Interesting topic. My comments do not represent official City of Berkeley positions. That said, like Henry Liu, I am also a planner, though a housing planner. However, working regionally, planners, designers, architects, land use lawyers and a lot of forward looking environmental thinkers of all hues of green are interested in trade-offs between land use densities, urban design strategies (the manner in which streets and land parcels are configured), transportation, and housing development (including low-income housing). As Henry and Brad point out this is difficult, but it is not impossible. Brad, as I recall, mentions a bit heavy-handedly that it would take "tearing down Berkeley bungalows" for dense apartment buildings. This is misleading as to the nature of creating density. Our first draft General Plan is calling for major increases in downtown housing density, economies of scale from which can be used to internally subsidize affordable housing units. But it is not necessary to raze whole neighborhoods to create the density transit needs, in order to improve matters in Berkeley. It is important to realize that urban density creates markets: for housing, street life, cultural outlets, retail businesses, and transit. We have a BART station downtown and about a half dozen major AC Transit bus routes that converge on downtown. The key to making density work is to reduce parking for street-jamming cars in favor of increasing people's reliance on transit (as well as other travel modes like bikes and feet). The key to making transit work is to limit auto parking while encouraging people to live near where they shop and work. The wild card in all of this is UC Berkeley (which is exempt from local property taxes and zoning), which tore down a parking structure three blocks from campus and wants to rebuild it instead of putting in MORE HOUSING. More housing would not only help take pressure off the Berkeley housing market, it would take pressure off the city's street system because more students could live closer to campus, rather than commute in from surrounding suburbs of Berkeley. (Other universities elsewhere are wildcards too - I believe Columbia and Univ of Chicago have also behaved like bulls in china shops over the years.) Doug, there are many people in California - north and south - who are interested in transit; I know, rhetorically and statistically the numbers are on your side, but the transportation snarls out here are bad going to worse (and beyond). Poll data out here indicate that Bay Area residents want something done about housing shortages and highway snarls. My response to Ms. Bock's inquiry is to suggest she look into the proposals coming out from groups that are advocating for "smart growth." These groups include Planners Network, California Futures Network <www.calfutures.org>, Urban Habitat Program (which produced a nice pair of volumes on regional inequities and tax base revenue sharing, and on transportation investment inequities), all of whom are interested in building a constituency for land use and property/sales tax reform to address sprawling suburban development (which DOES continue almost unabated). Even corporate Bay Area is getting interested in a regional approach to dealing with "sustainable development" of our cities here. I would also commend to Ms. Bock Myron Orfield's excellent report on the Bay Area (available from Urban Habitat) and his book METROPOLITICS for the Lincoln Institute on Land Policy (Cambridge, MA). More on this in an article I'm writing for Terrain magazine of the Berkeley Ecology Center, due out in August.
