Berkeley: Community or Commodity?
A majority of Berkeley’s city council, allied with the YIMBY movement, believe we must up zone our single family neighborhoods to undo the racism of the past; if we subdivide our homes into four micro units our housing crisis will disappear. While historically the Real Estate Industry was responsible for and supportive of enforcing racist exclusionary deed restrictions, refusing to sell homes in white areas to people of color; now we’re told only the Real Estate Industry can make things better. Single family zoning, red-lining, racist covenants, racially based bank loans are policies that came from the Real Estate Industry. It’s naive to think they will make the situation fair or better.
Their ideal, “whatever the market will bear,” will make our housing crisis worse. They game the system by holding properties off the market, reducing supply, increasing housing costs to the point of making millions of Americans homeless. The hidden hand of the free market in fact is an iron fist determined to exact its pound of flesh from all of us. It’s not a fair market, it’s a gamed market where a small number of financial giants have cornered the market. Did you know there is $260 trillion of captured real estate held by the financialized housing commodification industry? They turned our homes into the biggest artificial commodity in the history of mankind.
Drive down Shattuck Avenue at night. See those huge, empty residential projects surrounded by tents of the houseless? Many of the unhoused were local residents until their homes were lost in the bank failures of 2008. Thousands of micro houses aren’t going to solve our housing crisis unless rents are regulated to accommodate low and very low income workers.
We want Berkeley to be a welcoming place for working class residents, artists, musicians, students, and people of all races and socioeconomic backgrounds. We support more housing development in this, and other cities, for low and very low-income people. Workers who serve us in local stores, schools and hospitals, workers who stock our shelves, keep our power on, pick up our trash can’t afford studio apartments costing $2,000 a month.
The City’s current proposals have no requirement for affordability. Berkeley’s for-profit developers exceeded the regional government’s requirement for market rate units by nearly 200%, yet, failed to meet requirements for low and very-low income homes. The average cost of a home in Berkeley now exceeds $1,000,000. Even moderate income residents no longer can afford to live here. What is the city doing to correct this imbalance? If the city created as little as 10% of affordable housing for its working class residents, the pressure on housing costs would plummet.
It would be refreshing if members of the City Council looked more deeply into what is going on and talked with people who have for years and years advocated for housing affordable to very-low, low and moderate income people. Then we might begin to think they really were concerned with the needs of all the peoples of our communities.
This article was printed in the Berkeley Times on April 15, 2021.
Reimagining Berkeley envisions a Berkeley where more than just the 10% thrive.
