A couple of days ago, I wrote about the problems Louis Rossetto's mother was having trying to get permission from the city to add a small addition to her house in Berkeley (Link). On Monday, Berkeley's Landmarks Preservation Commission held a meeting to decide whether to grant landmark status to the house. In short, his mother got permission to build the addition. Congratulations!
Here's Louis' report from the meeting:
A report from the front: the battle was lost – but the war won!
Last night was my mother's Landmarks Preservation Commission hearing. Her 900 square foot two bedroom addition took three hours of discussion. In the end, the LPC voted 5 to 4 to designate her house a landmark. They then turned around and voted 9 to 0 to accept one of the two designs for the addition that my mother had submitted – proving that my mother wasn't threatening her "historic" Wurster in the first place.
I am both exhilarated and depressed by the experienced. Exhilarated because we beat those motherfucking neighbors and my mother can build her bedroom. And saddened to have witnessed first hand a truly arbitrary, philistine process that must be repeated ad nauseum across America, and that causes neighborhood wars, promotes mediocrity (if not worse), and can leave people emotionally and financially ruined without even protecting the alleged purposes of the landmark ordinances.
As my mother wrote in her ad, this wasn't about preservation, this was about the local Soviet trying to assert its control over the block. After the vote to designate, one of the neighbors behind the landmark petition came over to my mother and magnanimously "welcomed" her to the neighborhood. The problem with that is my mother has been living in her house for four years already, and that their "welcome" amounted to the taking of her property. When they then lost the war when the Commission – shamed by the role they had just played in the obvious injustice visited on my mother – voted 9 to 0 to accept her design, I wanted to go over to this now ashen-faced neighbor and "welcome" him to reality.
People write above about the "benefits" of this kind of kangaroo court to civic and even property values, but from my mother's experience, these kinds of processes protect neither. It was unclear whether a majority of the commission had even visited my mother's house – only one took up her invitation to see it. The Berkeley standard for designation is that the property is the "first, last, or only" example of its kind, but the Commission had done no research into the number of Wurster houses that had been built, whether this one was better or worse than any of the others, or even whether Wurster was really anything more than a local hero. Commissioners pontificated at length on the house and Wurster, but they literally did not know what they were talking about. In fact, if you do a google on Wurster, you get about 700 links (a lot of them having to do with my mother's case). Do one on another local Berkeley architect, Bernard Maybeck, and you get an order of magnitude more – 8K. Do one on another local, Julia Morgan, and you get 30K. That should tell you something about Wurster's relative stature.
The very scariest thing about the proceedings last night was that there were at least two members of the LPC who believed that their job was not just to consider buildings that had been brought to them for landmarking, but they should actively be increasing the number of buildings in the City's "inventory." As one of them put it, "There are 40,000 buildings in Berekley, and we have landmarked only 300." This, in a city that's barely 100 years old, and which already has more landmarked buildings, as I have noted, than San Francisco which is half a century older and has seven times the population.
And their criteria for landmarking? Berkeley has landmarked parking lots, has landmarked empty lots, has landmarked rocks, has landmarked factories where "whites and blacks worked together for the first time." Listening to these commissioners, you can easily imagine them finding something in every building in the city that would justify landmarking, and if not in the building itself, perhaps in its relationship to its neighborhood, to the trees on the site, to the "streetscape," to the feeling of the street, . . .
Anyway, my mother can build her bedroom. And I intend to make a contribution to the Institute for Justice. Once again, we are shown that tyranny isn't just a national threat; it starts, and is perhaps most pernicious, on your own block.
