Failed Family Friendly Housing Policies: Housing YES But Family Housing? NO

Emeryville: Worst City For Families in the East Bay

City Spending Money on New No Account Housing Plan 

To Follow the Last No Account Housing Plan 

Lots of Talk But Where Are The Families?

News Analysis

The City of Emeryville has failed in its pledge to bring families to Emeryville that it promised when it passed its 2014 housing plan, now in the process of being updated.  The 'Housing Element' plan, is part of the General Plan and it places "family friendly" housing as one of its core goals.  Regardless of the officially stated goal of increasing families in town, Emeryville’s average household size remains stuck at 1.8 people per housing unit, the same as it was when the last  Housing Element was written.  And it continues to be the lowest, by far, of all cities in the East Bay.   

The objective data highlight failed public housing policy for Emeryville, even as all the familiar talking heads try to tell us otherwise.  Despite family friendly housing being identified as a primary goal by the Housing Element and despite the Planning Commission and the City Council both having repeatedly assured us they are taking the goal seriously, Emeryville has not moved the needle forward on that metric one iota according to data from the US Census Bureau.  Emeryville is as family un-friendly now as it has been since before 2010.

Listening to all the over heated talk from City Hall and the City Council on this subject, people could be forgiven for thinking Emeryville is doing very well bringing families to our town.  It’s the kind of talk voters like to hear.  At election time, every City Council candidate says they’re going to deliver more families to Emeryville, sometimes ad nauseam.  The developers with construction proposals all say their residential developments will attract lots of families.  But at 1.8 average household size for more than ten years running, Emeryville is on the bottom among East Bay cities, right where it's been for decades.  Berkeley is the second least family friendly at 2.2 people per housing unit, followed by El Cerrito that has 2.3 people per unit.  Many cities east of the hills in the Tri-Valley area average three or even more than four people per unit.

Like it did in 2014 when it was writing the Housing Element it is currently replacing, the City has been conducting polls to see what housing goals the people want.  Then as now, the people are stating family friendly housing is essential.  In 2014, the goals ensconced in the Housing Element included “larger households” and to “improve the housing tenure” for families as well as “more for-sale units and less rental units” and to “increase owner occupancy”.  Emeryville has failed on all counts. 

The new goals, same as the old goals, will almost certainly be unmet when the newest Housing Element itself sunsets (in 2033) owing to the City Council’s recent pledge to build more housing at the cost of building parks.  The General Plan delineates providing at least 50 acres of park by the time that document sunsets in 2030.  However Emeryville’s mayor, John Bauters recently announced no new parks would be build in Emeryville until enough housing is built, an unquantified statement that will not likely happen before 2030, if ever.  If building parks means building less housing, then also requiring developers to build family friendly houses that actually attract families will also come at the cost of greater numbers of general housing units. 

If Emeryville would build the parks it has promised, they would likely find themselves in a virtuous circle; parks bringing families, families bringing more parks.  But with a City Council hostile to parks, this will not be tested.  Instead, Emeryville seems to be caught in a viscous circle; a lack of parks keeping families away and a lack of families demanding more parks translating into no parks being built.

To the extent that the City Council brags about building more family friendly housing units, a reality check is in order.  Because even if Emeryville is building more "family friendly" housing units than before, that fact has failed to bring more families the Census data shows us.   That being the case, clearly Emeryville needs to re-define what family friendly housing is.   Any proper definition needs to include a metric that relies on actual families moving into town.

However, bringing in families may not even be a real goal for Emeryville's elite.  Developers want to maximize their profits and to do that they need to build more market rate rental housing.  The City Council is helping the developers by ignoring the jobs/housing balance we traditionally have followed delineated in the objective data complied by the Association of Bay Area Governments and its Regional Housing Needs Assessment.   The City of Emeryville is a dues paying member of ABAG but has been de-coupling itself from that organization in recent years in favor of a different organization; YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard), a developer backed national housing lobbying conglomerate.  The group calls for de-regulation in housing and is funded by right wing scions including the Koch brothers.

During the formulation of the 2014 Housing Element, there was a high level of popular support for bringing families to Emeryville.  The power elite in our town, the corporations, the School Board, the City staff and the City Council however have not supported this.  The Census data proves that.  The powers that be in Emeryville have not delivered on this goal despite a near constant whinging on about how they support it.  

Decade after decade, Emeryville is the most un-friendly city for families in the East Bay.

  All the talk has net ZERO for average household size.  At what point do we conclude they're not serious about bringing families to Emeryville?

                                                                               Data from the US Census Bureau

                                                                                                 

Parks Get in the Way of Housing Says Emeryville Mayor

Mayor Announces Parks Are No Longer a Priority for Emeryville

It's Only Housing, Housing and More Housing For Emeryville

General Plan Parks Policy Overturned With Mayor's Proclamation

News Analysis

Emeryville’s mayor Tuesday night, finally put to words why Emeryville has stopped building new parks; “Because people don’t need to sleep in a park, they need to sleep with a roof over their head” he said, adding that “the region is suffering from a lack of housing”.  

The surprising announcement came as a response to questions from the Tattler at the City Council meeting, when Mayor John Bauters presented a major reversal of settled public park policy for Emeryville.  He said the City of Emeryville will no longer prioritize building parks, focusing instead on building as much housing as fast as can be built.  “Our housing jobs balance is off” he offered as a rationale. 

While his City Council colleagues looked on silently, the Mayor did not equivocate, “Every person on the City Council agrees we wish to expand parks and find opportunities to do that but not at the cost of housing” he said.

Mayor John Bauters
He says Emeryville needs housing
instead of parks.  He presents a false equivalency
between the two: it's going to be
parks or housing and he choses housing.

The issue of parks was discussed Tuesday night as a result of developers who had responded to a request for proposals from the City of Emeryville to build a large, new all rental residential tower on land south of Christie Avenue park.  The developers told the Council they were prepared to expand the existing park by as much as 10,000 square feet if they are given permission to build their proposed project.  But 10,000 square feet of park expansion is anemic, short by about 120,000 square feet if we are to keep pace with what the General Plan says should be built to offset the proposed tower.

The false equivalency of parks or housing put forth by Mr Bauters mimics draconian language from the national housing advocacy organization YIMBY, a group with tendrils extending into the Emeryville City Council.  YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard), a lobbying organization funded by developers and right wing entities such as the Koch brothers, was formulated as a pro-development foil to the discredited and disorganized NIMBY phenomenon that local residents sometimes engage in to fight undesirable development.  Other cities in the Bay Area have also recently taken up the YIMBY cause, some council members taking money from them and approving formerly controversial development projects as the organization grows in political power.  Several Emeryville City Council members are associated with YIMBY and at least two have taken money from them, either directly or indirectly.  

It's important to note while NIMBY represents opinions and behavior from individual citizens and as such is not an organization in any meaningful sense of the word, YIMBY is a powerful lobbying organization funded by interested parties, often with corporate dark money.

Emeryville City Councilwoman Courtney Welch (in red)
She agrees, Emeryville needs much more market rate housing.
Posing with YIMBY luminaries at the
YIMBY Prom Gala: "2022's biggest YIMBY party".  
City Council candidate Welch quietly took a campaign
donation of $1000 from the 'YIMBY Victory Fund' .

What Mayor Bauters failed to note as he announced Emeryville’s new park policy is that our guiding document, the General Plan, says Emeryville DOES need to build more parks.  A lot more.  In fact, more than 50 acres of parks are delineated by the sunset of the General Plan in 2030.  As of 2020, Emeryville had (and still has) only 22.4 park acres.  We should have had 41.6 acres by 2020 if we were following the General Plan.

Mr Bauters’ unquantified announcement that the City will not build parks until some future day when there is enough housing, was really more of an imprimatur, finalizing what has been a 'no park' trajectory by the City since the General Plan was written more than ten years ago.  The City has not been building parks nearly fast enough to offset all the new housing being built and Emeryville has been falling further behind our designated park needs every year.  The mayor’s announcement simply puts to words what has been the City's default policy of not building enough parks.  

The ‘parks or housing’ false choice proffered by Mr Bauters belies Emeryville’s massive market rate housing boom of recent years.  The City has been building housing at a prodigious rate.   The San Francisco Chronicle has reported that Emeryville wants to exceed housing requirements from the Association of Bay Area Governments by 50 percent even while neighboring cities are failing to meet the ABAG housing minimums.  The Chron reported as such, "One Bay Area town, the small city of Emeryville, is shooting to not only meet the target but exceed it by a mile".  Councilman Bauters admitted as late as 2019 the City was doing its share building housing, “Developers line up to build in the City”, giving Emeryville a “pro-housing” designation, he told the Real Deal, a local real estate magazine. 

YIMBY Prom Court
Ms Martinez, a vocal
antagonist against planning and
a long time critic of ABAG's 
housing needs assessment,
was also a 'VIP' guest at the
October YIMBY prom gala.

So while Emeryville has built housing more than what the jobs/housing balance actually requires as tabulated by ABAG and in spite of Mayor Bauters’ proclamations,  Mr Bauters now says the City needs to step up even more in its zeal to build housing.  Taken at his word, the parks-at-the-expense-of housing equivalency presented by Mr Bauters hints that whereas before Emeryville could presumably build parks, now we can’t, regardless of what our General Plan says.  Parks are a luxury Emeryville can no longer afford Mayor Bauters implies.  

The new no parks policy has come at a bad time for our town.  Emeryville has been the worst city in the East Bay area for parks for decades.  Our residents per acre of park in 2020 was at 549.  That number has gone higher since 2020.  We need to be much lower; three acres for every 1000 residents or 333 residents per acre. As we build more housing and don’t build enough parks to offset the increase in population, every year Emeryville gets worse.  And with Mr Bauters’ new no parks policy, delivered by executive fiat, that will likely be our fate.  Against all this pressure from an outside organization and barring a democratic pushback, Emeryville is now on track to remain the worst city in the East Bay area for parks into the foreseeable future.

Mayor Bauters refused to comment for this story but he said his comments made at the City Council meeting can be quoted as accurately portraying his policy ideas.

School Board Election Autopsy

 To the Tattler Readership-

Our copy editor today accidentally deleted and erased this story (we're going to have to dock his pay!).  We will re-build the story from our contemporaneous notes over the next day or two so please check back in later.  The story might be slightly changed but we will strive for an accurate re-post.  The comments will be loaded after the story is re-done.  All the comments were saved luckily.   Our new Councilman made a couple of news breaking comments so it is imperative we re-load the comments. 

This is the first time in our almost 13 year history this has happened but I'm going to have a word with Mr X about being more careful when he mucks about in the posting area.   Sorry for the inconvenience and please bear with us.

The Editor

What are we to make of the just passed November 6th elections in Emeryville?   

The City Council election was normal; candidates all said the same things they always say.  We need more parks, less traffic, safer bicycling opportunities they said….everything you would expect to say and what candidates do say every election season.  But what about the School Board election?  That was most unusual.  In fact it was bizarre. 

To start with, it was very unusual that we even had an election for School Board at all.  Normally at Emery Unified School District, there are no contenders for School Board races every two years and as a result, the incumbents are able to walk right back in without an election.  In fact, the only reason Emeryville voters got a chance to vote at all this time is because I ran against the three incumbents.  If I hadn’t run for election, there would have been no election at all and the people of Emeryville, those who pay for the schools, would have not have had a say in how their money gets spent. 

The ‘incumbent advantage’ is very powerful in Emeryville, be it at the School Board or at the City Council.  The elected officials know this of course and Emery School Board members usually quit before their terms are complete to allow their Board colleges to appoint a replacement, usually one of their friends.  Then the appointment is an incumbent and able to leverage Emeryville legendary incumbent advantage at the next election.  Most Emery School Board members start out as appointees and some never even have to face the voters.  Right now, four out of the five sitting School Board members started out as appointees.

It’s been like this for decades.  The culture of ‘quitting early to allow for appointed replacements’ is why Emery Unified School District never changes in any substantial way.  New voices are shut out in this way.  ‘Group think’ sets into an ossified system like this.  And as far as academics and pedagogical performance is concerned, it shows at Emery.

As I showed during my campaign for School Board, Emery’s performance is not commensurate with the amount of money the people of Emeryville throw at the district.  And the children suffer for it.  

Emery is by far the richest school district in the entire East Bay.  We fund our schools at over $27,000 per student per year (and this doesn’t include the $400 million new ECCL campus we paid for).  The next highest paid district is Berkeley Unified School District where they fund at a rate of about $18,000 per student per year.  But Berkeley also gets extremely high academic performance for its children compared with Emery.  Emery, for all the money we spend gets terrible academic results.  In fact Emery is on the bottom among all the school districts in Alameda County.

These facts prompted consternation on the campaign trail and Emeryville voters were witness to a spectacle about the District’s low academic performance during the campaign season.  The three incumbents were desperate to NOT talk about their record.  But I kept talking about it.  So they mostly ignored and prevaricated when they couldn’t ignore.   One incumbent, Board president Susan Donaldson took issue with Emery’s last place academic record.  She cherry picked data to make it look like Emery isn’t the worst but only the third from worst.  ‘Take heart Emeryville voters’, Susan said, ‘Brian is wrong; Emery is only third from last place despite all the money we spend’.   It was a specious argument people with an expectation of excellence wouldn’t normally make.  But Emery actually is in last place among all 18 Alameda County school districts, all the sanctimonious hyperbole from the incumbents notwithstanding.

The worst academic record with the most money spent.  That’s the three incumbent’s record and that’s not something people would vote for.  So why did Emeryville voters vote for it? 

My campaign focused on teacher pay.  Right now Emery pays about average for the Bay Area.  I said we need to pay teachers more.  Because we’re the wealthiest school district in the East Bay, we can and should pay our teachers more because that’s how to build an equitable city and how to build a better school district with better academic results for the children.  At the League of Woman Voters Candidate’s Forum, the three incumbents had a ready response to my challenge: NO they said, we can’t afford to pay our teachers more they insisted.

As I went door to door during the campaign, every single person I talked with and I talked with hundreds, every one agreed: paying teachers more should be a priority at Emery. 

But what about the incumbents?  Did the voters they talked with tell them paying teachers more should be a priority?  No.  Because the incumbents didn’t give them a chance.  Because they don’t want to pay our teachers more.  So the incumbents don’t want to hear that.

But why should it be that the likely majority of voters, who think we should be paying teachers more, shouldn’t get their way at the ballot box?  Why didn’t the only candidate running that clearly said teacher pay should be raised, why didn’t that candidate win the election?  The only reason that seems plausible is the lack of information.  I raised and spent only about a thousand dollars.  The incubates raised much more.  The used their massive campaign dollars to tell voters Emery is doing great with them in command.  They didn’t talk about test scores, academic achievement, dollars per student spent or teacher pay.  They talked about nebulous things like racial and gender diversity of the school board, stability (status quo)  and keeping Emery “on track”.  

Emeryville has no newspaper.  That simple fact allows elected officials to demagog issues and get away with it.

Breaking News: Election Results

 With two of two precincts reporting, the Alameda County Registrar of Voters released results from the City Council election and the Emery School Board election.  Kalimah Priforce and David Mourra will be elected to the City Council and the three incumbents, Regina Chagolla, Susan Donaldson and Brynnda Collins won re-election to the School Board.

Kalimah Priforce	503	25.09%
David Mourra	419	20.90%
Sukhdeep Kaur	402	20.05%
Brooke Westling	379	18.90%
Eugene Tssui	302	15.06%

Regina Chagolla	769	31.34%
Susan Donaldson	659	26.85%
Brynnda R. Collins	624	25.43%
Brian Donahue	402	16.38%

Letter to the Tattler: Brooke Westling

The following letter was received from Brooke Westling, a candidate for Emeryville City Council.  During the campaign season, Ms Westling has not sought to win her seat or at least she has chosen to not engage with Emeryville voters about her ideas for our town.  Early in the season, she declined to answer the Tattler City Council candidates questionnaire; a losing strategy for the only two former candidates that dared to ignore it (anybody remember Frank Flores or Jason Crouch?).  Nonetheless, because Ms Westling is a candidate for Emeryville City Council, we extend the courtesy of posting her letter to the Tattler.

Here then is the letter from Brooke Westling:

To the Emeryville Tattler-

Since joining the race for Emeryville City council, I’ve had the unique opportunity to connect with our city, our community, and learned of the many ways our city leadership has led us in the right direction and the times they have not.

Learning that the vacated seats, early on, were not being filled, I submitted my entry into the contest in the hopes that city hall and the people of Emeryville would benefit from a more independently minded candidate to choose from. However, every indication I received confirmed that residents do want transparent, bold representation on city council, but that the race was being skewed into preferences intentionally shaped by powerful interest groups and their historical influence on elected officials..

On the morning of October 20th, I participated in a candidate forum hosted by the students of Emery High School along with Eugene Tssui and Kalimah Priforce. We were the only candidates that accepted their invitation after weeks of preparation by the teachers and staff and it turned out to be a wonderful exchange between us as candidates and the students.

After this experience which includes the camaraderie and kindness Kalimah and Eugene extended towards me, I found them to be the kind of leaders that the city needs for this election. They both reflect the independent open-mindedness I’ve come to admire about them and they are both willing to place a significant amount of resources towards changing the dynamic of the city council in ways that, at this moment, I would rather utilize towards supporting their bids.

Come November 8th, 2022, I will be voting for Eugene Tssui and Kalimah Priforce for the two at-large seats for Emeryville City Council. They have my endorsement and friendship moving forward and I encourage my supporters to do the same. I will continue to lend a voice and play a role in helping to steer the city in the right direction, and I am confident that Kalimah and Eugene’s tenure will be inclusive of people like me and all those whose voices have felt excluded from city hall.

 -Brooke Westling