The Atlantic
New market-rate development, even of the luxury variety, helps relieve pressure on local housing prices.
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If you were intentionally designing a development to spark a NIMBY backlash, you might come up with something that looks a lot like 10 Clay. A brand new building located in Seattle’s formerly industrial Belltown neighborhood, it adheres to a modern aesthetic of poured concrete, muted tones, and floor-to-ceiling windows. True to form, the website for 10 Clay celebrates amenities such as granite countertops and stainless steel appliances. Hosting 76 “micro units” and half as much parking, the project seems perfectly optimized to house the well-paid, single young professionals that companies such as Amazon have attracted to the city in droves.
Berkeley City Council members unanimously approved a “Resolution to End Exclusionary Zoning in Berkeley” this week, according to a report in Berkeleyside, denouncing the city’s history of racist land-use policies while declaring their intent to change its zoning rules over the next several years. The resolution, which does not actually change the city’s policies, notes that Berkeley was the first city in the United States to adopt a single-family zoning policy, in 1916. It traces the history of redlining and other exclusionary housing policies, like a 1973 Neighborhood Preservation Ordinance which banned multifamily housing in many areas, to show that the city’s zoning policies still perpetuate racial segregation.
Last month, I asked my representative on the Board of Supervisors, Dean Preston, to make it easier to build new housing in our city.
I m a gay man who moved to San Francisco a decade ago for graduate school, so our housing crisis is personal to me: I know firsthand what it s like to want to fulfill the LGBTQ person s dream of moving to San Francisco only to struggle to afford housing here.
But Preston responded to my concern over the city s housing crisis by publicly insulting me: Are you seriously a professor of something? In fact I am both Preston s constituent and, now, a professor at UC Berkeley.