From The Archives

The Tattler's 'From The Archives', brings back Tattler stories from the past that we deem to still be of interest.  From The Archives appears on an occasional basis.

The featured story is from 2011, an opinion piece focused on a double deal with regards to trees never planted at the East Bay Bridge Mall.  The story, while specific to the trees can serve as a stand-in for the greater disconnect between what is promised to the residents versus what is delivered by the city council and the staff at City Hall.  The final thought in the opinion piece challenges any city council member to come forward to press for the resident's interests but two years on, City Hall continues to think city planning is best left to business interests.  This tree problem was purposely left unresolved, the developer serving as the winner and the residents serving as the losers....a common outcome here in Emeryville, the little city that can't seem to do anything right.

Here then is our From The Archives offering for today:  

THURSDAY, JANUARY 27, 2011

Missing Trees At Target Store Site 18 Years Later, Mistake Is Perpetuated

This is what the East Bay Bridge Mall

was supposed to look like.

This is what we got and it seems,

all we're ever going to get.

Staff Makes Same Mistake Again; Can't Learn

 Emeryville: The Little City That Can't Seem To Do Anything Right

Opinion

The 1992 Environmental Impact Report for the sprawling East Bay Bridge Mall says it all:  The rows of parked cars there will be ugly and create harsh glare, lowering the quality of life; a "significant" impact for residents.  Fortunately for us the report also identified the fix: plant trees, lots of them and then the problem will become "less than significant".  Unfortunately for us though, Emeryville contains more than its share of pro-developer government officials that don't really care about the resident's interests.  So we didn't get the required trees.

Now years later, part of the mall is being redeveloped with a Target store moving in, and we've been given a second chance to get the landscaping right, but once again government officials can't or won't work in our interests so again we won't get our promised trees.

The Target parking lot has been reconfigured and they're planting new trees right now after having recently cut down the 1990's specimens.  The city says perhaps as many as 100 new trees in all will be planted by Target.  But as in the 1990's, the percentage of the parking lot tree 'canopy coverage', that is the percentage of the parking lot covered by trees when viewed from above, will not be close to the 25% required by the mall's environmental documents.  What percentage of tree coverage Target will plant the city cannot say since apparently only Target knows that; the city hasn't taken an interest.

Past Corruption

Back in the '90's, how we first lost the trees is a history of bad governance; essentially a primer on how not to do it.  A citizen prompted 2003 Planning Department investigation revealed certain rogue Planning Commissioners had 10 years earlier, unilaterally revised the contract with the developer of the mall, Catellus Development Corporation, freeing the developer from the large number of parking lot tree plantings mandated by the mall's Environmental Impact Report document.  The action was literally a back room deal.  The environmental document required a minimum of 25% tree canopy coverage, but the actual amount planted was about 2% according to the investigation.

The investigation fingered at least three Planning Commissioners and cleared up the question as to why the environmental document required 25% tree coverage but the final 'Conditions of Approval' for the mall ultimately showed no tree requirement at all.  The investigation revealed the Planning Commissioners in question never provided testimony as to why they had intervened and let the developer off the hook for providing the trees.  One of the commissioners reflecting on the contract revision from 10 years earlier, did indicate that Catellus simply didn't want to spend the money the larger number of trees would cost and they asked the commissioners for relief from the 25% tree requirement, a task the commissioners gladly, and out of the public spotlight, provided.  The Planning Commissioners must have felt Catellus' pain since the Planning Department's investigation found no evidence of bribes having taken place.

Ghost Of The Corruption

Today, the staff has finally given up on the idea of planning at the East Bay Bridge mall since they are content with letting Target decide how many trees it wants in its parking lot.  The 25% requirement seems to have been abandoned and deference has been given to an 18 year old back room deal between some former Planning Commissioners and the profit maximizing Catellus Development Corporation.  We're locked it would seem, into a place where we cannot honor the ethos of livability the city council keeps publicly hawking.  Nobody at City Hall seems to see the folly of this: it was the apolitical Environmental Impact Report, a scientific document, that ruled that the 25% tree coverage to offset the parking lot negative impacts was necessary, not any commercial interests.  Now it seems this random piece of bad governance from a bygone era is going to continue to haunt future residents of Emeryville until a forthright leader steps up and disposes this ridiculous impediment.

From The Archives

The Tattler's 'From The Archives', brings back Tattler stories from the past that we deem to still be of interest.  From The Archives will appear on an occasional basis.  

The following is a story from November 7th 2010, right after the passage of Measure J, the school bond initiative for the new campus on San Pablo Avenue as part of the Center of Community Life.  Readers will note a main cause of concern at the time was the wisdom of trying to improve academic achievement by the building of a new facility, something the School District was adamant about.  

The amount of the bond, $95 million, has since been reduced owing to a reduction in the bond raising capacity of Emeryville, something the District said was improbable if not impossible at the time.  Added City money was to drive the cost of the Center of Community Life to some $120 million before interest charges.  
The story also highlights how the School District shuts down dissenting voices among the citizenry, an ongoing problem that has only increased since 2010.

Lastly, readers will note there is no mention of closing Anna Yates Elementary School in the story...that's because the District was still on record in 2010, claiming the public would be able to decide for themselves about closing the school in the coming months after the election.  This was before the District switched and adopted their current claim that the closure option was decided almost a decade earlier (presumably by District officials).

Here then is our From The Archives offering for today:

New Building Only Option Considered

Groupthink Shut Out Alternate Visions For School District

Opinion/News Analysis

What started out as an idea to increase academic achievement at Emeryville schools morphed instead into a strange insistence by the polity that an expensive new building must be erected.  The culture became permeated with groupthink after critical thinking was purged from supportive committees by the school board and the city council.

Is this really the best way?

As a consequence, the recently passed campaign for Measure J, the school rebuild bond, progressed just how the hired political consulting firm said it would.  From the opening salvos of city-wide push polling with its hidden agenda meant to sway voters to the final stubbing out of oppositional voices by the cancelling of freewheeling public forums called "living room conversations" along with the purging of alternative voices from official committees; the only idea taken into consideration was the building of a $120 million new school edifice (nearly $400 million with interest).  All fell into line and dissent was effectively quashed.  And that was the intent, right from the start.

How about something different?

The whole idea that a new school building is the best way to increase student academic achievement, accepted carte blanche by the elite, was never challenged because contrary voices were not allowed on any of the committees that were set up ostensibly to investigate this dubious premise.  The enablers never saw fit to question the official 'wisdom'.  Other voices, were they allowed to flourish, might  have argued a different vision be considered; a vision that, as it turns out is supported by a majority of educators.

Real Academic Achievement:

Small Class Size & Higher Pay For Teachers

In the academic community, as it turns out, there is no consensus on this Emeryville steamroller idea that it takes a new building to produce good academic results for students.  On the contrary, most educators outside Emeryville say it's small class sizes that brings higher academic student achievement.  Teachers are almost unanimous about this.  Many also point to the need for quality teachers and higher teacher pay is a proven way to attract better teachers.  Many academicians will say new buildings may help increase student performance somewhat but pale when compared to making smaller class sizes and hiring better teachers.

Center Of Community Life committee meeting

Those that might have asked if the emperor has clothes and question the inevitable new school building project were never able to point out the plethora of other school districts getting by with much older school buildings than the 1962 Emery High.  One only needs to look to Berkeley High School, built in 1901 (added onto in subsequent years including a large add on in 1964) and doing a far better job educating its students than Emery.   In fact the Berkeley High campus was recently designated a historic district by the National Register of Historic Places, something Emery High School is not eligible for because it's too new.  It is an inconvenient fact that many school districts across the United States are educating their children in much older schools than Emery and that they have exceptionally high academic student achievement.

Now There Are Fewer Options

We've put all our eggs in one basket

Perhaps most disturbing is the likely prospect that the $400 million dollar school rebuild project will squander Emeryville voter's admirable penchant for fiscally supporting their schools, possibly for a generation or more.  Any chance of reducing class sizes or increasing teacher pay with additional financial help from the residents is now much less likely because of the expensive new building we're going to get.  It would seem we have put all our hopes for a new regime of academic achievement in one basket; the one basket that will offer the least chance for success.  In terms of bang for bucks, we have gone for a lot of bucks and not much bang.

In an alternate universe where dissenting voices were welcome in Emeryville, these other ideas for driving up student achievement might have been part of the dialogue, they might have saved the residents a lot of money and better achieved the goal of improving education at our schools.  But back here on Earth, in this Emeryville, it seems the only alternative is their way or the highway.

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.  

Here then is our From The Archives offering for today:

SUNDAY, JANUARY 9, 2011

Emeryville: Land Of Palm Trees

All Pedestrians See Are Bare Trunks

Why So Many Palm Trees?

Opinion
Work crews are finally preparing to take down the power line poles from the new plaza near the railroad tracks at the foot of Park Avenue as part of the Park Avenue improvement plan.  The poles will be removed so that six large palm trees can be planted.   Strangely, those trees will be planted even though the citizen's committee charged with co-designing the plaza several years ago specifically said "no" to palm trees there.
It's not only the committee that objects to palm trees.  Councilwoman Ruth Atkin likes deciduous leafy trees and she has railed against the plethora of palm trees planted in Emeryville, calling them "ugly", yet we still seem to get palms planted everywhere here.
Why palm trees?   Because, as it turns out, some nameless, faceless bureaucrat from 100 years ago thought two palms would look nice in front of City Hall, so now Emeryville must  live with palm trees everywhere.

A healthy mature palm

At the Park Avenue plaza, the new palms will create a "unified and homogeneous street-scape"; at least that's what the city planners with masters degrees tell us.  City Hall, up the street has palm trees in front, so in order to tie Park Avenue together in a Big Lebowski oriental rug sort of way, we must also have palm trees in the plaza.

Indeed even the palm trees at City Hall are brought to us by the palm trees at City Hall.  Because of the now unknown designer in 1903 that planted the two large palms in front of the original building, the architect who designed the building's addition in 2000 insisted we must have more palms around the building to achieve proper "contextualization" (see Tattler story January 2nd).
The existence of the palms at city hall, iconic in their auspicious placement, have been used to justify palms all over town from Pixar across Park Avenue to the Public Market on Shellmound Street.

Our fate seems to be sealed because like it or not, a critical mass seems to have been reached and palm trees are now seen by architects and city planners as emblematic of Emeryville.  This vision is so strong for them that they over-turned a democratic vote by citizens on the Park Avenue Committee to not plant palms in the plaza.  The irony of the ugly bare power poles there being replaced by palms is probably lost on them.

So it looks like we're going to be seeing a lot of bare trunks and not a lot of leaves in Emeryville unless someone without a masters degree in city planning can shout loud enough that the emperor has no clothes.

The one on the right is healthier

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. 

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.  Sometimes a brief follow-up to the original posting will appear at the bottom of the story as an addendum.

Here then is our From The Archives offering for today:

Sunday June 5, 2011

SUNDAY, JUNE 5, 2011

Scathing Emeryville Housing Report Released

Long Anticipated Goldman Report Released:

Report: Council bungled unprecedented boom, leaving Emeryville and its schools in disarray, downward spiral

Emeryville's leaders have squandered unprecedented opportunities over the last quarter century in their rush to reconstruct a crumbling industrial core into a retail Mecca. Rather than an urban oasis, leaders have delivered a gleaming, yet demographically unstable post-industrial city, according to a new report from UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy.

The May 5th report titled Building a Community: Affordable Family-Friendly Housing in Emeryville (hyperlink is at bottom of story) found that giving housing developers a free hand has resulted in a preponderance of one-bedroom apartments and trendy open-plan lofts, but a dearth of housing suitable for growing families.
The report faults the council for refusing to use its authority to compel developers to produce housing that meets the needs of the real world. Instead, the council's laissez-faire coda has allowed development firms to deliver a plethora of cheaper-to-construct lofts and jam more, smaller units, into a building of the same footprint, maximizing profits.
With only a handful of family appropriate housing units, Emeryville has become increasingly a transient city, a place young people depart once singles begin pairing off and starting families.

New Emeryville housing: One 
bedroom units with parking 
on the ground level.

City Council Neglectful

The Goldman report blasts Emeryville, noting that families with children constitutes only 7 percent of the total population, a number that is "exceedingly low" compared to 33 percent nationally.  What few families do make a home in Emeryville, have a tendency to leave as their children get to be of school age because, "the housing developments do not meet the needs of growing families," according to the report.

Further, the report sees few encouraging signs for improvement in the near term. The city council continues to abdicate its responsibility to attain a more balanced mix of units from developers for at least the next three years. "While the city is expecting to increase its housing stock by 64% over the next 30 years, this will most likely not ameliorate the issue because, of the 1,281 new dwelling units the city has issued building permits to be built by 2014, the vast majority are more single bedroom luxury condos and apartments."

Open plan (no bedrooms) lofts 
turns their backs to the street; 
not conducive for families. 

Schools Pay The Price

The report also links poor student achievement within the Emery Unified School District in part on the lack of family housing.

The report's author, Master of Public Policy candidate Homayra Yusufi, is unequivocal; "Without adequate housing that accommodates the needs of families and encourages a strong sense of community, it will be difficult for the [school] district to increase enrollment and improve academic outcomes".

Ms. Yusufi notes that research demonstrates a "strong link" between housing and education. "The negative impacts of the lack of adequate housing can be seen in Emery Unified School District in that the district has considerably high attrition rates, which are constantly substituted by incoming inter-district transfers.  Due to the small size of the district, this greatly affects the district's overall academic performance".

One bedroom condos above,
empty retail below.

The lack of adequate family housing contributes to a high level of school "mobility"--- families that frequently move, enroll their children in different schools.  The report notes that high levels of mobility reduces academic performance by degrading the cohesive school environment and "greatly hinders the ability of teachers to teach effectively within the classroom".  Teachers are constantly being forced to assist new students and must backtrack and reteach information to the new students who are lagging behind, the report noted.

No Family Housing, No Accident

Emeryville's Redevelopment Agency, with its state mandated requirement that no less than 20 percent of all new housing be affordable, hasn't been any help in delivering family friendly housing.  The report notes that, left to their own devices, developers will not build family friendly housing since there is more profit in building single bedroom condos or lofts.  Since the Emeryville city council hasn't pushed developers to build family housing, the affordable housing that has been produced has been almost uniformly one bedroom units.  The report goes on to say the Emeryville's affordable housing  "has mainly attracted senior citizens and disabled persons without children".

Even as the population has surged over the past two decades, Emeryville has actually lost families.  The housing breakdown in terms of newly constructed units since 2008 is illustrative of the city's lack of will to build family housing.  The report shows just 4 percent of the newly built housing are single family units, a number the report calls an "extremely low percentage, even for the Bay Area."

More one bedroom units but with
a twist; below is parking and a
shopping mall.

Emeryville's Housing Committee, hand selected by the city council, has placed concern over this issue on the back burner.  The issue was not seen fit to be included in the committee's list of seven goals for housing city-wide included in the "Housing Element" the committee contributed to the city's general plan.

In a bright spot, the report noted that residents nevertheless appear willing to support their schools as evidenced by the recent approval of Measure J, aimed at rebuilding Emeryville's school facilities. The report suggests that this may spill over to residents asking or even demanding that the city build new family friendly housing to support the school investment.

Here's the report: http://scr.bi/lMd0n0

UPDATE: This Goldman housing report from last year turned out to be quite prescient.  Emeryville is losing families in 2012 at a fast clip.  The School District reports more than 60 families, with children formerly in Emery's schools, have left the district owing to rising housing prices and a lack of suitable housing.  No new families have moved in to replace the lost students.  The result is a budget crisis for the schools and teacher lay-offs.  The District's fiscal position is now so bleak, Emery schools may face another State takeover.  

The lack of any housing policy over many years, promulgated by the pro-developer forces on the city council, and highlighted by this Goldman report is why the schools are now facing a real existential threat.

There have been no mea culpas from any council members for any mistakes made.