Berkeley is one of THOSE towns (where the neighbors are all activists)
I thought I would link to an article in today's SF Chronicle about the brou-ha-ha in Berkeley over a proposed construction project (one that, incidentally, involves my favorite market, Trader Joe's):
In a city famous for its love of specialty gourmet food, irate neighbors are fighting a new Trader Joe's slated for University Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Way, now home to a Kragen outlet.
Residents are concerned about traffic, parking, the building blending in with the neighborhood, and the large volume of low-cost alcohol for sale just a few blocks from the UC campus, Berkeley High School and a number of homeless service agencies.
Based purely on aesthetic concerns, I am very much in favor of the new project. It is probably too big for the site though, and wish it could be scaled down smaller. The proposed building would replace a very tiny strip mall that has a large parking lot plopped down in the corner of the lot. The parking lot completely destroys the corner of that intersection.
But I also understand the neighbors' (ahem, my neighbors') concerns... I live just one block north of the top of the map there, and I would worry about my quiet victorian house with a small backyard having to sit next to a thriving retail center. I know there is a tendency to assume that cities want the extra tax revenue and therefore always favor business in these situations, but is this true?
How do cities typically confront these issues in a fair, legitimate way?
UPDATE: For the record, my house is really where the "d" is in "Trader Joe's" on the map. Not that it really matters.
Comments
["Trader Joe's is a nonunion store owned by a secretive German family that sells specialty food and low-cost alcohol," said Steve Wollmer, who lives 250 feet from the site.]
Hehe. So, really, it's a Deutsche-phobia that's driving the contention on this project? Well, maybe if the developers had hired an architect who could produce renderings that didn't look like a 6th grader scribbled them... someone who could design something soaked with adjectives like modern, pre-fabricated and sustainable (read "green") then they might get away with their banal and steroidish project. AND turn a profit!
Response:
I totally agree. It ought to be expected by the owners/architects that Berkeley is a progressive town—a town that wants its buildings to be progressive as well, which today means buildings with sustainable construction and operation.
In addition, if Berkeley's Zoning Adjustment Board ('ZAB') wanted to encourage development in the city, it would become more of a resource for potential developers wishing to develop in the city. In my ideal world, the ZAB would be at developers' disposal; it should be explicit in setting the limits of what the town will accept before architects even conceptualize the project.
If a town wants a limit its building sizes, its ZAB really needs to enforce them. At the same time, a ZAB ought not become a hinderance to developing abandoned sites.
As it stands, Berkeley's ZAB is some superposition of the two; it neither gives absolute limits for developers nor encourages development... in fact it manages to do neither. Perhaps the election in four days will change things.
Posted by: nick mcwhirter | October 31, 2006 8:34 AM