New Private School Ok'ed, Dissenters Attacked

Drink this and you'll want to quash dissent

Woe Be To The Dissenters

Is The Water OK In Emeryville?

Opinion

Is there something in the water here?

We have to ask:  What is it about Emeryville that makes the power elite so keen to automatically attack dissenters?  Take last month's resident appeal of the Esquela Bilingue Internacional school:  Three resident citizens were attacked after they took issue with the neighborhood damaging aspects of the private school to be located on San Pablo Avenue.

These courageous neighbors spent $200 of their own money to try to force this private school operator to work with the neighbors and limit some of the worst impacts the school will bring to the Triangle neighborhood.  This audaciousness was enough to make School Board Member Pat Hooper and Planning Commission member Frank Flores launch into a personal attack against the appellants: they discredited the appeal and called these Triangle neighbors "NIMBYists".  The spokeswoman for the Oakland based school it should be noted, piled on and derisively called the three Triangle neighbors "appellant landlords"; a clear attempt to discredit and try to re-cast the three residents as some kind of exotic money grubbing interlopers.

NIMBYism

The three neighbors, by their appeal, forced the traffic for student drop off and pick up, some 400 students in all, away from the residential 45th street and over to 47th Street.  The project before the appeal would have resulted in a massive amount of cut-through driving on 45th Street from San Pablo to Adeline Street. Now the cars will turn onto 47th Street, and turn around in the school parking lot and re-emerge onto 47th and back to San Pablo, leaving the residential neighborhood unimpeded.

Further, the appellants got the school to agree to 'Transit Demand Management' practices, including carpooling and van pooling, thereby lowering the total vehicle loads to our streets.

Also, the three neighbor appellants forced concessions on the school to make the new pedestrian path jogging around the back of the school to be gated to keep out nefarious types late at night, owing to the lack of visibility for the police.

These concessions would only have been made as a result of the appeal since the Planning Commission was not interested in lowering the impact on the Triangle neighborhood.  Together, the concessions make the Esquela Bilingue Internacional school a less impactful presence on the Triangle neighborhood and a better project for the whole town.

These three neighbors who bravely faced the anti-dissenter gauntlet at City Hall should be thanked for their work improving the livability of our town.  Instead, these three Emeryville residents had their integrity challenged by our government in the accusations leveled by Ms Hooper and Mr Flores.

We use the word courageous to describe the three neighbors because of Emeryville's infamous lack of tolerance for dissenters at City Hall.  The three neighbors likely knew they would be attacked by the government officials and undaunted they brought their appeal anyway.  We continue to be exasperated by this culture at City Hall and we thank these three neighbors for working to improve the livability for our town.

Audacity

The drama of the San Pablo Avenue private school appeal had audacity all right.  But it came not from the appeal generated by three Emeryville neighbors, it came instead from the thuggish reactions of government officials Pat Hooper and Frank Flores.

Family Friendly Housing In Emeryville: No Longer An Opinion

November 2nd, We Set Our New Course

Now We Will Remake Emeryville 

News Analysis / Opinion

The voters spoke on November 2nd and what they said will reverberate for generations to come.  The voters said in a loud and very clear voice; they expect Emeryville to be recast.  The game changing  Measure J vote, passed by some 72% of voters, mandates that our town will be completely remade with a whole new guiding vision.  Emeryville will morph from the existing auto dependant loft & condo commuter burg filled with single or childless couple professionals and Cal Berkeley students into a new city brimming with young families living in a new type of housing scarcely recognizable by current standards.

Emeryville residents of the future

Just how we're going to get there is unclear but get there we must since residents are now committed to a nearly $400 million new public school rebuild that requires attracting a minimum of 700 new Emeryville students, according to the school district.  Critics of Measure J , including the Tattler, called attention to this glaring problem of a lack of existing family friendly housing in the run up to the November 2nd election while proponents of the measure devoted no time to explaining how the lack of housing problem would be resolved but residents threw caution to the wind and voted to move forward regardless.

Epic in it's scope, Measure J represented a vote of NO to the status quo and YES to a complete make-over for the town.  Now, it's up to the city council to deliver family housing; lots of it and really fast, to support the new school and make sure the voters will is assuaged.  We mustn't fool ourselves; this would not be easy in the best of times let alone during the current economic morass.

Nevertheless, Measure J will usher in a whole new development paradigm for our town and our aging council members must radically change to meet the new demands; a difficult task given their specific personalities and their overall conservative nature.  Now, city leaders must actively and aggressively seek out new housing options.  The old way, waiting for developers themselves to make development proposals won't deliver the family housing that we need.

Not Open For Interpretation

Up until recently in Emeryville, the phrase 'family friendly housing' has been an imprecise term, even as many sectors have clamored for it.  It's been one of those things that everybody seems to want and yet we still can't seem to get.  The city council members have been liberally using the term of late and developers have noticed the change in rhetoric emanating from the council dais and they have provided assurance to the decision makers that any housing proposals they champion can be considered family friendly.  Some decision makers have gone out of their way to let everyone know that they know just what this new type of housing is.

Meet your new neighbors

Planning Commissioner Frank Flores, for one chastised the council in a sharply worded November 18th letter for even discussing whether a development proposal under consideration was family friendly and whether to require appropriate adjustments from the developer.  Mr Flores, who works for the developer in question, told the council members the loft/condo housing development proposal at 3900 Adeline Street is already in fact family friendly and no improvements need be made on that account.  Mr Flores would have us believe what constitutes family friendly housing is a matter of personal opinion and the developers for their part no doubt would like us to leave it at that.

Unfortunately now in Emeryville, we don't have that freedom anymore.  We must bring families to Emeryville to support the voter approved new school investment and families won't listen to Mr Flores or developers or even the council for that matter; they'll decide for themselves what constitutes family friendly housing and unlike the developers, their decisions will be based on if they actually feel comfortable living there as a family with their children.  Hubris from developers or the council and their sycophants will be exposed immediately by actual families in the marketplace.

Going Backwards

Up til now,  Emeryville has been going backwards; we've actually been losing families over the last twenty years even as our population has risen dramatically.  The lack of family housing has exacerbated the situation.  Council member Ruth Atkin recently complained developers, left to their own devices, have only provided eight three bedroom units in the last ten years in Emeryville.  Ms Atkin is correct; we can't afford to go down this path anymore.

Quaint old Emeryville; so very 2010

Against this bleak backdrop, the city has accepted the offer of local planning firm MIG & Associates to define what exactly constitutes family friendly housing in an urban context with a power point presentation made expressly for Emeryville.  This firm has shopped their presentation around town, and so far they've made their presentation to the School Board, the Housing Commission and the City Council.

Luckily for us, MIG has agreed to help us with our lack of family friendly housing.  We no longer need to guess about what it takes to bring families to Emeryville; no longer do we need to listen to opinions from those with hidden agendas to maximize profits for shareholders who might try to fool us.  No longer do we need to listen to ideologues that would help those seeking to maximize profits claiming to want to help build family housing and all the while working to subvert that effort.  Now we have MIG & Associates, a real independent arbiter that is a professional in the field and highly respected among their peers.

You won't see many of these anymore

Bay Street Site Up For Grabs

Given the limited geography of Emeryville and the pressing timeline, every piece of land freed up for possible redevelopment must now be put into play toward the goal of bringing in the 700 new students.  The first on the docket is the large piece of empty land along Shellmound Street directly to the north of the Bay Street mall and coveted by Bay Street developer Madison Marquette.  This land has sat idle for five years, waiting for Madison Marquette to make up their minds if they really want to do a Bay Street mall expansion.  The council has granted the developer exclusive rights to this valuable piece of Emeryville real estate for expanding the shopping mall five years running.

Now the council must expand their thinking and figure a way to build family friendly housing on the site, even if Madison Marquette demurs.

This is what the new Emeryville will look like

Indeed, the council must now be thinking in terms of building family friendly housing on every piece of land until we bring the 700 new students to the district.  Every development proposal must now be considered a contested site.  The past high profit margins from lofts and one bedroom condos developers have enjoyed in Emeryville are at an end.  Now, the profits will be much slimmer.  The council will have to learn how to say NO to developers as they make their claims that family housing developments "won't pencil out", like they always do.  They'll have to hold fast when the developers threaten to leave Emeryville if they don't get everything they want, like they always do.  The council will have to learn to bring a new kind of development to Emeryville.  These old dog council members are going to have to learn some new tricks.  The bonds proscribed for Measure J are being prepared for sale right now and the clock is ticking.  We need family friendly housing now in Emeryville.

Emeryville will be lousy with these

MIG is here:

http://www.migcom.com/