Berkeley is a city of contrasts. It has built thousands of new apartments in the last five years, yet it also exhibits extreme differences between its exclusive, tree-lined neighborhoods and its formerly redlined neighborhoods. The city was at the forefront of integrating its schools, but it is also where single-family zoning, for racialized reasons, began. It was a hub of social protest in the 1970s, but in the same decade the city made apartments illegal to keep out people of diverse economic and social backgrounds.

This contrast also played out in Berkeley's housing element, its state-mandated eight-year housing plan. While Berkeley did a solid job of planning for enough housing across the city to meet its goals, the initial plan was to put more than half of that housing in its lowest-income neighborhoods and only 3% of that housing in its wealthiest neighborhoods. This practice goes against a state requirement to affirmatively further fair housing, which means that all neighborhoods, especially high-resource and exclusive neighborhoods, need to contribute to housing growth. Affirmatively furthering fair housing means that you can't put housing in redlined neighborhoods and leave wealthy neighborhoods as de facto gated communities, preserved in amber against change.

Affirmatively furthering fair housing isn't just important because it sounds more fair; building more housing in high-resource neighborhoods turns out to have a huge positive impact on people's lives. Studies have shown that one of the biggest predictors of lifetime success for children isn't their family's wealth; it's actually the ZIP code they grew up in.

Coming back to Berkeley's housing element, in response to feedback that Berkeley was not affirmatively furthering fair housing, the city committed to upzoning three commercial corridors in some of its most exclusive neighborhoods: Solano, College, and North Shattuck. The specifics were left extremely vague, and now we come to the point of figuring out what areas will get upzoned and by how much. The city planning department has put forward an initial proposal that, to be blunt, is pretty disappointing. The base zoning is only for three to six stories in height, and it only upzones parcels directly on these three streets—it leaves out all of the adjoining blocks. This is particularly frustrating because many of the parcels on these streets are difficult or unlikely to be developed into housing.

For that reason, we're calling on Berkeley to do more: to allow for greater height and to upzone a wider area. We believe that the city of Berkeley should stand for integration, for doing its part to solve the housing crisis, and for protecting the environment by increasing housing in neighborhoods where residents can walk to shops, restaurants, and transit. NIMBYs are saying that more housing will ruin these neighborhoods, but we know better: more housing is actually what's going to save these neighborhoods from turning into ghost towns. More people will create vibrant, thriving business districts.

One of the reasons why affirmatively furthering fair housing is so difficult is that when you upzone a neighborhood full of wealthy homeowners, those homeowners have the resources to fight the change. We're seeing it play out before our very eyes. That's why it's so important to take action for upzoning these neighborhoods today.