act request and as a result Emeryville residents can now only guess what public officials know about the traffic impact that will be caused by the ECCL that officials are unwilling to share with the public.

City Attorney and interim City Manager
Michael Biddle (on left) with recently retired
City Manager Pat O'Keeffe 

The Emeryville Center for Community Life, still years from being completed, has recently disappointed residents that hoped it would live up to the environmental promises made by both School District and City officials.  First, this February we saw the School District request special permission to be exempted from the City’s LEED environmental standards for Emeryville public buildings. In a 3-2 vote, the City Council allowed this environmental promise to be broken.

More recently, in April, we saw the School District back before the City Council requesting that it be exempted from another environmentally-friendly requirement that it found bothersome, the General Plan’s requirement that there be a bicycle and pedestrian path along the western property border of the proposed ECCL site. While this 3-2 vote of the City Council preserved the path in the City’s General Plan, none of the most recent ECCL designs show any intention by the District of actually building the required path.

With the School District’s record clear, the Tattler has decided to watch carefully the District’s compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) as it proceeds with the ECCL design and construction.  On April 11th the Tattler wrote ECCL project director, Roy Miller, requesting all Environmental Impact Reports related to the planned ECCL, all CEQA notices, and to be placed on a list of “interested parties” to receive all future CEQA notices.  Mr. Miller replied that such documents were not currently available and would be available at the District office once “they have been prepared for public release”,  presumably after having been scrubbed clean.

However, we were surprised a few days later with the release of the monthly Progress Reports, dated March 1 and April 1, prepared by the City’s Building & Planning Director, Charlie Bryant, which each describe the School District providing the City with a copy of a traffic study for the ECCL project, and the City’s Building and Planning department responding to the District with comments.  The Progress Reports reveal no details of the traffic study.

If the earlier request for CEQA-related documents was not clear enough, the Tattler again wrote to the School District’s Roy Miller to request a copy of this ECCL traffic study.  For good measure, the City also received a request for the same ECCL traffic study document.

After several days, lawyers for both the City and the School District flatly refused the Tattler’s request for Public Documents.  City Attorney Biddle responded on behalf of the City that the traffic study was a “draft” not subject to the Public Records Act.  Mr. Biddle’s letter claims that “the public interest in withholding those records clearly outweighs the public interest in disclosure,” citing a California Supreme Court decision called Citizens for a Better Environment v. Department of Food and Agriculture. 

Phony Case Law
Readers might find it as amusing as we did to read the court opinion cited by Mr. Biddle (in the link above), because what the Court actually decides in that case is that the documents at issue have to be disclosed to the extent the document contains factual material and that only the expressions of opinion have to be redacted.  So, clearly this top secret ECCL traffic study is either entirely a work of opinion, and therefore not subject to disclosure, or a work containing factual material that the City and School District are improperly withholding from the public.  This leaves one to wonder what value a traffic study would have to a CEQA process if it were made up entirely of opinion and contained no facts on which to base those opinions.   Leave it to our School District to break exciting new ground in purely fictional traffic studies!  Bravo!  The Tattler expected nothing less.

Mr. Biddle also argued that the documents requested were “deliberative materials necessary for robust agency discussion” and therefore subject to an exception to the Public Records Act intended to foster “robust policy discussions.” This is what the Tattler has always found to be true of both our City and School District. They never shy away from a “robust” policy debate… just so long as the public isn’t included.  If we're allowed to listen in, presumably the talk becomes wimpy and feeble.

This City and this School District, fearful as they are of transparency should come clean with regard to this withholding of documents.  We ask again, are these environmental documents for the Center of Community Life factual in nature?  If so, the City Attorney's own citation requires their release to the public, by his own reckoning he must make them available.  And in that case, Mr Biddle and the School District is wrong, for they are harming the public more by withholding these documents than by releasing them to the rightful owners, the public.

Emeryville's Vision For San Pablo Avenue: Civic Dysfunction

Berkeley Beats Emeryville

Opinion/News Analysis
Travel down San Pablo Avenue in Emeryville and look around.  It's not the kind of thing however, someone would want to do on foot; a car works much better here.  And that's not an accident - it's a result of a specific vision and suite of policy decisions authored by city council member Nora Davis and her council majority colleagues.  Fast food, baking parking lots, blank walls crowding the sidewalk, drive-in drive-out podium condominiums...it's the anti-pedestrian, feel bad street-scape made for high speed cars, it's San Pablo Avenue in Emeryville.

Council member Nora Davis is fond of telling citizens it used to be worse before her transformative 25 year reign changed it into...what?  It's been transformed alright but just not someplace where you'd want to linger.
San Pablo is a perfect street to put the Nora Davis city planning vision into stark perspective. The street traces it's trajectory through neighboring Berkeley as well as Emeryville and two different city planning philosophies are readily apparent as one crosses between the contrasting cities.

Twenty five years ago, San Pablo Avenue represented, from a pedestrian and neighbor perspective, failed urban planning in both Emeryville and Berkeley.  Both cities then began campaigns making the street friendlier, with government programs for pedestrian amenities and general beautification.  Raised medians were added with copious plantings and street trees were planted in both cities along with beautiful new street lighting.  But that's where the similarities stop.  After all the government spending on San Pablo, one town continues to be largely and arguably an urban wasteland while the other town has sparked a civic rebirth and the street has become an extremely vibrant community gathering place filled with street cafes, one-of-a-kind shops, an independent bookstore, art galleries, slow food restaurants and such.

Berkeley's Funky Vibe
The most amazing thing about Berkeley's transformation of San Pablo Avenue is how the street continues to maintain its funky vibe in the face of this transformation...it's not just yuppies and overpriced boutiques like Fourth Street.  Since the street has extremely varied retail opportunities offering shopping and a civic space conducive to sustain a neighborhood, middle class and working class people are well served and they continue to live and shop in the neighborhood.

Over the years there have been a few attempts to make San Pablo in Emeryville more pedestrian friendly, most notably former council member John Fricke's work to bring Arizmendi's Bakery to the Promenade development but mostly it's been the anti-pedestrian / anti-neighborhood vision of council member Davis that has been the dominant force.

Berkeley, famous for its hyper involved citizenry and disdain for suburban style malls and fast food restaurants has left its stamp on San Pablo.  Decisions, large and small, made by the Berkeley city council (with the threat of a citizen uprising at a moments notice) has wrought what we now see in that city on San Pablo Avenue. Tortuous as it is, the process has worked in Berkeley and the neighbors are the beneficiaries.

Emeryville's Deference To Developers
In Emeryville, Ms Davis and the rest of the council majority has long held that the best way to develop the city is to put the developers themselves in the drivers seat.  It's a sort of an anti-planning city planning philosophy. The idea is that rational market forces know best and market forces, left to their own devises will deliver a vibrant neighborhood filled with the kinds of development consumers want.
Not to put too much emphasis on the city council policy vision of developer deference, what some might call governmental neglect, it should be noted that Ms Davis has in fact directly intervened to impose a fast food centric program for San Pablo.  At least twice councilwoman Davis has actively worked on the behalf of specific fast food restaurants for the street.  In 2003, Ms Davis even started a citizen signature drive to assure that International House of Pancakes would get the premier Park Avenue corner spot reserved for the Promenade development.  Earlier, she intervened directly and led a council majority drive for a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant.

We can see, some 20 years after the street beautification work, the results of the two cities aggregate visions; one market based that sees citizens as consumers and the other neighborhood based that values community.


Three Ingredients
San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley presents pedestrians and neighbors a whole different psychology of public space than in Emeryville.  The street has a democratic feeling to it.  But what are the ingredients in Berkeley that create this vibrant civic space?  It's really pretty simple:

• Mature beautiful street trees
• Reasonably interesting historic architecture
• Lack of franchise chain retail and fast food

The architecture part is probably the least important ingredient.   While it's true Emeryville typically allows its historic buildings to be demolished for new development (in violation of the General Plan which calls for adaptive re-use), the historic architecture on San Pablo in Berkeley has been saved but that said it's not really very exciting.  It does however contribute to the funky vibe pedestrians find appealing.

The street trees make a larger contribution and Berkeley here too beats Emeryville.  While Emeryville has planted many trees along San Pablo, the species selected don't grow as large and spreading as Berkeley's and Emeryville has historically allowed developers to cut down the street trees and plant new saplings.  It seems we're forever watching juvenile trees struggle to become mature here.

But by far the biggest reason Berkeley has won this contest is the lack of franchise chain retail and fast food restaurants.  Though hard to quantify, there can be no mistake about the erosional nature against street vitality this kind of nation-wide ubiquitous development has had.  It's not hyperbolic to note that this kind of development kills pedestrians natural desire to want to linger in an otherwise grand public space.  And people lingering, not rushing is how community is created.

The paradigm of franchise chain retail and fast food is the result of a lazy city council at best and a council driven by pro-developer ideology at worst.  People here should expect the city council to put the public into public policy and work to value add to the commons as a way to build community as they have done in Berkeley.  The council keeps touting how they're going to build and sustain community on San Pablo by reliance on one project: the incipient Center of Community Life.  But to expect to have 20 years of this developer led policy directed from Nora Davis and her council majority colleagues be offset by one pie-in-the-sky project is a set up for failure.  The Emeryville city council needs to stop coddling developers on San Pablo Avenue and start doing what Berkeley has done; show some leadership in governing.

Emeryville

Emeryville

Berkeley

Emeryville

Berkeley

Berkeley

From The Archives

The Tattler introduces 'From The Archives', a new feature that brings back Tattler stories from the past that we deem to still be of interest.  From The Archives will appear on an occasional basis.  A brief follow-up to the original posting appears at the bottom of the story as an addendum.

Here then is our From The Archives offering for today:

Wednesday April 21, 2010

'Drive In & Drive Out Condos': Emeryville's Alienating Architecture

'Auto Centric' City Subverts Our Goals

News Analysis

Emeryville has had a 15 year period of explosive residential growth planned in conjunction with the growth in commercial development that has been going on even longer. The newly approved General Plan calls for more growth in the residential sector albeit at a slower pace than what we've experienced up till now. The use of the word 'planned' should be qualified since only the idea of adding more residences has been considered by the decision makers. The actual type of housing we've been getting has been supplied by the developers themselves with no intervening action on the part of City Hall. The type of housing they've been building has been what they have seen fit to build here in Emeryville; what they've estimated will maximize their profits. City Hall has kept out of their way.

Podium Development

Room for lots of cars:
This is how Emeryville designs streets.

The buzz word heard from city planners at City Hall and around the nation for that matter is 'Smart Growth'. This is the idea that cities should increase in density by 'urban infill', with use of 'mixed use zoning' so as to discourage suburban sprawl; a decidedly unsustainable growth model. Out of this noble concept has arisen a variation on an old idea: the podium development. Essentially, this is a building over a parking garage. What makes it 'smart' is the addition of so called 'liner retail' fronting the sidewalk and shielding the parking garage from view. If the building is housing, this would be called mixed use; a mix of retail and residential in one zone. Much hyperbolic rhetoric flows from planners about this whole concept; flighty talk of activated pedestrian experiences and it's inherent nexus to civic engagement. The problem is it never seems to quite pan out the way its sold. The reason? Podium development by its very nature has systemic problems that subvert the lofty goals it aspires to. Emeryville's developers for their part have settled on this kind of building as the simplest way for profit maximization.

Drive In, Drive Out Development

This is how a sidewalk should be 
used in a city.

This ubiquitous architecture subverts the livability goals of the City of Emeryville by taking pedestrians out of the public realm and by disengaging and estranging the condo dwellers from the greater city. The condos all come with at least one assigned parking space and the residents come and go exclusively by use of the car. These condo developments function like little gated communities, their backs turned away from the town. Some architects, aware of this glaring problem have attempted to ameliorate this civic disconnect by placing some of the unit's front doors facing the streets like the 'City Limits' project on 67th Street. These doors are not used by their owners since the project was designed for use by cars. There's never a reason to use the front doors and they function as a curiosity like some half remembered archaeological artifact from a bygone era.

Is there another way of building cities that encourages real civic engagement among its residents?

An Alternate Emeryville:

An Architecture Of Civic Engagement

Imagine if we could plan how our city were to look and feel, how it actually worked for the residents. Imagine if we could make a city with full realization of the benefits of the engaging psychology of space. Imagine if the sidewalks were really fully "activated" instead of the empty rhetoric we now get from the developers. Imagine coming home from work and walking a block or two to your front door. You run into friends and neighbors on your short walk, they also are heading home. You stop by a green grocer on the corner and pick up something for dinner, perhaps stopping by the neighborhood florist to pick up a few flowers for the table.

Condos With Real Front Doors

A front door opening to the street!
Chance encounters can happen,
community is built.

We could have all this by directing developers to build a different type of condo (or apartment) building. It would mean the end of earmarked parking spaces on site for each dwelling. Instead, residents would park at parking structures peppered throughout the city, built and paid for by the developers. These new Emeryville residents would walk a block or two from the parking structures to their front doors, right on the sidewalk, just like how our grandparents used to do, coming home from the street car stop. Each building could have a few parking spaces on site for the elderly or the infirm and a place for temporary parking for drop off. Everyone else would walk. When it's raining, people would learn to use umbrellas. All this new pedestrian traffic would lure real sidewalk retail; in addition to helping civic engagement (and exercise), we would be helping create an economic flowering as well. This new type of building would also dovetail nicely with the regime of Transportation Demand Management (TDM) the city has been touting. This is a mandated set of restrictions the city places on a developer to try to encourage use of alternate transportation by residents. Up till now, TDM's have been competing against development that intrinsically favors car drivers and these mandates haven't worked very well. Since virtually all residents would have to walk the last block or two anyway, more residents might see benefit in not using a car at all opting instead for walking, biking or mass transit.

No More Free Ride For Developers

Everybody says this is how
they imagine a livable city.
What's Emeryville doing
to achieve this?

We would have to stop the politics as usual and embrace a more democratic development model to get there from here. We can't wait for developers to give us this style of housing, after all they've already worked out the best way to maximize their profits and it's this drive in & drive out development model they keep pushing. Instead, it's going to take the city council deciding we want a livable city. The council has to take a new path. They need to tell the developers that the old way isn't working for us, the residents. The developers are going to have to accept the new awakening in Emeryville. Instead of two dollars of profit, they're only going to make one dollar of profit. The old ways of the decision makers giving away the store are coming to an end.

If we build less alienating residences then everybody wins, even those who don't live at the new condos. With a more connected and engaged citizenry, other aspects of life in Emeryville improves as well, the schools, the business sector and the government. All this far reaching civic improvement can be attained by the very simple policy of forcing people to walk a block or two through the neighborhood by not putting parking in the condo buildings. To those who might think this idea too radical, remember, this is how all cities were built for generations. The idea that cars should be incorporated into the buildings is relatively new. Our grandparents built cities like this, they used front doors. It's time we take the good ideas they left for us and incorporate them into a new ethic on how to build livable cities ourselves.

UPDATE:  Since this story first appeared the Great Recession has continued along at an increasing pace for municipalities in California.  Emeryville's budget has been skewered and the Redevelopment Agency has been absorbed by the State.  Private residential building projects have been extremely curtailed.  We've entered a period of austerity and the fix outlined by this story, the idea we should be building public parking garages peppered throughout town, now seems increasingly remote.  Perhaps some of this can be accomplished at the margins as we move forward in time.  With that in mind, each new project approved moving forward, should take into account the need to start building a fund to build these parking garages. 

Even though we still have the capacity to vision this kind of livability, albeit on a very limited basis, at this juncture and likely for the next generation at least, the picture presented by this story  represents the road not taken.  These community building development ideas likely won't be Emeryville's legacy.  Emeryville's story will be one mostly of squandered opportunity. 

Winners And Losers In Emeryville

Loser:
The poor; they're "not a good fit"

Winner:
Slurpees and Cheetos

City Planning:

City Council Selects Winners And Losers

Opinion
The idea that it's inherently wrong that government should engage in selecting private sector winners and losers by dint of its economic policy, has been forwarded wall-to-wall by conservatives over the years.

Mattress stores; the city council has 
a  jones for 'em!

This argument suggests that its not government's bailiwick to intervene or steer the private sector, deferring instead to Adam Smith's invisible hand of market forces, selecting winners and losers in a purely economic Darwinist manner.  That's the propaganda at least.

In Emeryville conversely, the city council clearly sees how the power of government can be harnessed to effect city planning and dramatically remake the town the way they see fit; they unabashedly select winners and losers if you will.   The council gets right in there and greases the skids for development they like and they put the kibosh on any land use they don't approve, like for instance the recent intervention against ECAP / Ohana on San Pablo Avenue.

This interventionist city planning policy has netted an interesting list of winners and losers over the years:


Winners:

• national franchise chain retail (7-Eleven, Mattress Discounters, et al)
• fast food (Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, et al)
• shopping mall builders
• loft builders
• asphalt companies

Losers:

• ECAP / Ohana (food and clothing aid for the disadvantaged)
• locally serving retail
• family housing builders
• the schools

Super size me!
The city council thinks the best way to
solve traffic problems is to widen the streets.
Asphalt companies agree.

Of course if the city council were truly interested in livability for residents, the above list would be inverted; winners and losers changing positions.  Since the Emeryville city council, more than neighboring city's councils, is quite interventionist and successful when it comes to fast tracking development, take a look around as you traverse the town...what you see is what they wanted, and what they wanted is what we got.

Burger King: Got a hankerin' for
some fat and salt with a little
pink slime?
The Emeryville city council
 feels ya brah!

"Contextualization": That's Supposed To Be Good, Isn't It?

Planning In Emeryville: 

'Contextualization' Is The New 

Buzz Word

Essay
by Brian Donahue
Over the last decade or so there's been a quiet revolution going on in the arcane world of city planning and Emeryville has not been spared its effects. The form of this revolution is a new and codified way to develop cities dubbed 'contextualization'; seemingly innocuous yet profound in its effect on how cities look and feel, our city included.
Emeryville has embraced contextualization in the core planning law both in the new over-arching General Plan and in its local antecedents such as the Park Avenue Plan.  It has been recognized by the City as a best practice when considering building design.  

Contextualization:  What It Is
In a nutshell, city planning contextualization simply means new buildings should "fit in" with surrounding existing buildings.  To 'fit in' is taken to mean the new building should architecturally acknowledge the surrounding pastiche of buildings and be reflective of the existing built environment.  New buildings are to be site specific.

The idea of course, is to avoid the odd "sore thumb" architecture that tends to happen in the absence of planning.  There is an acknowledgement that visual harmony is desirable and inappropriate and clashing architectural styles are antithetical to it.  While this may seem to be common sense, this idea is relatively new in city planning parlance, at least in municipal law.

All this is for the good and it is refreshing to see law reflective of the collective accommodation of visual aesthetics in the public realm like this.  There is a danger however; when the law is applied in a brutish manner, the original good intent is subverted and there is a degradation of the resultant public space.  This, unfortunately is what is happening in Emeryville.


It's Failing In Emeryville
In Emeryville, contextualization has been interpreted in a very obvious and literal way.  Hence, new buildings are made to blindly copy the existing neighboring buildings.  So where there are brick buildings, the new building will be brick and where there is stucco, there will be stucco, and so forth.  This is a stultifying and inelegant response that creates a kitch simulacrum of place like the Bay Street mall.  The goal should always be to create an authentic sense of place.
The ubiquitous brick in Emeryville is especially problematic.  Old brick buildings help create a sense of place not only because of the palpable sense of history they embody but more importantly, there is an inherent logic that's viscerally accessible; the brick carries the weight of the roof in a structural way that conveys presence.  These buildings feel substantial and authentic.  Standing next to them, one can feel their weight and permanence.  The new simulations, with their non load bearing "lick and stick brick", have none of these essential qualities and their slavish obedience to a brutish idea of contextualization makes a mockery of the real thing.


A Quick Primer
A better interpretation of contextualization would use the idea of the 'compliment', that is a juxtaposition of a building's essential qualities.  Compliments can come in the form of color, texture, material, and so forth and they can be thought of as an opposite.  In the field of color, compliments occur on opposite sides of the color wheel.  So for instance green is the compliment of red and yellow is the compliment of violet.  This works when the color saturation is equal and there is equality in value (relative lightness or darkness).  Color theorists have noted that complimentary colors are pleasing to the human eye and this is universal across all cultures.  Similarly, texture and other qualities have their compliments as well.

The color wheel:
opposite sides are complimentary

Beautiful compliments:
The orange of the leaf against
the blue background

Rough brick texture
has a compliment

Glassy smooth texture

A Better Way
We could start to make a more sophisticated and elegant city simply by paying closer attention to aesthetics.  Perhaps future Emeryville planners could see the value in using complimentary colors and textures instead of thuggishly trying to make bad copies of what already exists.  Maybe we could see a short and squat old red brick building (if we stop tearing them down) next to a new tall and slender building with glossy blue/green panels and stainless steel accents creating an exciting and visually activated public space.  Ironically, City Hall itself is an example of the idea of the compliment with the new addition adjoining the old part of the building.  Here, a less elegant approach would have been an attempt to copy the old portion with the new.

Emeryville planners need to be more cognizant of these most basic lessons every artist knows if we are to craft a nice place to live.  We should stop the dumbing down of visual aesthetics.  It is shameful that 'experts' have license in all fields of endeavor except for the expertise that artists might bring.  Experts are deferred to elsewhere except where the professional talent of an artist is needed.  Up until now it's been city planning experts on the staff and business people on the Planning Commission absurdly making visual aesthetic decisions for how a new building in our town should look.
Additionally, buildings in an urban environment create a psychology of space, either for the good or the bad, in their collective massing.  Of course visual aesthetics such as the use of compliments, also contribute to the psychology of the space created and this should not be treated so lightly as it has been in Emeryville.   City Hall should take up this challenge since this is such a cheap and easy way to incrementally increase livability in our town.  All it takes is a little more sensitivity and an admission that aesthetics are at least as important as other qualities they have heretofore acknowledged.  We should stop the brutish way in which contextualization has been taken up and we should demand a more enlightened approach.

Planning Commission OKs Controversial Ikea Expansion

Specter Of Veiled Threat From Ikea

Ignoring residents jammed cheek-by-jowl in opposition, the city's Planning Commission narrowly OK'ed a busy Ikea warehouse on the edge of a residential area near 53rd and Hollis Street. The planned facility would function as a place for Ikea's patrons to pick up the furniture retailer's largest and bulkiest items.
The commission approved the proposal in a 4-3 vote Thursday night (Kuemmerle, Donaldson and Steinberg dissenting), leaving many residents surprised. Residents chief concern was the added din of traffic noise and safety concerns from the project, which could bring hundreds of extra vehicles to Hollis Street and 53rd Street, especially on weekends when customers flock to Ikea.
The proceedings were marred by what appeared to be a veiled threat against the city concerning a public easement for a planned foot bridge over the railroad tracks unless city officials played ball. A pedestrian and bicycle bridge over the tracks connecting Novartis on Horton Street with the Bay Street mall has long been planned.

Commissioners mostly disagreed on the compatibility with the city's new General Plan. The three dissenters presented findings that the project was in fact not compatible. The 22 citizen speakers, mostly Emery Bay Village residents agreed that the proposed warehouse use is not 'office/technology' as the General Plan requires. Only one speaker supported the project.

Ikea Threatens The City

The evenings most noteworthy moment came when Ikea representatives stated that the company was prepared to allow the city full use of its back parking lot as a staging area for construction vehicles should the city ever proceed with its approved but as yet unbuilt bicycle/pedestrian bridge. The implication being that no such permission would be forthcoming in the event of a NO vote by the commission.

After the vote, a high level city official unwilling to state their name told the Tattler that there would be "no way" Ikea would freely allow the city to encroach on their property without a YES vote on the 53rd Street warehouse expansion. The official stated that the commission had saved the city "a lot of lawyer time fighting Ikea with this yes vote".

City Hall was filled to capacity and the council chamber overflow was forced to watch from the basement by closed circuit TV.

Representatives from the ad-hoc '53rd Street Neighborhood Committee' stated they intend on appealing the Planning Commission's decision to the City Council.

I See Dead People

There's Dead People On The Side Of The Building

Don't accuse the dearly departed of not leaving a mark.
It's certainly not true of those cremated by Apollo Crematorium, one of the state's most busy incinerators of human remains.

The longstanding Emeryville business, whose attempted relocation to Richmond was scuppered by protest, continues to operate where it always has. But the once heavily industrial area is now blossoming with chic loft residences and sprouting trendy businesses.

Richmond residents, already enduring refinery releases, successfully blocked the move in 2007 citing mercury toxicity, presumably from burnt fillings.
Meanwhile, though the crematorium and its smokestacks have been hemmed in by development, it is no longer invisible to casual observers.

An off-white ashen smear mars more than 100 square feet of the metal-clad side of AgeSong, a $29 million assisted living facility with about 160 residents. The discoloration reaches all the way up to the building's roof deck.
While death is ultimately part of life, having 3,000 to 4,000 cremations a year drifting past your window, maybe a little bit more of a reminder than necessary that life is after all cruel, brutish and short.

New Neighborhood Group Fights Ikea Expansion

Ikea To Expand Into Emery Bay Village Neighborhood

Group Decries "Wrong Site/Wrong Use"

Emeryville City Hall backed development proposals have a way of incubating neighborhood preservation groups. Such is the case of a new, so far nameless group some are calling the '53rd Street Neighborhood Committee', an ad hoc resident group formed to stop a proposed Ikea bulky item customer pick-up center slated for 53rd & Hollis Streets next to the sylvan resident enclave of Emery Bay Village.

The committee, some 125 resident petition signers strong, says the proposal is a "regional retail facility", incompatible with Emeryville's new General Plan and will negatively impact an adjacent existing 'family friendly' neighborhood by 200 customer vehicle trips per day, not including the copious delivery truck traffic generated by the proposal.

Emery Bay Village resident Marcia DuBois, a member of the committee's 12 person 'core group', says Ikea representatives gave a presentation of the proposed expansion to 52 neighbors in late July but was met with "blanket opposition". She noted, "Not one citizen speaker was in support of the proposal". Ms DuBois said much opposition centers on the negative impacts that will be borne by neighbors. She cautioned, "The projected 200 customers pick ups per day, with vehicle activity from 7:00 am to 9:00 pm - seven days a week, would severely degrade our quality of life with noise, fumes, potential hazards and traffic jams".

Ms Dubois saved much of her ire for the incompatibility with Emeryville's new General Plan, "We need the citizens of Emeryville to stand up for the General Plan so many worked so hard to create: big-box regional retail should be west of the RR tracks and south of 40th St., not next to homes. This location is zoned for office/technology, a use more compatible with family housing".

Ikea seemed to scale back the plan after calls from committee members highlighted incompatibility with the General Plan. The existing warehouse where Ikea proposes the pick-up center, is about 120,000 square feet and Ikea at first planned to use more than half, 62,000 square feet, a number that would automatically require a General Plan amendment under 'secondary use' planning provisions. Later, committee members noted the planned usage had dropped to 59,000 square feet, barely under the limit line and rubber stamp approvable with only a 'conditional use' permit . The 3000 square foot reduction move by Ikea has been called a pittance and a way to avoid a potentially difficult General Plan battle. Some neighbors insist the Ikea project remains a General Plan violation, at least in spirit. Others called the slight-of-hand a cynical ploy by Ikea.

Marcia DuBois joined her core group colleagues on the 53rd Street Neighborhood Committee in opposition to the IKEA proposal, "We oppose the location of an IKEA bulky-item customer pick up facility immediately adjacent to a family-oriented residential community of 142 homes, 2 pre-schools, a children's gym and a high school". She appealed to all Emeryville residents to help save the neighborhood, "Please come to the Planning Commission meeting on Thursday, August 26 to protect our homes" she said.

The committee is primarily comprised of Emery Bay Village residents, 53rd Street residents and Emeryville Child Development Center parents.

The Planning Commission will debate and vote on this issue after public testimony is taken. All are encouraged to attend at 6:30 PM on Thursday August 26th at City Hall.

'Drive In & Drive Out' Condos: Emeryville's Alienating Architecture

'Auto Centric' City Subverts Our Goals

Public Policy Analysis

By Brian Donahue

Emeryville has had a 15 year period of explosive residential growth planned in conjunction with the growth in commercial development that has been going on even longer. The newly approved General Plan calls for more growth in the residential sector albeit at a slower pace than what we've experienced up till now. The use of the word 'planned' should be qualified since only the idea of adding more residences has been considered by the decision makers. The actual type of housing we've been getting has been supplied by the developers themselves with no intervening action on the part of City Hall. The type of housing they've been building has been what they have seen fit to build here in Emeryville; what they've estimated will maximize their profits. City Hall has kept out of their way.

Podium Development

The buzz word heard from city planners at City Hall and around the nation for that matter is 'Smart Growth'. This is the idea that cities should increase in density by 'urban infill', with use of 'mixed use zoning' so as to discourage suburban sprawl; a decidedly unsustainable growth model. Out of this noble concept has arisen a variation on an old idea: the podium development. Essentially, this is a building over a parking garage. What makes it 'smart' is the addition of so called 'liner retail' fronting the sidewalk and shielding the parking garage from view. If the building is housing, this would be called mixed use; a mix of retail and residential in one zone. Much hyperbolic rhetoric flows from planners about this whole concept; flighty talk of activated pedestrian experiences and it's inherent nexus to civic engagement. The problem is it never seems to quite pan out the way it's sold. The reason? Podium development by its very nature has systemic problems that subvert the lofty goals it aspires to. Emeryville's developers for their part have settled on this kind of building as the simplest way for profit maximization.

Drive In, Drive Out Development

This ubiquitous architecture subverts the livability goals of the City of Emeryville by taking pedestrians out of the public realm and by disengaging and estranging the condo dwellers from the greater city. The condos all come with at least one assigned parking space and the residents come and go exclusively by use of the car. These condo developments function like little gated communities, their backs turned away from the town. Some architects, aware of this glaring problem have attempted to ameliorate this civic disconnect by placing some of the units front doors facing the streets like the 'City Limits' project on 67th Street. These doors are not used by their owners since the project was designed for use by cars. There's never a reason to use the front doors and they function as a curiosity like some half remembered archaeological artifact from a bygone era.

Is there another way of building cities that encourages real civic engagement among its residents?

An Alternate Emeryville:

An Architecture Of Civic Engagement

Imagine if we could plan how our city were to look and feel, how it actually worked for the residents. Imagine if we could make a city with full realization of the benefits of the engaging psychology of space. Imagine if the sidewalks were really fully "activated" instead of the empty rhetoric we now get from the developers. Imagine coming home from work and walking a block or two to your front door. You run into friends and neighbors on your short walk, they also are heading home. You stop by a green grocer on the corner and pick up something for dinner, perhaps stopping by the neighborhood florist to pick up a few flowers for the table.

Condos With Real Front Doors

We could have all this by directing developers to build a different type of condo (or apartment) building. It would mean the end of earmarked parking spaces on site for each dwelling. Instead, residents would park at parking structures peppered throughout the city, built and paid for by the developers. These new Emeryville residents would walk a block or two from the parking structures to their front doors, right on the sidewalk, just like how our grandparents used to do, coming home from the street car stop. Each building could have a few parking spaces on site for the elderly or the infirm and a place for temporary parking for drop off. Everyone else would walk. When it's raining, people would learn to use umbrellas. All this new pedestrian traffic would lure real sidewalk retail; in addition to helping civic engagement (and exercise), we would be helping create an economic flowering as well. This new type of building would also dovetail nicely with the regime of Transportation Demand Management (TDM) the city has been touting. This is a mandated set of restrictions the city places on a developer to try to encourage use of alternate transportation by residents. Up till now, TDM's have been competing against development that intrinsically favors car drivers and these mandates haven't worked very well. Since all residents would have to walk the last block or two anyway, more residents might see benefit in not using a car at all opting instead for walking, biking or mass transit.

No More Free Ride For Developers

We would have to stop the politics as usual and embrace a more democratic development model to get there from here. We can't wait for developers to give us this style of housing, after all they've already worked out the best way to maximize their profits and it's this drive in drive out development model they keep pushing. Instead, it's going to take the city council deciding we want a livable city. The council has to take a new path. They need to tell the developers that the old way isn't working for us, the residents. The developers are going to have to accept the new awakening in Emeryville. Instead of two dollars of profit, they're only going to make one dollar of profit. The old ways of the decision makers giving away the store are coming to an end.

If we build less alienating residences then everybody wins, even those who don't live at the new condos. With a more connected and engaged citizenry, other aspects of life in Emeryville improves as well, the schools, the business sector and the government. All this far reaching civic improvement can be attained by the very simple policy of forcing people to walk a block or two through the neighborhood by not putting parking in the condo buildings. To those who might think this idea too radical, remember, this is how all cities were built for generations. The idea that cars should be incorporated into the buildings is relatively new. Our grandparents built cities like this, they used front doors. It's time we take the good ideas they left for us and incorporate them into a new ethic on how to build livable cities ourselves.