In the late 1960s, in the neighborhood where I grew up, construction crews began work on the planned North Berkeley BART station by demolishing several city blocks. They cleared four square blocks around what would become the station itself, plus an adjacent five-block strip to build tunnels. Early proposals included replacing the demolished homes with new apartment buildings, but that never happened. The entire parcel around the station became a parking lot, and the linear five-block parcel became an urban wildland of blackberry brambles, cardboard shanties and sketchy hand-welded playground structures.
By the mid-1970s, when I was old enough to ride a BMX bike, that wildland included dirt jumps like one I can remember pedaling toward, fast and frantic through dry grass and broken glass. I must have been 9 or 10. A bunch more kids, probably smoking cigarettes and eating candy, watched as I hit that ramp and got air and tried a trick called a tabletop, which involves holding your bike down and away from your body and turning it sideways, parallel to the ground. I failed to pull the bike back into riding position, so I landed with the frame still flat like that. My little body slammed down onto the pedals and gears, and I came up crying — but psyched to go tell my father, who loved that kind of thing.
That meant rolling home with bloody scrapes full of gravel past old farmhouses cheap enough for mailmen and jazz musicians to buy, build claptrap chicken coops and grow weed in the backyard. It meant riding onto the crab grass lawn of our own two-story Victorian, which my parents bought for $27,000 in 1971, a year in which my mother didn’t work and my father’s total income, as a public-interest lawyer for the Legal Aid Society of Alameda County, was $14,000.
Across the street was a shabby stucco where Owsley Stanley, the original Grateful Dead sound man, cooked up some of the earliest recreational LSD. Another neighbor, Alice Waters, who was my preschool teacher at Berkeley Montessori, was starting a little neighborhood bistro called Chez Panisse. A kid down the street, Charlie Hunter, joined me in taking guitar lessons with a dude named Joe Satriani, who later emerged as one of the world’s finest technical guitarists — not long before Hunter himself became one of our own generation’s great jazz players.
That urban wildland by the BART station was turned into an official city park in 1979, with manicured lawns and a volleyball court, but the station is still ringed by a parking lot. I’ve been thinking about both lately, and the old neighborhood, because there is a new effort — led by BART itself — to cover the parking lot with apartment buildings. This project has been under discussion for years, although the exact scope remains unclear. In 2018, a local group aligned with the national pro-housing YIMBY movement — Yes in My Backyard — shared an image on Twitter of a hypothetical 31-story, 300-unit tower soaring over the small single-family homes all around.
That Twitter image did not come from any developer or city government office — it was just an activist’s mock-up — but it caused fear in the neighborhood. A local city councilwoman had also gone door to door, encouraging residents to stay informed about whatever construction BART might have in mind. Alarmed neighbors leapt into action, organizing through a pair of resistance groups called North Berkeley Neighborhood Alliance and Neighbors Not Towers.
At any other time in the previous 50 years, these two groups could well have killed the North Berkeley BART apartments before they broke ground. But by early 2018, the California housing-affordability crisis had become so nightmarish — and the YIMBY case for solving it so compelling — that state legislators were passing a raft of new laws aimed at removing obstacles to construction. One of these laws gave BART near-absolute authority to build housing on agency property, as a way of increasing density near transit. Another bill, still in committee at the time, promised to eliminate most zoning restrictions within half a mile of every BART station, so that every house in my parents’ neighborhood could in theory be torn down and replaced with apartment buildings.
That second bill died in committee, but so many other pro-housing laws have now gone into effect that a statewide building boom of historic proportions may well be coming. In Berkeley, that boom is well underway, with apartments going up all over, particularly downtown, where voters already approved added density. And the planning commission, when it finally took up the issue of North Berkeley BART, recommended towers of seven to 12 stories, with the possibility of 18 and room for perhaps 2,000 residents.
My mother and father and a lot of their neighbors hate the sound of this, and I know that memories of our shared old Berkeley — and the yearning to preserve what’s left — have a lot to do with it. And what about nature? my mother asked, over Sunday coffee in her living room. Where are all the birds supposed to go? Are we just going to turn everything into Manhattan? My mother worried about all those new cars looking for parking. Changes to California law also mean that the development would most likely include far fewer parking spots than apartments. She worried, too, about lower property values and rising crime, less afternoon sun.
But Mom, do you realize how expensive it has become to live around here? That little stucco on the corner just sold for $2 million! What about the girls? I was talking about my own two daughters now, who are off to college and, given that neither has any interest in artificial intelligence or private equity, are unlikely ever to be able to start families of their own within 200 miles.
My mother was right, though: Apartment towers would change the neighborhood. As I walked outside and down the sidewalk toward BART, I wasn’t surprised to see political yard signs, in gardens along the way, airing out the same conversation I’d just had with my mother. On the YIMBY side, most of these yard signs read, “Homes at North Berkeley Now!” and, in cheeky reference to Joni Mitchell, “Let’s Build Paradise Instead of a Parking Lot.” A roughly equal number of yard signs, often directly across the street from the YIMBYs’, said, “Let’s Welcome New Neighbors Not New Towers,” and carried both the old Twitter image of the 31-story building and a second rendering of a significantly smaller proposal for the same site. These signs, I couldn’t help noticing, were often accompanied by others saying things like, “Berkeley Stands United Against Hate,” “Bernie Sanders for President” and, in what struck me as a potential cipher to the underlying emotional code, “Save Hopkins.”
Hopkins Street, a few blocks over, runs past Monterey Market, which is widely believed to be Alice Waters’s favorite place to buy organic produce. Shopping at Monterey Market means living right by living well, being among the good-values elect. The big threat, from which Hopkins had to be saved, was yet another city plan — this time to create protected bike lanes, eliminating parking in the process. The fear, as I heard it, was that this would urbanize quiet Hopkins in a way that might harm Monterey Market, as well as the nearby bakery and cheese store. I know that a lot of older folks shop on Hopkins only because they can drive and park there, and I know also that there were reasonable design concerns. But it was hard not to wonder if we all reach a point in our lives at which personal convenience and a fear of change become imperceptibly commingled with our sense of the common good.
I don’t like the term NIMBY because nobody calls themselves that; it’s a YIMBY epithet for people who stand in the way of housing construction. And in Berkeley, the old left-wing suspicion of real estate developers has a complex and compelling history. It dates at least to 1963, when the Berkeley City Council banned racial discrimination in housing sales and rentals. The same year, the Berkeley chapter of the California Real Estate Association backed a city ballot initiative that successfully reversed that ban. Months later, Sacramento banned the practice across California, only to have the C.R.E.A. fund Proposition 14, a statewide ballot initiative that would effectively relegalize housing discrimination. The C.R.E.A. claimed to be interested only in liberty — as in, the freedom to sell and rent your house to whomever you want — but everybody understood exactly what the law was about. The civil rights movement was well underway at the time, and student activists at the University of California, Berkeley, openly advocated for a “no” vote on Prop 14.
This was all in the air when, in the fall of 1964, university administrators abruptly started enforcing policies prohibiting the use of campus property for political organizing. But one activist defied the ban on Oct. 1, 1964, setting up an outdoor information table for the Congress on Racial Equality. Campus police officers arrested that activist and put him in a squad car, so students sat down around the car — in what turned out to be the opening act of the Free Speech Movement, which soon became about so much else: not just Vietnam but anticapitalism and the nascent environmental movement too.
A few years later, with Berkeley still consumed by antiwar protests — and with construction beginning on BART — the university was pushing ahead with a longstanding plan to build new dormitories. It had started the same way BART did, acquiring land by eminent domain and then bulldozing old houses that stood in the way. While BART construction proceeded, work on one particular university site stalled, and in early 1969, antiwar activists moved in. They called the site People’s Park and started planting gardens and staging concerts and free-speech events.
Early on the morning of May 15, Berkeley police officers cleared People’s Park. By noon, 3,000 protesters had gathered. The police opened fire with shotguns, rifles and tear gas, injuring dozens and killing a young man as he watched from the roof of a nearby bookstore. Gov. Ronald Reagan ordered 2,700 National Guardsmen to the scene, and they remained there for two weeks of sometimes-violent clashes. A splinter cell of protesters headed across town to that five-block strip near the North Berkeley BART station, calling it People’s Park No. 2. Cops raided that as well, and an indelible association formed in the collective Berkeley countercultural consciousness, connecting the imperialist American war machine, fascist university censorship, capitalist destruction of natural resources, racist real estate developers and, yes, apartment buildings. Resistance to one became resistance to all.
So when my mother brought Vietnamese war refugees to live with us and got herself arrested protesting nuclear weapons, this all felt morally and politically congruent with opposition to local development, and with broader efforts to zone all of Northern California’s coast agricultural to make sure nobody ever built a single new house there again. All of it — desegregating law enforcement, saving the redwoods and stopping real estate developers — added up to battling for a better world.
‘This zucchini exists because I don’t have a big two-story house next door to me.’
This way of thinking felt coherent through the 1980s, as strip malls and subdivisions devoured Southern California. It felt coherent into the early dot-com boom, when young Silicon Valley types drove up home prices and every new apartment that did get built, anywhere in the Bay Area, rented for such an astronomical rate that it was tempting to see apartment construction as a cause of — not a solution to — the housing-affordability crisis.
By 2014, though, something started to give. Bay Area home prices were becoming so obscene that even affluent young professionals struggled to buy. Tent cities of the unhoused became a regional horror, and service workers started having two-hour supercommutes between their downtown jobs and affordable housing in the exurbs. In the midst of all this, a woman named Sonja Trauss, over in San Francisco, started the modern YIMBY movement by showing up at planning-commission meetings to support construction of any new apartments anywhere at all.
In June 2017, as two-bedroom apartments rented for more than $4,500 and Berkeley’s median home-sale price crept above a million dollars, the City Council heard public comment on a proposal to turn just one single-family home into a duplex. A younger neighbor held aloft a zucchini, waved it around for all to see and said, “I brought a zucchini because I love to garden, and in order to garden you need sunlight, and the report says that the shadow impacts have been made nondetrimental because the shadows are cast on my yard, but this zucchini exists because I don’t have a big two-story house next door to me right now.” Video of Zucchini Lady went viral — locally, anyway — and a YIMBY activist came to a later planning commission meeting with a giant state-fair-size zucchini and said: See this? This grew in the shade!
Three months later, in September 2017, California state legislators, reading a shift in the public mood, started passing all those laws aimed at streamlining housing construction. One of these laws, A.B. 2923, empowered BART to build housing on all its properties, whether neighbors like it or not. Several others strengthened a requirement that every California community create a viable plan for building a certain number of units or lose local control over what got built. If a community does not make a workable plan, in theory, property owners can build any housing they want, anywhere they want — including apartment towers on single-home lots in fancy suburbs like Orinda.
By March 2018, in other words, when rumors spread about the possibility of apartments at North Berkeley BART — and neighbors of my parents organized to block them — YIMBYs owned the moral and political high ground to the point that, for the first time in California history, being on the side of the angels meant being in favor of apartment construction. Being opposed to new housing — any new housing at all, and regardless of whatever ideological roads you walked to get there — suddenly meant being a selfish, rich NIMBY interested in nothing but your own lifestyle and wealth.
North Berkeley BART isn’t much to look at. It’s still just four square blocks of asphalt around a dreary concrete-and-glass structure that keeps rain off the train platforms. I was there for a public meet-and-greet with the developers, a consortium of three housing nonprofits and one for-profit tasked with creating a workable approach to building on the site.
In theory, that event was a way for community members to give feedback. In years past, these were precisely the kinds of events that allowed anti-growth advocates to make their voices heard. But the new California legal environment means that local residents, after so many decades of control over what gets built in the neighborhood, suddenly have almost no control at all. BART chose that development consortium in part because it planned to exceed the required minimum units for low-income residents. The actual design process, though, remained opaque; that consortium got to plan more or less whatever it wanted, and as long as it meets the city’s design standards, Berkeley’s planning agency will approve the project.
I arrived early enough to spend a moment in the parking lot, summoning a memory: being 15, in our family’s Ford Escort GT with a ridiculous sunburst paint job, learning to drive with my mother in the passenger seat — a sweet memory, but not sweet enough to make me want to save the asphalt. From where I stood, I could also see into the adjacent park where the old BMX jump had been. Then I noticed, rolling up on an electric bike, Libby Lee-Egan, a 38-year-old graphic designer with a sleeve and a half of tattoos and an undercut.
I met Lee-Egan days before, at her home nearby. She and her husband moved to California in 2012 to work at the Sierra Club and eventually bought a Berkeley fixer-upper for $569,000 and had their first baby. In early 2015, on unlovely San Pablo Avenue — four lanes of traffic past shuttered storefronts and auto garages — Lee-Egan noticed, on fencing around a defunct Cadillac dealership, a public-announcement poster to the effect that developers wanted to build apartments.
This is when Lee-Egan’s story breaks with the entirety of the California past. Ever since the Gold Rush, an endless stream of newcomers have been settling down in this beautiful place, falling in love with it and dreaming about ways to keep out the newcomers behind them. So, while the California dream has long included social change — love the people you love and “In this house we believe” — its physical-world corollary has been more about getting your own little piece of paradise, then fighting for the rest of your life against anything and anyone that might change it. But Lee-Egan wasn’t like that at all; because when Lee-Egan, progressive young homeowning Berkeley mother, read that poster, she thought something more like: Wow, apartments. That would be so great.
Of course, another way of looking at Lee-Egan is that she is just like my own mother in 1970, confident about what ails the world and determined to live by her values. Lee-Egan helped start East Bay for Everyone, the YIMBY group that eventually tweeted the infamous picture of a 31-story tower at North Berkeley BART — the very same one that terrified my mother’s neighbors. Egan even avoids Monterey Market, she told me, because without those proposed bike lanes, she can’t get there safely with her kids riding in the front of her electric cargo bike. That anecdote made my mother cry when I told it to her later on — for real, actual tears — seemingly because it confirmed the arrival of a bewildering new generation, pushing for BART apartments and bike lanes, as if they cared not a lick about the Berkeley that we know and love.
And yet, in still another parallel to my mother, Lee-Egan was likewise riding a wave of change aligned with her politics. Those new laws are forcing every California community to follow through on planning for more housing, and while many communities are dragging their feet, Berkeley has recently granted a planning permit for a 25-story apartment building downtown — dwarfing the city’s current tallest high-rise. Berkeley also appears on track to approve two more towers of comparable size and another that, at 28 stories, will be taller than the university’s famous campanile, which, at 307 feet, has defined the city’s skyline for more than a century. All that new construction was on people’s minds, of course, at the meet-and-greet at North Berkeley BART. People my folks’ age, with faint traces of once-hippie identities still visible around their fuzzy, gray-haired edges, gathered facing a man named Jonathan Stern from BRIDGE Housing, one of the nation’s largest nonprofit developers of affordable housing and the lead on the BART project.
Stern lives in Berkeley and dressed diplomatically for the occasion in a red Berkeley High School hoodie. He has also done this countless times, including at other BART stations. Stern reassured everyone that none of the current design plans include buildings taller than eight stories and that all the plans include at least some permanent supportive housing for the formerly homeless, as well as subsidized housing for people making less than $100,000 a year. The rest would be market rate — which could mean $6,000 a month, or even more, for a two-bedroom.
What happened next could easily be rendered as a classic Northern California clown show: an older man with a white beard and Covid mask and sunglasses holding a protest sign saying, “Stop the BART High-Rises” and telling Stern that, because the environmental impact report was already one whole year old, the entire project ought to be paused for a new assessment; a woman in a similar Covid mask and sunglasses with a protest sign reading, “Parks Not High-Rises” yelling: “We need affordable housing for people! This isn’t going to be for people who really need it! I’m an advocate for the homeless and disabled! And there are people dying in our streets, and I just want to say my opinion. We need open space! Not high-rises! This is wrong!”
In truth, though, most of the comments and questions came from people who lived close, like directly across the street, and who conceded that a parking lot was not a great use of the property. Many of these people, when I talked to them separately, even conceded that housing ought to be built on the site — even multifamily housing! They just wished it could be not quite so huge.
I felt and respected their sadness. Some of them probably also felt trapped, like my mother and father. Because another strange side effect of anti-housing politics is that, along with everything else, it has blocked the construction of senior housing. What little there is often costs so much that selling the old place and downsizing doesn’t pencil out, unless you want to leave everything and everyone familiar by moving, say, up to Oregon, a privileged option but not everybody’s dream for life’s final chapter. As a result, in this city teeming with students who can’t afford their own bedrooms, countless old folks like my mother and father knock around big half-empty houses — which is maybe a more generous way to think about Hopkins Street and the yearning to save it from bike lanes. When the world keeps closing in around you, maybe even tiny changes feel like too much.
Walking around the old neighborhood, though, after that meet-and-greet, I realized that I’d been feeling a different sadness for years. On the surface, those lovely old Berkeley homes, with eclectic paint jobs and front-yard flowers, still conjure the creative middle-class society that I knew as a kid. I’d give anything to have my daughters start families on those very streets and replicate that way of life. And while that old Berkeley is never coming back — any more than any bygone world — we all want to grow old among loved ones and familiar faces. So there’s just something inescapably painful about an economy that makes this impossible for all but the superrich — a place where a vast majority of local children know they will have to leave as soon as they grow up. I guess if I have anything to say to my mother and father, on this score, it’s that I don’t blame you for wanting the physical world to stay the way it is. But I don’t think Libby Lee-Egan is crazy, either, for thinking that we need to completely change California to make it possible for another generation of kids to have childhoods like the one you gave me.
Daniel Duane is a writer from Berkeley, Calif., and the author of the climbing memoir “Lighting Out: A Golden Year in Yosemite and the West.” He has written for the magazine about women who big-wave surf, the chef Madeleine Kamman and climbing in the Grand Tetons. Paloma Dooley is a landscape, architectural and exhibition photographer based in Los Angeles.
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