Gentrification’s insidious violence: The truth about American cities

[daredtowork]

29. Yes

Bates sold all the public housing units in Berkeley to private owners. He has been keeping money Berkeley acquired for low-income housing locked up in committee and consultants even though demand is desperate. You should see the poor receptionist guy at the Center for Independent Living fielding call after call from disabled people who have no place to go. All he can do is refer them to CIL's monthly housing workshop. I went to that workshop to see what advice it gives. All they can tell people to do is get on waitlists for existing dedicated low-income units, and they acknowledge the waiting lists are now months to years long! The situation is a tacit invitation for the poor to move out of Berkeley! Meanwhile Bates, a a real estate developer, has been moving forward with "luxury apartment" projects and high end shoebox apartments for tech commuters: these apartments are so expensive that they place no pressure for rents to come down. Rent is skyrocketing here, and that's why landlords are selling out from under longterm fixed-income residents and undermining rent control.

According to a series of articles in the Berkeley Daily Planet, Bates characterized building low-income housing as "really stupid":

The Newport council got a federal grant to build low income housing. But for every proposed site, conservatives stirred up the neighborhood with fears of low income families. Schools were suffering from declining revenues due to lower enrollment (reflecting changing demographics), and the BCA school board was forced to consider closing schools, to make the hard choices over which to close, and to decide what to do with closed school sites.

With a dominant majority on the Council, many of the most active people in the progressive community were appointed to boards and commissions, and so became part of the administration. The community began to rely on the elected officials making the right decisions, and it became difficult to fill city hall with aroused progressive citizens. On the contrary, the seats were now largely filled with angry conservatives.

Bates was harshly critical of Newport’s attempt to increase low income housing. “They made some really stupid, in my judgment, decisions that haunted them, one of which was... the federal government said that they had all this low income housing that was available, and if Berkeley wanted them, they could get like 172 units of low income housing. And they said, ‘Sure. We want it.’ So then they’d try to figure out where to put the low income housing... And guess what? Nobody wanted it anywhere... So they took the schools and they also controlled the school board and they basically took school
ground and converted it to low income housing... and people were angry..."

http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/pdfs/Tom-Bates-and-the-Secret-government.pdf

You might think this is a "conspiracy theory" from the past, mounted by people who oppose Bates as Mayor. Except he's still doing it today!!! Berkeley has more grant money for low-income housing RIGHT NOW!!! And for the last few years it has mysteriously been detoured into "studying the problem" while building these units for the 1% have been on the express lane!

If building low income housing is "stupid", Mayor Bates's idea of smart is to squeeze the low income (black?) people out of town.

What's a travesty on top of that is Berkeley has no good resource for handling the ensuing housing crisis. CIL is not the resource - their monthly housing workshop is just an overview. It won't really help people. But the poor receptionist has nowhere to refer all the people who are calling!!!

Ps. If you try to comment on this in local papers you get trolled by Ayn Rand market-uber-alles types to high heaven. Given Bates's previous stunt with stealing newspapers to win an election, I'm starting to wonder if he hires some of them. As far as I can tell, his State Senator wife Loni Hancock does jack to help low income people, too.