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A David Brower Memorial Parking Garage for Berkeley?
by Jan Lundberg
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On May 18, 2004 the Berkeley, California City Council moved towards approving a seductive, eco-groovy proposal to build a $47 million complex called the David Brower Center. The developers are working with interested groups that include collaborators of the late David Brower, who was the first executive director of the Sierra Club and founder of Friends of the Earth.
Practically everyone is for this two-building complex, including Brower's son Kenneth Brower, author of The Starship and the Canoe. Environmental organizations such as Earth Island Institute (co-developer and David Brower's last organization) and the Rainforest Action Network, with $5 million and $2 million a year budgets respectively, want to be new tenants in the Brower Center. Low income housing would be featured. However, there is a major fly in the ointment: a parking garage would be built underneath, and the implications are troubling.
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Another problem is that Strawberry Creek, which runs down from the University of California under the street, is too close to the construction site. And there's a major earthquake fault nearby; a building's structural integrity is compromised by putting it on top of a parking garage (housing a hundred gasoline tanks called cars). And there may be Indian artifacts in the soil to be disturbed and desecrated.
If the parking garage is built, before it is contaminated with cars its use could be changed to a cold storage spot for food and wine. Or growing mushrooms. What a pity if the garage were utilized for just enough time to pollute it thoroughly before the oil supply-crash hits - after which people must walk, bike and use urban spaces wisely.
The City of Berkeley, besides its willingness to honor Brower and have a fancy building to attract visitors, is banking on parking revenue from the Brower Center. So the city is giving the land away for free to the developers, representing a $5 million gift. I told the Council before its vote that the parking revenue would be blood money, because "we stand against war for oil and believe there should be 'No Blood for Oil'."
The land is already a huge, ugly parking lot, filled mostly with commuter vehicles whose owners don't bicycle or utilize the buses and Bay Area Rapid Transit trains. Developing such a place for a green-certified building complex is laudable, but the Brower Center would still be attracting about the same number of polluting cars that consume oil. In addition to many nonprofit groups at the Brower Center, there would be commercial tenants as "anchors."
"As we are in an age of global warming caused mostly by fossil-fuel burning," I said to the City, "this illustrious Council can do better. A parking garage for this center is not 'green,' as David Brower would agree." Allowed only two minutes, I also said "David Brower was an Advisor to the Alliance for a Paving Moratorium, a project of the Sustainable Energy Institute which I head. Berkeley is choked with cars and guzzles petroleum. Just as adding to the car's infrastructure creates more traffic congestion, disaccommodating cars decreases traffic congestion, as has been found in European cities where car-free centers have been created."
One of the environmentalist principals supporting the Brower Center development and its parking garage told me afterwards "It was a show-stopper for you to give those comments." He was apparently worried my comments would be taken seriously and that the development could thus be delayed or modified so as to derail it. He was disturbed that I had not taken into account the many mitigations he said were undertaken to lessen the car and oil factor. I told him and Earth Island's executive director that "somebody had to say those things. The planet is being killed and war for oil is out of control." The head of Earth Island told me that David Brower had used a car almost every day and, as if it was an indulgence that Brower supported a paving moratorium, Brower supported many causes. But I'm told that one of his causes was his walking around Berkeley a lot.
We can nevertheless be sure David Brower would not want a parking garage constructed under a building to honor him, nor would he want the creek ordinance waived as suggested by a Council member. In these times of ecocide and denial over the effects of the car, David Brower would call for instead a rewriting of the city zoning laws requiring parking. He certainly would not want to feed the city's coffers with drivers' parking fees when greener alternatives for travel are available. There could be parking for disabled people only.
My main purpose in attending the Council meeting was to give my two cents' worth of advice in pointing out that the global peak in oil extraction is occurring now, and because of the ramifications, the world is going to experience its final petroleum crisis soon. I would have also mentioned transportation alternatives, but this was covered by the Gray Panthers representative and by Council member Linda Maio who recognized the need for car-free living.
The sidewalks at the Brower Center would be of minimum width, which means little of nature's greenery would be present. However, after the oil crash and the drop off in car use, the roadway would be available for pedestrian use as it should be now.
The problem we are facing, when we witness environmental groups compromising and spinning (even if only so very rarely) while they maintain their comfortable funding, is that the world is out of time. We can't pretend the car-oriented infrastructure and the oil economy will go on and on. We have to address the problems and stand on our principles - today. For without vision and clarity of our message and mission, the true alternative to this destructive culture will not be demonstrated - until the system collapses. A sustainable future has no place for a parking garage, even if the building is the most progressively green ever devised ("platinum" certified, the best rating, in this case). When an extremely rare, visionary warrior for the Earth - David Brower - is being honored, who is really qualified to represent his vision and stature in a business deal? Are his equals present, at the ready, and objective, in all matters possible?
Besides just scrapping the parking requirement as would befit a truly progressive city, an alternative Brower Center concept could be for today's $5 million parking lot to be turned into a community organic garden on half the space, and on the other half there could be some Earth-friendly structures serving the environmental movement and housing its workers. If the tenants and workers pledged to be car free, the City of Berkeley might allow no parking places.
However, the City is already getting blood money from the parking lot, and without a bona fide protest movement to cease this and declare war on the car, such revenue will not be denied until the oil virtually dries up or the Earth is burned up in climate change.
So the David Brower Center development made headway and the final plan will probably be approved this summer. The vote on May 18 was 7-1 resolving to authorize negotiating for the Development and Disposition Agreement, but a public hearing in July 2004 has been added as part of the scrutiny of the contract whose drafting has just been approved.
- – Jan Lundberg
This piece was Culture Change Letter #63
Send a comment to the City of Berkeley (email: clerk@ci.berkeley.ca.us, fax (510) 981-6901) and tell the Council Members that, for example, you would more likely visit a David Brower Center and the fair city of Berkeley if they did not represent the same old oil, fumes & road hog paradigm.
For green city/building design expertise see www.ecocitybuilders.org of Oakland and Berkelay, California - Richard Register, President, author and illustrator.
From James Doherty, Culture Change's Bike Warrior Blogger:
TO THE BERKELEY CITY COUNCIL - and the greater Berkeley Community:
Please reconsider the submitted design of the new David Brower Center (DBC)
and postpone the Disposition and Development Agreement (DDA until the
Berkeley community has had a chance to review the plans and consider alternative
designs.
Parking for up to 120 automobiles underneath the proposed David Brower
Environmental Center (DBC) will severely exacerbate:
1. Construction costs, yet this is a center for affordable, sustainable
housing, as well as nonprofit ecology work;
2. Earthquake risks, including risk of collapse of the entire structure onto
the parked cars as happens routinely in California earthquakes, such as Loma
Prieta, Northridge, and Paso Robles;
3. Noise pollution to offices and workers and residents in the DBC;
4. Toxic fumes pollution to offices, workers and residents in the DBC;
5. Lifelong Heating, Ventilating, Air Conditioning, and Maintenance expenses
in attempting to cope with 2 & 3, above;
6. Lifelong liability and fire insurance costs, which skyrocket after each
new earthquake in California exposes the risks, including fire risk, of
having cars and gasoline tanks driving in, out, under and around the support
structures of the lower levels of such buildings; (The city of Hayward lost
its city hall to this; more recently, the city of Paso Robles lost almost
all its civic buildings to this risk.)
7. Risks of Terrorism and Saboteurs, with car bombs of various types having
already been used by anti-environmental extremists.
I. Whereas, The requirement that such parking be installed from "the ground
up" in an Environmental Center is a travesty of the principles of living and
working lightly and sustainably on the Planet Earth;
II. Whereas, This proposed Center is in memory and honor of David Ross
Brower, considered the Archdruid and founder of the modern environmental
movement, a man who fought roads, paving, and the impacts of automobiles for
three generations, including his opposition to the construction of the
Golden Gate Bridge;
III. Whereas, A design mandating cars to be driven in, out, under and around
the David Brower Center is thereby an insult to the memory of this
Distinguished Citizen of Berkeley and the Planet Earth;
IV. Whereas, The planning and design process for this "environmental"
parking lot has been largely closed, secretive, and poorly noticed to the
community to date, yet Berkeley wants a reputation for democracy and
openness in its planning process;
V. Whereas, The City of Berkeley has built a progressive reputation for
restricting and limiting automobiles, with innovative programs to do that as
well as to encourage bicycling and other transportation alternatives; yet
mandating automobile parking at the David Brower Center pushes in the
opposite, stale, and embarrassing direction of encouraging automobiles;
VI. Whereas, The City of Berkeley and the University of California have
begun planning for a large scale hotel/convention/museum arts district
Complex to be added to downtown Berkeley in the near future, with a better
designed, more secure and centralized parking facility to be built within a
very short distance of the David Brower Center; and
VII. Whereas, The Developer of the Library Gardens announced on February 10,
2004 that 120 parking stalls will be added to that development, effectively
replacing the 112 stalls now at the Oxford site just two blocks away from
the proposed David Brower Center,
I respectfully suggest a public review and revision of the David Brower
Center Parking mandate, given the changes in century, city administration,
and overall planning for downtown that have taken place since the Shirley
Dean era mandatory parking preservation ordinance was passed.
POGOLAND
One of David Brower's favorite maxims was drawn from Walt Kelley's Pogo
cartoon strip: "WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US."
This seems utterly applicable to the situation with the proposed dumb design
of Berkeley's DAVID BROWER CENTER, with respect to the ridiculous mandate of
bulldozing parking for 120 private commuter cars underneath the center.
To do so would insult and squander one of Berkeley's greatest resources, the
memory and legacy of its perhaps most famous, globally renowned and
respected citizens, David Ross Brower.
With approximately 2,000 new car parking stalls already in early stages of
planning for the vicinity of Downtown Berkeley/UCB, the current plan of cars
underneath and surrounding on all four sides the "car-free" affordable
housing proposed at the David Brower Center, is absurd on its face.
Attempting to bulldoze an ultra-expensive underground cement parking garage
for commuters underneath this site adjacent to the Berkeley BART station is
unaffordable, unwise, undoable, insulting, unnecessary, expensive,
polluting, obsolete, ugly, noisy, dangerous. This plan will produce only
the result of encouraging cars and surrounding the site with a gridlocked
mess by the year 2010 - a year this complicated, controversial, impractical
center might actually get around to being built by.
It is a 1980s era BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES type plan that will only delay
and deadlock the planning, and it is important to note Berkeley, like the
rest of the world, has actually crossed over the turn of the spigot, er turn
of the century, and it is no longer 1980 with dollar a gallon gasoline.
With environmental heavies like Randy Hayes, and many other fabulous and
wonderful individuals lining up to beg the Berkeley City Council to "just do
it," the phrase from Walt Kelley's POGO that Brower loved to recite so much,
seems to be in full force on this project:
WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US!
I realize people will propose idiotic compromises in the name of getting this "done,"
such as mandating the only cars to be parked under the center should be "green"
cars like Buy-Ol' Diesel and Hype-for-Cars; but in honor of the Arch Druid,
I vehemently oppose such absurd compromises in honor of a man who regretted
compromising and in his later years became dead set against killing the cause
and the planet, just more slowly, with such compromises.
And in fact, in honor of the man who so much regretted "being reasonable"
with such compromises, I am proposing closure of the easternmost blocks of
Kittredge and Allston, just ONE lousy block on each side of this site being
closed to any traffic except that of existing uses, which do not mandate
that these blocks accommodate through traffic, since each street ALREADY
ENDS at Oxford Way. This would cost the city yet another 50 or so parallel
parking spots, but that's a drop in the bucket with 2,000 more new parking
stalls proposed nearby.
And the joy of creating Berkelely's first CAR FREE ZONE where citizens could
WALK AND ROLL without fear of being turned into roadkill, would give
Berkeley the cutting edge it SAYS it wants in such arenas as Street
Reclaiming and Strawberry Creek Daylighting.
YES, AND an automated bike locker could be added to the site, see www.fujitech.com/2ringpark . Doing so would create a major tourist attraction for Berkeley as this sophisticated automated elevator driven
bicycle/scooter secure storage system would be the first of its kind in the
US, if Berkeley acts quickly; they have already been built in Fuji, Japan
and elsewhere overseas. Why has this option been ignored? Will it take a
lawsuit to get the city to consider it?
Will it take a lawsuit to get anyone (besides savvy councilmember Wozniak)
to notice or care that the current plans for the site violate Berkeley's own
general plan, in addition to violating the Strawberry Creek Conservation,
Daylighting, and protection ordinance?
If you are interested in receiving Culture Change's e-letter you can sign up to get Culture Change Letter directly, by clicking here: E-Letter
Jan Lundberg, co-founded the Lundberg Letter, called "the bible of the oil industry," in 1973. Mr. Lundberg ran Lundberg Survey Incorporated for the petroleum industry, utilities and government. He founded the Sustainable Energy Institute (SEI) in 1988.
We promote and practice cultural change as key to sustainability. Does economic growth via fossil fuels and materialism provide real security? A sustainable society features car-free living and growing food locally. Communities must return to self-sufficiency for food and energy.
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