On our organic dependency
I asked Anthropic’s Claude about the implications of the recent rezoning of the commercial corridor four blocks west of my house. Claude confirmed that raising the zoned height limit from two to four stories meant that redevelopment along the corridor could be up to eight stories. When I asked if an area plan could temper this, Claude said no, the state laws now in place rule out context, views, and shading as determinants of what’s allowed. All that an area plan can address are the details of the streetscape and facades. Would our view of the bay from our upstairs deck be blocked by a wall of eight-story buildings? You could see over them, Claude said, but the bay itself would no longer be visible. As for buildings in my neighborhood, more units could be added with closer to total lot coverage, but the height would be roughly the same. Goodbye, then, to backyards, famously described by California State Senator Scott Wiener as “immoral.”
This will likely take 20 years, Claude added. By then, if I’m here at all, I’ll be 98. So, my thoughts are really for our children as inheritors of our house. It was built in 1902. Our neighborhood miraculously survived the 1923 fire that took out others to the east and south. My wife and her sisters own an apartment building across the street, built after the fire, that exemplifies the “missing middle housing” spoken of by New Urbanists in these parts. A mix of single-family residences with deep lots and backyards, cottages on parts of subdivided lots accessed by long driveways, and three-story apartment buildings typifies the neighborhood.
Its walkability is made possible by the relative closeness of the shops along the “high street,” with buildings of mostly one to three stories, stores of different kinds, some with housing above them, cafés, restaurants, and two supermarkets. To the south, nearer to downtown, the apartments are taller, but generally well-scaled in relation to the street. When they were designed and built, “fit” was considered important.
The term “sense of place” conveys what distinguishes banality from urbanity in a town or a city. Zoning is a blunt instrument where urbanity is concerned, but the state laws that bend it to their will are worse, tipping the scales toward banality. The word “conviviality” conveys what Ivan Illich sought to restore in the wake of a bland sameness that he traced back to the Enlightenment’s privileging of universals over local differences.
Instead of this, the new laws gave us “marketecture,” multi-unit housing that prioritizes individual units at the expense of shared spaces that support actual community life. In Berkeley, marketecture caters to the segment of students and seniors who can afford it. Families are left to compete for the older, detached houses that work for them, raising its price. That’s then cited as evidence of a general shortage, but in fact marketecture tends to be overbuilt, its developers chasing too few tenants and having to offer discounts to attract them. Meanwhile, family and social housing is starved of funds, so its production lags. Welcome to California.
I had coffee recently with Terry Taplin, a Council Member for Berkeley’s District 2. A poet and classicist, Taplin is a thoughtful politician, open to hearing my critique of the received ideology of housing production. What follows was written with him in mind. Apologies that it’s discursive.
“The expression of our relationship with the natural world”
Mark Elvin wrote The Pattern of the Chinese Past in 1973. He asked why China, ahead of Europe in the Middle Ages economically and in science and technology, fell steadily behind it. Only appearing in translation in China shortly before Elvin’s death in 2023, the book and Elvin’s other publications influenced Chinese historians of economics, science, and technology. The November/December 2024 New Left Review paid tribute to Elvin by reprinting an unpublished preface to the Chinese translation of his book. Introducing it, University of Toronto Professor Joseph Bryant wrote,
Mark Elvin’s analytical anchor point is the organic dependency of human beings on their environments, a primordial, inescapable datum that necessarily imparts to technology — ’the expression of man’s working relationship with the natural world’ — a decisively constitutive role in the ongoing history of our species. Tools, medicines, and weapons are physical instrumentalities created by culturally informed thought processes. The variable effectiveness of our invented devices bears directly on matters of life and death, the viability and quality of collective existence. The specific technologies that social groups develop and utilize — ’to produce, preserve, organize and destroy’ — are thus ultimately determinative of how societies cope with environmental challenges and the threats posed by rival human groups.
I was struck by this quote (from Bryant’s “Lost and Found: Introduction to Mark Elvin’s 2007 Preface,” New Left Review 150, November–December 2024, p. 97) in relation to the situation in which Berkeley finds itself. How we dwell, both within individual households and collectively in neighborhoods and districts, is an “expression of [our] working relationship with the natural world” that speaks to our “organic dependency…on [our] environments.” Dwellings, neighborhoods, and districts are, as Bryant writes, “physical instrumentalities created by culturally informed thought processes.” They are “invented devices” and “specific technologies.”
We can ask, as Elvin did, if our current situation — hemmed in by state laws that produce zoning that ignores context, views, and access to sunlight in favor of intensifying land use to produce greater numbers of dwelling units for abstract categories of occupants defined by markets and politicians — leads to outcomes that speak to our desired “working relationship with the natural world” or fails to do so. Does our current situation support or work against our “organic dependency” with our surroundings?
A “Slow” that doesn’t mean no (and why it’s relevant to Berkeley)
Pertinent to these questions is Tessa Holland’s Newcastle University 2017 Ph.D. thesis, Navigating Slow, “fast” and crafted knowledges. In contrast to the more measured, thoughtful, locally aware “Slow” championed by Berkeley’s Alice Waters, among many others, Holland’s “fast” is a form of neoliberalism, whose goal is “to become broadly embodied in belief systems about what is possible, …realistic, …efficient, …economic, … until it can be hard to imagine an alternative.” (p. 18). As Robert W. McChesney explains, neoliberalism’s goal is that “a handful of private interests are permitted to control as much as possible of social life … to maximize their personal profit.” (Noam Chomsky’s Profit over People, 1999, p. 7).
Dialectically speaking, the state’s housing legistlation is a reaction to decades of stasis. In cities like Berkeley and San Francisco, a duopoly of local politicians and a few connected developers with pockets deep enough to pay to play slowed entitlements in connivance with NIMBY opponents of change at almost any scale (and their lawyers). Fed up, other developers took their money to the legislature and got exactly what they paid for. Market-rate housing took off until financing dried up. (That’s how markets work.)
Developers in Berkeley would like to add more height downtown and redevelop “wealthy corridors” like north Shattuck Ave. as Claude described. Their plans will leave families and the less affluent to fend for themselves, with a few exceptions, and the City’s leaders, so far, are silent on that issue.
The best rejoinder may be “Not so fast!” The Slow movement isn’t a NIMBY front, clinging doggedly to the past and resisting any and all efforts at change. What Slow wants is to support life’s vitality in the different ways, forms, and scales it takes in a city like ours. It’s not opposed to by-right zoning that promotes uncomplicated growth, but it wants each local community to be in dialogue with the city government and its elected leaders about the nature of what’s built and what comes with it.
A template for recovering a sense of place while enabling growth
An example of such a dialogue is the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan forged by San Francisco’s Dogpatch and Lower Potrero Hill neighborhoods and the City Planning Department under John Rahaim. The planners set out the city’s goals for future growth and the locals set out theirs. They hammered out a plan for redevelopment that, if met, could be rapidly entitled. As a result, Dogpatch and vicinity were transformed, with local approval.
The Eastern Neighborhoods Plan is a template for how Berkeley could reform its zoning. For this to happen, however, state law would need to be modified to acknowledge that context, views, shading, and other elements of a neighborhood’s sense of place are properly part of any dialogue about its future growth. The YIMBY vs. NIMBY divide often came down to the inability of each side to understand the other’s viewpoint. State legislation has handed the YIMBY side the decisive edge that its NIMBY opponents used to have. Dialectically, we’ve gone from thesis to antithesis. Now we need a synthesis that gets urbanity back in the picture. If we don’t get it, I predict a Trump-like reaction that will pull everything back to NIMBYism.
Any new and better synthesis should honor the spirit of the state legislation now in place, but eliminate the excesses that were neoliberal overreach and payback for decades of NIMBY lawfare. “Density with urbanity” is how I’d put it. And, as St. Mary Magdalene Parish adds, “No one turned away.”
“A decisively constitutive role in the ongoing history of our species” is table stakes for Berkeley. As the Slow movement’s American starting point, it’s fitting that we Berkeleyans insist on the conviviality of our surroundings.
