REPORTER’S NOTE: This version below is twice as long as the one that was printed in the Express on July 22, 2009.

In the fight over density in downtown Berkeley both sides are claiming to be “more green” than the other

By Eric Klein

The Berkeley City Council has cleared the way for developers to build more, taller buildings in the center of the city. Some traditional opponents of big development helped draft the original plan, approving an initial compromise that would have increased density across downtown as well as allowing for a handful of new buildings taller than any Berkeley has ever seen. Now those same people are gearing up to derail the plan, gathering signatures to put a referendum on the ballot in 2010.

Calling themselves “Alliance for a Green and Livable Downtown,” the opponents of the plan adopted by the city council have roughly one month to gather about 5,500 signatures  (ten percent of the number of votes in Berkeley’s 2008 mayors race). They are starting the process now of recruiting volunteers and have a website up at greendowntownberkely.org. Council members Kriss Worthington and Jesse Arreguín have already indicated publicly that they support the referendum.

In their drive to overturn the plan this group is going up against local Smart Growth and environmental groups as well as Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates. “We hope there is not a referendum, but if there is we’ll fight it vigorously,” Bates said. Referendum campaigns in Berkeley’s recent past have included competing interests setting up information booths in close proximity to one another in their drive to educate the public and get, or deter others from getting, the needed signatures.

The group supporting the referendum are motivated in part by what is in the plan, but even more so by an anger at how the process for creating it unfolded over the course of the past few years.

The first draft of Berkeley’s new downtown plan was crafted during two years of meetings and negotiations by a twenty-one member commission put together by the city council in 2005. The majority of this group agreed on a much denser downtown with a handful of towers, but they planned on getting something back for this compromise by forcing developers to pay a lot of money to improve their own buildings as well as the broader urban landscape, all for the privilege (and profit) of building tall in downtown Berkeley. Some of the participants in this two year process were then upset when their final version of the plan was taken up by a separate, more developer oriented, city commission. This second commission then revised and improved upon the original plan or threw all the good parts out the window. It depends on who you ask.

The head of the revision process, Berkeley Planning Commission Chairman David Stoloff, says his body created the newer downtown plan to be a guide for development instead of a roadblock. City planner Matt Taecker recently told the Berkeley City Council that the two competing plans were “nearly identical” because they shared the same goals of generating good, green, high density buildings for the city and it’s residents. Where they disagreed, according to Taecker, was the specific path to getting that higher density.

For the purposes of this discussion, downtown Berkeley is the part of town along Shattuck Ave between Dwight and Hearst. It’s west of the UC campus and east of Martin Luther King Jr Way. Taecker said the original commission thought that Berkeley should have a “mid-rise” downtown consisting of “100 to 120 foot tall buildings, roughly nine to eleven stories.” Those who controlled the revision on the other hand preferred 120- and 180-foot tall buildings, based on a study they commissioned that calculated that height to be the range that was economically feasible for the developer to build.

In the final version of the plan approved by the city council, the new tall buildings come in three sizes: small, medium and large. An unlimited number of “small” 65- to 85-foot tall buildings could be built throughout most of the downtown. The plan also allows for construction of six new “medium” sized buildings, four at 120 feet tall and two at 100 feet. Finally, two “large”180- to 225-foot-tall structures — probably hotels — can be built in the roughly eight blocks closest to Downtown Berkeley BART.  For reference, the two existing towers on Shattuck Ave right outside the BART station are about 170 feet tall.

The exact number of these new big buildings is certainly controversial. Many in Berkeley were hoping for less in order to preserve the unique character of the city. Meanwhile Smart Growth advocates, including the group Livable Berkeley, were lobbying for even more huge buildings to provide for the maximum amount of housing in the city center and reduce pressure for sprawl in the suburbs.

But supporters of the original plan say they are upset about more than just building heights. They lost a series of requirements that developers were going to be forced to heed in order to build big in Berkeley.

“We had required green infrastructure improvements,” says Patti Dacey who participated in drafting both versions of the plan, but is a fierce advocate for the original. “New Parks, green storm water, new green roofs and fees to support it. Transit improvements and pedestrian improvements with fees to support them. … Really good protection of historic resources and landmarks. Mandatory green building standards way beyond just LEED standards. Zero waste. Aggressive water conservation. Solar Panels.”

It was these specific requirements that won the Sierra Club’s endorsement of the original plan. In a letter sent to the Berkeley City Council and the Mayor about a month before the plan was finalized, the Northern Alameda County Group wrote:

“The Sierra Club supported the… plan because it met or exceeded environmental principles such as: promotion of mass transit (including the concept of Bus Rapid Transit or BRT); walking incentives; support for creation of a pedestrian corridor on one block of Center Street from Shattuck to Oxford, including an open space plaza and water feature; requirements for green sustainable design like solar access, green streets and open space; strict green building standards; and creating a mix of housing including a substantial increase in affordable units.”

The letter went on to point out the main difference between the two plans: “The other version of the downtown plan … stands in stark contrast to the [original] plan in these key areas. It eliminates any requirements for green building and site design, open space, transit improvements, and affordable housing in exchange for increased density.”

Of course, the original draft of the plan, which included these costly environmental requirements, was submitted to the council about a year before the real estate bubble burst and the economy collapsed. Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates has suggested that the city proceed with the more down to earth version in order to get the ball rolling to generate some revenue for the ambitious urban projects like a pedestrian only Center Street Plaza with an open Strawberry creek, or the proposed seventy-foot-wide park blocks along Shattuck Avenue, modeled after downtown Portland Oregon. “Developers … can’t develop anything right now,” Bates said. “They can’t borrow money. There’s nobody lending any money. … We’ll be lucky if something gets built in the next ten years. Not just in the next few years.”

Or as one of Berkeley’s most successful and controversial downtown developers, Patrick Kennedy put it, the financial meltdown seems to have finished off what Berkeley’s anti-development activists started: “The banking crisis has created a nuclear winter in development and done what the ‘forces of no’ have been able to do for twenty years, and that is eliminate the development potential in downtown Berkeley.” Kennedy urged Berkeley to allow for much more growth in the downtown, sighting a specific lack of high-rise senior housing.

Last week, as the four-year-long process seemed to be reaching a conclusion and momentum was building for a signature drive to oppose the plan, there was a whirlwind of negotiations to reconcile these two camps. The negotiations appear to have resulted in some compromises including more protections for existing neighborhoods, but Dacey indicated that it was too little too late, or rather too much too quickly, characterizing the last minute talks as “chaotic.”

Still, under direction from the city council and the Mayor, Berkeley planning staff restored some of these “public benefits requirements” to the final version of the downtown plan. According to Dan Marks, head of Planning in Berkeley, any new building over 85 feet in the downtown will have to be constructed using green  standards, provide for open space, include affordable housing, and implement strategies to reduce automobile use.

But the opponents of the final plan like Dacey have expressed cynicism and mistrust that developers of tall buildings will be held to such a high standard. To make her point, Dacey reminded the city council that one of the downtown’s newer, bigger structures, The Gaia Building, which was built by Patrick Kennedy, was allowed to exceed limits placed on height in the downtown by promising “cultural uses” (like a book store) that in the end never materialized.

This sort of public battle over land use in the city has been one of the defining features of Mayor Tom Bate’s time in office. In 2006, an attempt to change Berkeley’s Landmarks Preservation Ordinance pitted many of the same players against one another. After a complex series of events the new Bate’s backed Landmarks Law, which would have greatly simplified the development process in Berkeley, was defeated by a 2008 ballot referendum. This despite the fact that Bates crushed his opponent on the same ballot to win his third term in office. The only other setback for Bates in the 2008 election was the District 2 race, where Terry Doran’s endorsement from the Mayor was not enough for him to win that seat.

The victor in that District 2 race is now a leading supporter of the upcoming referendum drive, Council Member Jesse Arreguín, who represents downtown Berkeley. Arreguín was also a member of the original commission who feels that its perceived status as the best possible compromise between the competing interests in the city was not respected. He’s proposed many amendments to try to steer the final plan back towards something more resembling the original, with what he calls stronger requirements for affordable housing, and greater protections for the neighborhoods, but he has been more or less voted down by his colleagues, including the Mayor.

“You’re setting up a situation where there will be a referendum,” Arreguín has warned after his numerous amendments were shot down. “I do not want to have to vote against the plan but it looks like I have to!”

Meanwhile, the 800 million pound gorilla in in the room during any debate on the future of downtown Berkeley is the University of California, which plans to grow and expand by up to 2.2 million square feet in the next 10 years. Some portion of that growth will be “off campus” in the traditional sense, with at least two of its own 120-foot-tall buildings expected in the downtown under the plan that the city council has adopted. UC officials have indicated to the city that they intend to abide by Berkeley’s new downtown zoning, but under state law the UC regents don’t have to abide by anything City Hall puts in front of them. It’s unclear how long they will respectfully delay their development plans if things continue to be held up by a democratic process in the city.