NIMBYism as Segregationism

African American residents in Berkeley, California:

Year (Decennial Census)	Number of African-Americans	Percent of Berkeley Population
1970	27,421	23.5%
1980	20,671	20.0%
1990	19,309	18.8%
2000	14,007	13.6%
2010	11,241	10.0%
2020	9,812	7.9%

In 1963, James Baldwin remarked about redevelopment specifically in San Francisco: “urban renewal equals Negro removal.” In 2021, my Urban Studies and Planning students at San Francisco State University began calling gentrification the New Urban Renewal. They are referencing the expression “The New Jim Crow” which Michelle Alexander first saw in Oakland, used to describe the institutional discrimination and violence against Black Americans in the 21^st century.

Not the 19^th century. Not the 20^th century.

Now. 2023. And not just in San Francisco and Oakland; but also in our fair Berkeley, California.

A misleading question to ask is: “Is this intentional?” This question requires us to assume that institutions and aggregate practices are conscious beings. It tries to force us to judge a whole array of property-practices as if they themselves are conscious, somehow separate from the individual homeowners who are trying to minimize risks to their property-values. Those homeowners—if they are aware of what they are doing by blocking new housing—they can be judged as segregationist. But most homeowners assume that the ideal of single-family, detached, low-density housing is normal. I agree that in the United States, it is normal. I also agree that a preference for racial segregation and exclusion of the poor is normal among Americans. Furthermore, those two normal things are actually two expressions of the same moral failing.

Even Friedrich Engels argued specifically against the misleading question of intentionality (p. 57 of the linked PDF). As the son of a German industrialist sent by his father to check on textile mills in Manchester in 1842, he took a horsedrawn carriage down a “high” street from his residence to his father’s factory. Along this high street, he noticed that the shopkeepers consistently kept destitute people off the street. As shopkeepers, they had a shared interest in attracting wealthy people (like Friedrich) as customers, and therefore keeping the street ‘attractive’ and ‘presentable.’ The shopkeepers did not need to be organized into a Merchant’s Association nor a Business Improvement District in order to consistently and collectively prevent destitute people from begging on the high street. It was not a question of intention. It was a question of shared interest. This is what Engels meant by “class” in his subsequent writings.

What happens when white homeowners in Berkeley prevent new housing—especially affordable housing? They exacerbate a housing shortage. The shortage of this basic necessity of shelter increases the value of existing housing. In other words, NIMBYs enrich themselves by excluding others. What happens to Black Americans in a country, in a state, and in a city with a history of employment and loan-discrimination against them? Opponents of new housing effectively evict Black Americans through opposition to new housing.

The current NIMBY (“not-in-my backyard”) form of opposition to new housing in Berkeley began in 1973 with the imposition of Environmental Impact Statement (EIR) requirements on all new developments except single-family detached housing. NIMBY suppression of housing production has effectively reduced the proportion of African-Americans in Berkeley by two-thirds over fifty years.

This afternoon (March 5, 2023), an all-White group of neighbors gathered at the North Berkeley BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) Station to get a tour of the site, and provide input on BART’s plan to redevelop the parking lots around the station as high-density housing. There were two non-White people present: our city council representative Rashi Kesarwani (against whom some hurled repeated ad hominem attacks) and one of the city planning staff. These White homeowners—who, by definition of the median house price in north Berkeley, are millionaires—feel particularly victimized by a process in which the State of California has directed BART to develop housing around its transit stations.

Through a series of public meetings these White residents have repeatedly complained about the classification of the North Berkeley station as an “urban” station. This is a bad-faith argument going back a half-century to the creation of BART in 1972, when North Berkeley got the benefit of a high-capacity regional rail station. The entire BART system in Berkeley was placed underground thanks to the activism of Mable Howard, an African American opposed to yet more infrastructure tearing through Black neighborhoods. Mable Howard lived near the Ashby Station. Ironically, Howard’s activism also yielded the collateral benefit to White homeowners around the North Berkeley station which was also built underground. Furthermore, the covered trackway was turned into the Ohlone Greenway from MLK Street to Sacramento Street, and into Cedar Rose Park and the Peralta Community Gardens as the BART heads northwest toward Albany. Along this entire route, Whites have profited immensely from the value-premiums of their homes adjacent to this enormous public transit investment. And as Darrell Owens points out, White homeowners had already downzoned the area in the 1963 Master Plan ‘to preserve neighborhood character’. This down-zoning was an adaptation of previously overt policies of segregation, converted into a new strategy to maintain de facto segregation implicitly, without naming it. William Byron Rumford had sponsored the California Fair Housing Act of 1963, and the Berkeley downzoning was a successful end-run around it. White opposition to fair housing was intense, and the California Real Estate Association sponsored California Proposition 14 (1964) specifically to overturn the state Fair Housing Act. Prop 14 passed (two-to-one) but was eventually overturned by the State Supreme Court (1966) only a few years before the Federal Fair Housing Act would have invalidated it. However, residents of North Berkeley got away with maintaining de facto segregation by suppressing the development of denser, multifamily housing north of University Avenue—a transformation which BART planners expected to happen around transit stations as they developed the system in the 1960s.

What can we conclude from this brief historical review?

1. The persistence of low-density, single-family housing north of University Avenue is the result of a clearly-documented segregationist strategy from the 1910s through the 1960s. Residents got away with it because the Master Plan rationale of ‘single family housing’ was “fair on its face” even though it was motivated by the desire to maintain racial segregation.
2. The “preservation of existing neighborhood character” means preserving racial segregation, literally, in the built landscape. The California Real Estate Board clearly expressed this in their own journal article entitled “Enforcement of Race Restrictions Through Constitutional Amendment Advocated”. This was published in the California Real Estate Magazine on September 4, 1948. The Real Estate Board was responding to the U.S. Supreme Court decision on May 3, 1948 against enforcing racial covenants in the Shelley v. Kraemer decision. The Real Estate Board spent years trying to figure out a workaround, and briefly succeeded with the passage of Proposition 14 in 1964. The overwhelming White support for this Proposition is hard evidence of how “normal” White Americans felt about residential segregation in 1964. Have White homeowners changed since then?
3. Under normal market conditions expected by the planners of BART, much denser housing would have developed around this regional rapid transit station in the 1970s (fifty years ago). If that multifamily housing had been built around the BART station 50 years ago, it would be old enough and inexpensive enough by now that it would all be affordable housing. Furthermore, it would have provided more housing for a full half century by now.
4. There is nothing natural, nor ethical, about the current “environment” of low-density single-family housing surrounding the North Berkeley BART station in 2023. Single-family zoning is a direct and continuing expression of segregationist policies implemented in Berkeley beginning in 1916, attested by the city government itself in 2021.

Some readers might be surprised to hear of such things happening in Berkeley, California.

You might think that, at least since the 1960s, residents of Berkeley are ‘progressive.’

I would love for my neighbors to prioritize moral values over their fears about their property values. Ironically, the new development at North Berkeley will probably increase their house-values, giving yet more wealth to millionaires. I am OK with that windfall so long as poorer people can start gaining access to housing again in Berkeley. At minimum, I wish that Berkeley homeowners would oppose racial segregation rather than perpetuate it and intensify it. I refer you again to the Census data at the beginning of this blog post: that is the collective actual expression of ethics by my White homeowning neighbors. In recent meetings they have complained that if one part of the North Berkeley site is developed as affordable housing and the other side is commercial housing (to cover the development costs), that constitutes “segregation” at the scale of buildings. While I would rather have racial integration in all respects, I would be thrilled for Black families to have their children in the King Middle School district, rather than the current situation in which they are relegated to eastern Contra Costa County and their parents to miserable commutes back into the job-dense inner Bay Area.