Emeryville Housing Autonomy Confounded by the Advancement of a Paid Sacramento Lobbyist to Council Committee

The City Council Appoints a Paid YIMBY Lobbyist to the Housing Committee

Corporate Developers Now in Direct Control of the Levers of Power at City Hall

The Emeryville City Council Wednesday appointed a professional influence peddler for California YIMBY, a Sacramento based corporate real estate developer supported lobbying organization, to the Emeryville Housing Committee.  The Council appointee elevated to the Committee, Ned Resnikoff, is employed as the Policy Director for California YIMBY and has lived in Emeryville just two months.  The pick is a first for the Emeryville City Council who have so far resisted appointing a paid lobbyist to any Council committees.

New Emeryville Housing Committee member
Ned Resnikoff
He says 'best practices' for housing policy is to 
remove regulation for developers.  The implication
being that benefit for average people will
then trickle down, Ronald Reagan style.

Council member Kalimah Priforce strenuously pushed back against the appointment in what Councilwoman Sukhdeep Kaur pejoratively called an “outburst”.  As such, Mr Priforce was the lone dissenting voice among his colleagues against the controversial pick.

The vote elevating Mr Resnikoff, 4-1 (Priforce dissenting), raised the specter of a new paradigm in Emeryville of Council committee appointees being actual paid corporate lobbyists in the bailiwick of the business of the committee.  

Up until Wednesday, many if not most committee appointees have been local community members shown to be in the thrall of the business community but never in modern Emeryville history has there been such a blatant abdication of the City’s autonomy over to purely corporate interests.  

It was an action that drew rebuke from Mr Priforce, "How does a lobbyist even survive the vetting process through the Housing Committee he said.  “Should a  member of the NRA [gun lobbying organization] sit on the Public Safety Committee, he further inquired of his colleagues rhetorically.  The Councilman castigated the YIMBY employee for his housing policies as working against the interests of Black and Brown people, “You don’t care if [marginalized] people are gentrified out of their communities, he said.

Relying on a publicly offered argument of 'trickle down' democratic benefit, YIMBY's pro-developer policies have been shown to work in the real world as a gentrifying force against poor people in their communities, all the heated countering rhetoric from YIMBY aside.

Mayor Bauters dropped the gavel on Council member Priforce calling his speech “out of order” for disrespecting a "constituent" even though Mr Bauters himself is fond of doing precisely that from the dais, it should be noted.  

Council member Kalimah Priforce
"Emeryville's reputation of being a rotten city is
something we have tried to grow away from. 
But some of the rotten is still here in
how we chose to do things, in who
we select for our committees".

The YIMBY organization (Yes In My Back Yard) is a nation wide pro-housing developer lobbying organization and California YIMBY is the largest cell within the organization.  Their aim is to protect developer’s profit margins to get them to build more housing and they do so at the expense of local autonomy.  YIMBY pushes back against anything that would impinge on corporate profits including the building of more parks as the Emeryville General Plan calls for or even to deliver more ownership housing.  Developers can make more profit by building rental only housing and so that’s what YIMBY uses its power in the service of.  Emeryville has in recent years morphed from a mostly home ownership city into a mostly rental city regardless of Emeryville’s General Plan and its direction to increase the ratio of ownership housing.

The Mayor and Vice Mayor have forged ahead recently to deliver Emeryville to YIMBY, much to the delight of the Sacramento based lobbying organization.  California YIMBY, showing their appreciation, elevated Mr Bauters and Vice Mayor Courtney Welch to their ‘developer shill’ bracket  because of the pro-corporate housing deference the two have shown.  

The elevation of the Director of Policy for YIMBY to our Housing Committee sends a signal that the Council now pays total deference to the Sacramento organization, further bolstering the claim from the San Fransisco Chronicle that Emeryville is "the most YIMBY city in the state".

The Tattler reached out to Mayor John Bauters for this story but he refused to answer any questions.

The applicant's innocuous statement begins at 44:10 (below) but the fireworks start at 50:16.

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  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 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.

Council Takes Baby Step Toward Family Housing

New Day In Emeryville?

Is The City Council Ready To Deliver Family Housing?

News Analysis

At first the Housing Committee was a solid block; unsupportive of family housing, but now there's a little crack in that block.  A single outspoken promoter of family friendly housing was appointed Tuesday to the key city body responsible for housing policy. The outlier joins a dozen other members on Emeryville's Housing Committee.  The council's surprising and unanimous appointment of Emeryville resident Sarah Harper to the committee may indicate the start of a far reaching shift in Emeryville's housing policy.

What exactly is 'family friendly housing' in an urban context?   The Berkeley city planning firm MIG and Associates, hired by Emeryville to advise the decision makers, tells us among other things it's homes, apartments and condos with real bedrooms for privacy, not wall-free open floor plans. It's affordable housing with two and three-bedrooms, rather than a single bedroom. It's housing with access to a small safe outdoor play area for unsupervised play so parents can take care of domestic chores.  It's housing on quiet pedestrian activated streets without car dominance.
Why is it important? Besides the virtues of a diversified populace, it's because city officials recently convinced voters to spend nearly half a billion dollars in principal and interest on new facilities for all 765 students enrolled in district schools. Factor out the 306 Oakland and Richmond children who attend school in Emeryville, and the $400 million school campus works out to $871,460 per Emeryville pupil. If the council, school board and residents want this massive investment to make sense, they must raise enrollment. Despite an explosion of new housing construction in Emeryville over the past 15 years, the number of local children attending our schools has been declining. Why? Because despite building several thousand new units, barely a handful are suitable for families.

Suburban model of middle class
family friendly housing.

Of the 13 committee members, only Ms Harper (nominated by Councilwoman Jennifer West) mentioned family housing as a worthwhile goal on their applications for joining the committee.

This newly added singular voice on the Housing Committee might represent the first inklings of a new culture at City Hall. On some future day, a loft developer might be told, "Thanks but no thanks, we're trying to build housing for families in order to support our schools".

Up until now, the Housing Committee has been a poor champion of family housing.  In June 2010, the committee finished an exhaustive 172 page update to the general plan entitled 'Emeryville Housing Element 2009-2014.' Providing family housing didn't even make the list of seven housing goals.  

Urban model of middle class
family friendly housing.

The city council is mainly responsible for the committee's general disinterest. Until now, the problem hasn't been antipathy to family housing on the council, but a philosophy that government shouldn't interfere with developers driven by the free market.  The problem is that it's simply more profitable to build lofts. Or for that matter to build five, one-bedroom condos instead of two three bedroom ones in the same space.  This 'hands-off-developers' council approach has created our current situation; awash in a certain childless younger demographic while actually losing families.  

The council's abdication of governance in deference to the profit motive of private developers has resulted in a critical lack of family housing that has created an urgent problem for the new school.  If the problem is to be fixed before the school's completion, a massive program of home building must begin immediately.  Whether it's too late or not, it seems this new appointment to the Housing Committee might indicate the beginning of a shift in governing philosophy by the city council. It could show that the Emeryville city council is ready to put the public back into public policy and begin governing.

They Said It

Josh Simon Said It-

"The Housing Committee Is Taking Care Of Family Housing"

Politics in Emeryville have produced quite a lot of hyperbole over the years. At the Tattler, we occasionally post quotable quotes from Emeryville personalities since where we've been can sometimes inform where we're going.

Josh Simon
School Board Member
Housing Committee member

At the final meeting of the now disbanded 'Partners Committee' to usher in the Center of Community Life and the new school rebuild,  the topic of discussion was whether the new state mandated 'Measure J Oversight Committee' should include family friendly housing in its purview.  "No", School Board member Josh Simon said.  "It's inappropriate, the Housing Committee is taking care of family housing".  He added that the Housing Committee is doing a fine job of it.

The real story of the Housing Committee as it pertains to bringing family housing is something quite different.  It has been an abysmal failure:

• In 10 years less than 10 three bedroom housing units have been built in the entire town, according to councilwoman Ruth Atkin.  
• Households in Emeryville with at least one child dropped by 2% from 1990 - 2000 (the last year calculated in the City's housing study).
• The population of children in Emeryville dropped by 8% from 1990 - 2000 even while the total population increased by 20% during the same time.
• Bringing family housing is not even among the seven goals for the Housing Committee through 2014.  The committee literally does not care about family housing.

Bearing in mind that School Board member Josh Simon also sits on the Housing Committee, one has to ask what is he talking about with his quote, "The Housing Committee is taking care of family housing "?