News from Around the Bay

The big news is the 1,000+ foot skyscraper and two 800+ companion towers that planners proposed last week for the South of Market near First and Mission.  The proposed tower, if built would be the tallest west of the Mississippi and help further remake an area characterized by light industrial development and low slung back offices into a slender glass forest.  What's more, the revenue harvested by raising height limits in the area would be plowed into developing the Transbay Terminal  into a 21st Century transit hub, with a Caltrain station and high-speed rail connections to Los Angeles.  The proposal has met with encomiums from John Boland's San Francisco Cityscape and the Examiner's Ken Garcia.  Urbanities joins with the crowd of well-wishers, though like Cityscape commenter Bill Hough, we fear it is so good that it will never be built.

Today's John King column features the Hercules-WalMart slugfest currently being played out in the bucolic, New Urbanist suburb across the bay.  The world's largest retailer wanted to build an outlet on property it owned in Hercules, but the city denied its application.  When WalMart submitted a prettied-up application, it was denied again.  Now the city is threatening to go after the property by eminent domain.

While Urbanities is generally sympathetic to Hercules' desire to be something other than a carbon copy of so many other suburbs, we do not approve of its tactic of going after the jugular with eminent domain, even though in this case unlike Kelo, the city seems more sympathetic than the property owner.  It's easy to pick the virtuous, little municipal David over the retailing Goliath as John King does, but property rights are property rights and must be respected even when they belong to a company with a poor image like WalMart.  We hope that cooler heads prevail and that WalMart can find a graceful way to exit a place where it is not wanted.   

While we're on the subject of property rights, let's head on over to the ever-entertaining city of Berkeley where the city prohibits anyone from building or expanding or remodeling an existing building within 30 feet of a creek, even if the creek is flowing through an underground culvert.  Although the ordinance was passed in 1989, it didn't become an issue until 2004 when a creek flowing through an underground culvert caused part of a building to collapse.  Now the city is planning a rewrite of the ordinance that it hopes will please both creek-lovers and property owners, but it looks like there's going to be a fight. 

The urban creeks movement promises to liberate urban creeks from the shackles of their underground culverts and let them flow freely above ground.  Visions of steelhead spawning in the middle of downtown Berkeley led to the passage of the ordinance in 1989.  But it's neither reasonable nor rational to hold property owners hostage to a nice idea. 

Unless the city of Berkeley compensates property owners for essentially creating a public easement through their property they should be allowed to build as they see fit.  Urbanities thinks the city is making a step in the right direction by granting more leeway to creekside property owners but we think the rewrite doesn't go far enough.

Comments

[Jamison]

The Glen Park community plan calls for surfacing the creek again and I think that might have called for snagging the edges of a few back yards, but the main reason isn't restoring nature (that's a side benefit) it's for flood control.

[Patrick Carroll]

Interesting; I'll have to check that out. I wonder how it will work. Peralta Creek flowed openly just a few houses down from where I grew up in East Oakland. It was a nasty creek with dead, deformed fish, algae, and rats. Needless to say it was a very popular hangout for the neighborhood boys. The creek flooded when I was about 8 and the water came up almost to the house. Nobody was sorry to see it go when it was culverted over in the 1980's.

An early plan for Oakland called for its creeks to be made into linear parks that would have gone from the hills to the bay. I wonder how that would have worked out. It sounds lovely, but considering some of the neighborhoods in Oakland, I wonder if the creek parks would have just turned into vectors for crime.