Jacob Menough lolls in the doorway of an empty storefront on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley.
Posted on 12/17/2007 7:50:38 AM PST by SmithL
Berkeley is one of the most affluent, lively cities in the Bay Area, but its downtown looks more like Tombstone, Ariz., on a slow day.
Shuttered businesses dot the streets like tumbleweeds in a ghost town: Barnes and Noble. Gateway Computers. UC Theater. Soon to join their grim ranks: Ross Dress for Less and Shoe Pavilion.
"Berkeley's downtown plan has resulted in a wonderful, vibrant, mixed-use community. It's called Emeryville," said Will Travis, chairman of the city committee charged with revitalizing the beleaguered commercial district around Shattuck and University avenues.
In a few years, downtown Berkeley could look a bit more like downtown San Francisco under a makeover plan to be considered Tuesday by the City Council - a bustling urban center thick with hotels, office high-rises, theaters and museums, but low on parking and sunlight.
The plan was created by the 20-member Downtown Area Planning Advisory Committee, which met more than 100 times in the past two years and looked at everything from sustainability to historic preservation. After a hearing before the council, the blueprint will undergo a lengthy review by the Planning Commission before going back to the council for a final vote in May 2009.
The committee came up with a set of goals to remake downtown into a regional cultural center that would accommodate UC Berkeley's ambitious expansion plans - including a Toyo Ito-designed art museum and a 19-story hotel and conference center - as well as the needs of residents, students, office workers and visitors.
. . . Merchants, city staff and residents have blamed the decline of downtown Berkeley in part to the proliferation of homeless people. Forty percent of Alameda County's homeless population lives in Berkeley, which has just 7 percent of the county's population.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Jacob Menough lolls in the doorway of an empty storefront on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley.
Where have all the flowers gone?.........
They getting rid of the homeless hippies then? Leftists moving back east? Changing the gun laws?
They haven’t a chance in heck...
Women are scared to shop in Downtown Berkeley - they go to Walnut Creek, instead. The kind of crackdown necessary to restore the area requires big, mean, white policemen with guns and dogs and vans and a labor camp in the Central Valley to haul the human detritus off to, and will attract howls of protest from the usual suspects...thus the Berkeley City Council will never go for it. ;)
I was thinking the same thing...maybe lowering taxes? Reducing regulation? Increasing police presence? Naawwwwwww...too radical.
Mayhap it's time to check the "charitable contributions" to homeless advocates. I hate being this cynical (especially with the Christmas bell ringers out there), but there are people evil enough to pull something like that.
Agreed. Add to that the tendency of these communities to want “boutique” shopping areas over all-purpose venues and it is likely destined to fail since boutique-type stores are finding it more lucrative to go on-line rather than into brick and mortar magnets for the homeless.
Finally got rid of those evil, repressive corporate profits, did ya?
Not unless they first adrress a few things they'd rather not talk about:
the street crazies, drug users, homeless, the perverts, the thugs the screaming radicals of all stripes.
Sort of like San Francisco, without the compensating charm.
What was it? Banning [insert any given] fats? (in the food, that is) Banning "free water" at the table? Banning salt?
Living in a Liberal Paradise. Not!
Even if you could accomplish exactly what you say (which I agree completely is what is necessary), it would take the mother of all steam pressure washers to get the funk off the streets.
The stench would choke a maggot.
Second, what caught my eye was the line:
"The plan was created by the 20-member Downtown Area Planning Advisory Committee, which met more than 100 times in the past two years..."
What's that? Something like once a week...week after week after week after week for two years?? Its hard to imagine any volunteer being quite that civic minded. Ergo, these folk on the "Downtown Area Planning Advisory Committee" must have been paid, and paid for every meeting they held; thus the 100+ meetings.
You have to wander through Berzerkeley at least once in your life to get a feel for the place and the, uh, residents.
I don’t think DAPAC (what the locals call the committee) was a paid gig. The reason for the number of meetings was the inflexibility and the vociferousness of the members. You have the “historic preservationists” on one side, the “let’s clean it up” people on another, then the “greenies” are in there and the people who inject racial angles into every civic decision are in there.
The end result is that there’s plenty of talking, very little listening, and no results. People in Berzerkeley like to give their opinions on every little thing, at great length, without compromise or change.
This, they do with great gusto.
The last time I wandered around Berzerkeley was, oh, 1992. It was an open cesspool then, and has gone downhill much, much further. You couldn’t get 50 yards after dark without being aggressively panhandled by some urine-soaked bum.
They’ve got a 5 Year Plan, like their Soviet heroes did every five years! On to the Radiant Future!
For those not familiar with the area, Emeryville is a small city just 4 to 5 miles away from Berkeley.
One of the problems for businesses in downtown Berzerkly besides the large bum population, a problem no one wants to talk about, because it would be, why, RACIST, is the proximity of Berkeley High, just one block off the main drag, with its population of shoplifting, vandalizing underclass hooligans. If you’re ever in the area, just visit the mess made by such non-customers on the second floor of the ROSS store, which like all ROSS stores does not have floor clerks to keep some order.
Old hippies don’t die . . . they just smell that way.”
Douglas “The Core, the Core, the Core” Fairbanks, Jr.
(munching lettuce)
Oh, just great! I propose as a centerpiece for the revitalization effort, The Museum Of Liberal Failures.
Another bustling Berkeley shopping district is the Fourth Street area. I was there yesterday, and it was brimming with happy Christmas shoppers. I myself was there for an afternoon bookstore gig with my bluegrass band. We got a great crowd that stopped to listen.
Why don’t they just order the citizens to re-populate downtown and have the storm troopers enforce it?
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