Jul 11 2022
At its June 20 meeting, the City Council made two preliminary decisions regarding sites for the 215 or so low-income housing units state law requires Piedmont to accommodate. The Council removed the Vista Avenue tennis courts from the list of potential sites and added Blair Park. Both choices appear at odds with recommendations made, after months of study, by the city’s professional staff as well as its paid consultants and the citizen advisory committee appointed by the Council.
The Council argued that listing the tennis courts, recently upgraded with help from citizen gifts, for low-income housing would discourage philanthropic giving to the city. The argument for including Blair Park was that Piedmont must use or lose its share of County funding for low-income housing and that the Park provides opportunity for relatively fast development.
A moment’s reflection, however, calls both these arguments into question. Residents have given gifts to both the city and to the Piedmont Beautification Foundation to upgrade Blair Park. Friends of Moraga Canyon, for example, funded a landscaping plan, commissioned by the city, for the Park. Despite the plan, the city chose to leave the Park “as is.” Why? City staff argued, among other points, that improving the Park would attract users and that traffic engineers had not found a way to safely separate visitors to the Park, particularly children, from high-speed traffic on Moraga Avenue.
The city did, however, allow the family and friends of Barbara Peters, who dedicated four decades of service to the city and its residents, to place a bench in her memory in the Park she worked so hard to protect. This is the bench to which a councilperson referred when characterizing Blair Park disparagingly as “just a bench.” Is there a more effective way to discourage philanthropic giving to the city than to have councilpersons publicly disparage gifts?
The argument that Blair Park presents a more timely or attractive opportunity for developers than the tennis courts also appears less than compelling. Time will certainly be lost when residents and environmental groups appeal the use of parkland to meet housing requirements. The State does not encourage cities to use parks to meet housing mandates and no other city has done so. Piedmont, moreover, already has one of the lowest ratios in the Bay Area of parkland to residents.
Most of Blair Park that is not steep hillside is a former landfill. No one knows what the landfill contains other than San Francisco Bay mud, likely to harbor mercury and other heavy metals, from the construction of transbay BART tunnels. This circumstance will lead to time consuming testing as well as expensive and contentious mitigation. Without testing and mitigation, the city may have to indemnify developers and future managers of the apartments against claims of building defects and toxic exposure.
Building 150 or 200 apartments in Blair Park will certainly require expensive and time-consuming realignment and extension of sewer, water, and power lines, not to mention the reconfiguration of Moraga Avenue to ensure traffic and pedestrian safety. And how long will it take to negotiate responsibility for the liability that comes with managing traffic on Moraga Avenue and its interchange with the 13 Freeway during construction?
And, of course, any prospective developer will have to assess the cost of uncertainty likely to arise because some Piedmont residents assume, with good reason, that their City Charter requires a vote of the citizens to convert parkland to residential use. The Council may claim that loopholes allow them to avoid such a vote, but residents may see it differently and seek time-consuming redress.
The tennis court site, on the other hand, is flat, within walking distance of elementary, middle, and high schools as well as of banks, churches, the arts center, and the local market. Piedmont Park and the new aquatics center are as close. Water, power, and sewer infrastructure is on site. No landfill or landslide risks require mitigation. And the recent completion of nearby large school facilities shows that the traffic disruptions of construction in the area can be acceptably managed.
Given the above, why would the City Council ignore the recommendations of its professional staff, paid consultants, and citizen committee and swap Blair Park for the tennis courts? Why would the Council concentrate low-income families as far from Piedmont schools, services, and social as well as civic life as physically possible? Is convenient access to a tennis court more important to us than the isolation of 200 low-income families?
Our predecessors brazenly used city resources to drive minority families from Piedmont. They countenanced race-based restrictive covenants. And they allowed a private club to operate a city-owned swim facility when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 required integration of publicly operated accommodations. Given this history, how will our, or a future, City Council dissuade an objective observer from judging the choice to isolate and stigmatize 200 low-income families as anything other than a continuation of exclusionary policy?
I believe most Piedmonters want the city to comply with housing mandates in a way that conveys the best of our values rather than the worst of our instincts. I urge the Council to honor those values as well as its own adopted policy of distributing affordable housing throughout the city. Do the right thing for generations of Piedmonters – adopt the inclusionary recommendations of your staff, consultants, and citizens’ committee.
Ralph Catalano, Piedmont Resident
Editors Note: Opinions expressed are those of the author.
