Berkeley Sparks Family Fight High Density Housing Plan

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This is where the Lee-Egan story breaks with the entirety of California’s past. Since the Gold Rush, an endless stream of newcomers has settled in this beautiful place, falling in love with it and dreaming of ways to keep the newcomers behind them at bay. So while the California dream has long included social change—loving the people you love and “In this house we believe”—its corollary in the physical world has been more about getting your own little piece of paradise, and then fight for the rest of your life. life against anything and anyone who can change it. But Lee-Egan wasn’t like that at all; Because when Lee-Egan, a progressive young homeowner in Berkeley, read that sign, she thought something more like: Wow, apartments. That would be great.

Of course, another way of looking at Lee-Egan is that she is like my own mother in 1970, sure of what ails the world and determined to live by her values. Lee-Egan helped start East Bay for Everyone, the YIMBY group that eventually tweeted the infamous image of a 31-story North Berkeley BART tower that terrified my mom’s neighbors. Egan even avoids the Monterey market, she told me, because without those proposed bike lanes, she can’t get there safely with her children on the front of her electric cargo bike. That anecdote brought my mother to tears when I told it to her later, with real tears, apparently because it confirmed the arrival of a bewildering new generation, pushing for BART apartments and bike lanes, as if they didn’t give a damn about Berkeley. that we know and love.

And yet, in another parallel to my mother, Lee-Egan was also riding a wave of change in line with her politics. Those new laws are forcing every community in California to press ahead with planning for more housing, and while many communities are dragging their feet, Berkeley recently granted planning permission for a 25-story apartment building in the center of town. , dwarfing the current tallest high-rise building in the city. . Berkeley also appears to be on track to approve two more towers of comparable size and another that, at 28 stories, will be taller than the university’s famous bell tower that, at 307 feet, has defined the city’s skyline for more than a century. . All that new construction was on people’s minds, of course, at the meet and greet at North Berkeley BART. People my parents’ age, with faint traces of once-hippie identities still visible around their graying, blurry edges, gathered in front of a man named Jonathan Stern of BRIDGE Housing, one of the nonprofit affordable housing developers. largest profit organization in the country and a leader in the BART project.

Stern lives in Berkeley and dressed diplomatically for the occasion in a red Berkeley High School hoodie. He has done it countless times, too, including at other BART stations. Stern assured everyone that none of the current design plans include buildings higher than eight stories and that all plans include at least some permanent supportive housing for people who were previously homeless, as well as subsidized housing for people making less than $100,000 a year. The rest would be at market rate, which could mean $6,000 a month, or even more, for a two-bedroom apartment.