City Council Sherwin Williams Vote: Emeryville is Better Without Parks

Council Says Emeryville Urgently Needs More Market Rate Housing,

Parks; Not So Much

News Analysis/Opinion

The Emeryville City Council assures us a new paradigm is ready to blossom at City Hall; a new way of thinking that will finally bring glorious parks to the people.  But first we have to develop the Sherwin Williams site.  And so they voted 5-0 NO to park/open space and YES to more market rate housing, enough housing for 1200 new resident renters.

Now that the City Council has approved more housing at the Sherwin Williams site on Tuesday night and rejected the idea that we should build one large park there and after all the sanctimonious proclamations self-releasing them from their responsibility in this case to fulfill their campaign promises to build the parks we need have been strenuously asserted, we have to ask; where and when is Emeryville going to finally build the parks the people want?  It’s a legitimate question and Emeryville residents have a right to know the answer.  The City Council refuses to say so the Tattler will provide the answer herein so residents can stop waiting.

It's not like we have NO parks.
Bay Street mall shows it's appreciation for green.
How about a green roof?  There must be an acre
of luxurious grass up there alone.  
Ever had a picnic up there?

The Sherwin Williams developer will provide a little two acre park associated with the housing project but with more than 1000 people moving into the apartments there, the resultant ratio, more than 500 residents per acre, brings down Emeryville’s park average.  Emeryville goes backwards as far as parks go with this project. 
So the Sherwin Williams site wasn’t the place we were told to deliver the park land the people want.  In an attempt to mollify those who would ask the question, the City Council was quick to remind everyone they share their love of parks and we should trust them they’re going to deliver the parks.  Just not here and not now.

So to the City Council: Just when are we going to see this new park building culture blossom at City Hall?  And where will the new parks be built?

And to the residents: Since they won’t level with us on this, we’re going to have to figure it out on our own.

Parks: How and Where?

Let’s assume we believe the Council’s steadfast yet protean assurances they’ll begin to obey our General Plan’s mandate for 26 acres of new parks within 12 years.  How will it happen?  Developers won't build the parks we need, we know that.  We have a 35 year history of an ever decreasing ratio of park-to-residents average to prove that.  Similarly, our anemic park fees charged to developers won't build the parks we need.  The proof is in that pudding as well- we don’t have enough money to even build one small park this way.  

No, eminent domain is in our future, land seized by eminent domain and paid for with sales from a general obligation municipal bond, however the only land parcels left of any reasonable size in Emeryville already have buildings and businesses on them and after we lost (rejected) the 8 acre golden opportunity provided by the Sherwin Williams site, eminent domain seizure is the only way moving forward.  We know we’re not going to evict people from their homes in order to build parks.  So the only option open to us now is to seize private property and pay fair market value to the owner, pay to relocate the businesses on it, pay to tear down the buildings, pay to clean up the property and then build the park.  That’s what we did to build Doyle/Hollis Park.  That’s what’s going to have to be repeated many times over to get the parks we need.  The business community of course won’t like this idea but we’ll have to disregard their concerns (another new paradigm for our town).

Here's a park for the people.
It's on the second floor of a Wareham Development
project built a few years ago.
It's on private property but it's open to the
public as part of a deal negotiated by the City
(always looking out after our needs, right?).
Ever thrown a frisbee in this park?

Here's The Rub
But this unavoidable eventuality, Emeryville’s future park building schema (by use of eminent domain) begs the obvious question: why not build more housing on the land we clear?  As soon as the land is cleared, developers will want to build more apartment complexes on it and then what’s to stop the City of Emeryville agreeing with the maxim that we need to build more housing to ameliorate the terrible condition of unaffordable housing in our town?  After what we witnessed at Sherwin Williams, we know the City Council can be counted on to make that argument.  Once again it will inevitably rise to the level of a near emergency.  Of course it needs not be said that this is exactly where we find ourselves right now with the Sherwin Williams site... and we see how that turned out (parks be damned).  
So what mechanism would intervene, what could cause new thinking to rise up to cause the Emeryville City Council to suddenly realize our General Plan has value and enable them to say NO to a developer seeking profit in our town?  We have not ever seen that and the new Council members have shown us they aren’t interested in this kind of change.  So what would cause this to happen and, identifying the cause, why didn’t it work at the fallow Sherwin Williams site, a much cheaper site on which to build a park?

News Flash: Emeryville You Won't Get the Parks You Want
After the Sherwin Williams decision, we're left asking why indeed.  The answer to that of course is there is no answer.  There is no city planning that happens in Emeryville.  City planning would mean saying NO to a profit seeking developer with plans of his own.  There is no mechanism to build parks moving forward here, real or imagined.  So don't you believe it when you hear some shit talking Council member or Council member wanna be unload.  There is only the developer’s pain and the City of Emeryville’s bottomless well of empathy, their endless capacity to feel that pain.  Saying Emeryville will get parks like other towns have is like saying America is post racial; it’s what some of us would like to imagine us to be.  We cry foul....Wake up America, you are racist to the core.  Wake up Emeryville.  

Introducing Fannie Lou Hamer Park

Emeryville's First Large Park in 40 Years:

Fannie Lou Hamer Park

Opinion/News Analysis

Emeryville, you've been lied to.
It doesn't have to be more housing.
We could build a large park instead.

Emeryville residents, long agitating for public parks, could finally get a new large park at the Sherwin Williams site along Horton Street as part of a City Council led drive to deliver on the promise of 26 acres of new parks built in our town before 2028.  The fallow Sherwin Williams site could be turned into a large new park almost eight acres in size and would be funded by the sale of a park bond floated by a newly chastened City Council who, since the 1980's has been terribly remiss in the building of parks to keep up with our population growth.  We propose the new park, the biggest built in Emeryville since the Watergate peninsula was constructed, be called Fannie Lou Hamer Park named in honor of the famous civil rights leader of the 1960’s and as such would represent our values in social justice and recognize the citizen's need for a leafy green open space respite from the daily tribulations of congested urban life.  After a long multi-decade program of building housing and shopping malls in Emeryville, Fannie Lou Hamer Park would provide a much needed counterpoint to that as well as redress the long-on-talk, short-on-action issues of livability our town has been subject to.  Fannie Lou Hamer Park could correct a lot of wrongs and make our town as nice as other towns.

The Why's and How's of Fannie Lou Hamer Park 
Emeryville is vastly underserved by parks/open space according to the American Planning Association and other good government/city planning institutions.  But not for long:

• The Sherwin Williams site is Emeryville’s last large piece of fallow ground available to build a large park on, and fallow land is the least expensive location to build a park.
• Emeryville’s residents to park acreage ratio, now almost unimaginable at nearly 500:1, has increased every year since 1979 and FLH Park offers a chance to reverse that.
• No cost to relocate any businesses, building tear down or clean-up (like we incurred at Doyle Hollis Park).
• Financed by floating a general obligation park bond leveraging Emeryville’s copious assessed valuation. 
• The property is acquired by standard private to public eminent domain after paying the developer fair market value.
• The trade off is clear; 30 affordable units above our existing average to be provided by the Sherwin Williams project and a small art gallery versus an eight acre public park.
• Beautiful tree framed sight line to our future iconic South Bayfront Bike/Pedestrian Bridge that will touch down in the park.
• The Horton Street Bike Boulevard is saved.
• Much less traffic in Emeryville. 
• Chances for citizen recharging and even solitude available that only a large park can provide.
• Parks foster civic pride and citizen engagement.
• We get the park now rather than waiting for 12 years. 

The above list offers a cogent and rational take one would expect to have traction in a normal democratically served municipality.  Unfortunately here in contemporary Emeryville, citizens acting as rational cogent agents has been supplanted by a different paradigm.

Fannie Lou Hamer
1917-1977
"I'm sick and tired of 
being sick and tired"
A great moral force of the civil rights
struggle.  Naming our park after her
would continue the pre-Ronald Reagan
tradition of elevating labor leaders
and social justice crusaders by naming
grand civil projects; libraries, town halls
and parks in their honor.
Interest in learning about
Fannie Lou Hamer by children would
be served and Emeryville's values
would be proudly proclaimed.

The Pro-Developer Meme 

The idea that Emeryville would begin a program of building enough parks to catch up with our exploding population growth, an idea considered rational and normal in a different era in a different town, sounds idealistic if not crazy in a town grown used to a naysayers paradigm that has overtaken our town these last decades.  In Emeryville, we’ve been mugged by these naysayers who tell us we’re simply not good enough to have what other towns have.  A strange Patty Hearst Stockholm Syndrome has replaced a former culture of expecting civic spaces that are liked and wanted by the residents.  Now many residents here readily accept what developers and the Council tell us is our only option; let the developers do what they want in our town.  Lots of Emeryville residents feel pride in all the new development projects and are happy developers are paying any attention to us. 
  

Like the thirty year project promulgated by right wing think tanks that gets us repeating the line that limited government is best, after a while it begins to seem like common sense; government is bad, inefficient, wasteful…isn’t it?   It’s no accident that the American people, who 40 years ago used to think the government is good at solving problems now thinks government itself is part of the problem. 

Here too we’ve foreclosed on our own agency to service a long standing right wing meme that insists like trickle down nostrums created in Washington, we have to let developers develop our town…the fact that we have almost 500 residents per acre of park/open space compared to Oakland’s 67 acres per resident only highlights how much better and more desirable Oakland must be according to this meme.  The meme permits a kind of twisted thinking that makes it unreasonable that we could expect to get the 26 acres of parks that our own General Plan requires we build within 12 years.  We’ve become a people who dream of nice things like other people in other towns do but have no expectation at all in getting them, thanks to the pro-developer meme.  

The meme in Emeryville is so ubiquitous, so pervasive that “progressive” City Council members are not at all distinct from the old school conservative Council members on this subject: even though they campaigned on parks, there’s little chance they would consider Fannie Lou Hamer Park because the developer doesn’t want to do it.  The meme is so powerful that even the “progressive” Council members will retract when confronted by the idea that we could build a park, they retract instead of offer a reason why we cannot build a park; reason takes a holiday thanks to the meme.  It is cast as reasonable to not provide reason; developers must be placated and no other vision is entertained. To do otherwise, to build Fannie Lou Hamer Park at the Sherwin Williams site, is so far off the radar that to propose it is tantamount to proposing an Emeryville space program.  

And it’s not just the Council “progressives” and otherwise who cannot even imagine building a park, it’s the citizens too, seduced by the pro-developer meme that Emeryville just isn’t good enough to get what other towns have, who vote for Council members who promise parks but don’t deliver, who worked on our General Plan that promises parks that’s not worth the paper its printed on, who publicly profess the love of parks who dismiss the idea we could build a park here and now for reasons they refuse to specify.  

And the new City Council candidates plying for our votes in November are telling us exactly the same as Council members seeking election have said for decades: they like parks, they’re going to deliver parks they say but they don’t think the Sherwin Williams site is appropriate for reasons not specified other than the dog whistle of the pro-developer meme.  Of course anyone who is aware of the pro-developer meme will not be taken in by the new crop of wanna be Council members.  They seem to be playing to new resident rubes and those mesmerized by the meme.

In coming weeks, Fannie Lou Hamer Park will likely fade into the ether like bike boulevards here and the other things the residents say they want but run afoul of the desires of developers.  Our polity is stark and bereft.  As opposed to what the residents get in other towns not taken over by an alien ideology overlain public policy.  And that’s really sad but it’s also who we’ve become; a town with no pride.  So remember Emeryville, next time you hear anyone say anything good about our town: we’re actually measurably much worse than our neighbors.  We have almost 500 residents per acre of park/open space land and that number is rising with no clear way to reverse the trend or improve on that.

Parks in Emeryville are always going to be built at some future date.  Say, about 12 years from now.  A newly arrived Emeryville citizen, looking at our General Plan and its built-in impending sunset in 12 years, might assume the City is going to engage in a massive flurry of park building at the end of the sunset period.  Cynical old timers who haven't been hoodwinked by the pro-developer meme know better.  They know the score; 12 years from now when we write our next General Plan (with lots of citizen participation mind you), the same 26 acres of parks that will make us as good as other cities will be in there...only a new 20 year clock will have been reset and a new program of placating developers will begin afresh.  The only place to build parks in Emeryville then will be on the site of existing viable businesses and expensive buildings.
Or we could build Fannie Lou Hamer Park now and prove the cynics wrong.