Thursday, July 9, 2009
Oakland Prays for Tall Buildings
Business / Politics Robert Gammon — Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 10:30 AM
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The Oakland City Council approved a new downtown plan that essentially represents a giant prayer for tall buildings and a huge influx of upscale residents. The new zoning plan allows skyscrapers to be built throughout most of the downtown area. But as we noted last week, the plan threatens to stifle dense development because it could artificially raise land values and encourage property owners to demand high prices -- thereby discouraging developers from buying property and erecting buildings. And then even if developers decide to build skyscrapers, there's no guarantee that they will be able to attract residents.
That's because tall condo or apartment towers are expensive to construct, so they demand higher prices. As a result, the high rises will require wealthier residents to pencil out. But the question is: will they actually want to live in the downtown area?
The council should have looked more closely at the lessons learned by other cities, including San Francisco and Seattle, and attempted to encourage more mid-size buildings, while still allowing for some high rises. Mid-size buildings, those 55-feet to 75-feet in height, can house huge numbers of people, and because they're cheaper to build, they can accommodate the less wealthy.
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If the EBE won't do there homework, then at least someone will....
http://www.abetteroakland.com/are-we-downzoning-or-upzoning-downtown-oakland/2009-07-07
If you really wanted the city council to look more closely at other cities, maybe you should have suggested that at any number of the meetings held for the CBD over the past year and a half. Or maybe you should have published your article earlier in the process so that all the parties involved could have encorporated its viewpoints into the final plan. But if you were simply looking to pull an 11th hour stunt that would give you the cover necesarry to click your tongue and bewail the failures at city hall while not making any meaningful contribution yourself, well "Mission Accomplished".
The only lesson learned by Seattle was that the zoning Gammon and Pyatok suggest doesn't work. Seattle saw an enormous drop in building permits after they adopted restrictive zoning many years ago. Determined not to further stifle growth, the city adopted new zoning regulations in 2006 that is actually very similar to what Oakland just did, except that the building heights allowed in Seattle are higher. It's pathetic that Robert Gammon couldn't even look up this very basic fact before he repeated it in print. Yet another example of why newspapers are failing - they're completely untrustworthy.
And of course, if Gammon or Pyatok had gone to any of the twenty plus meetings about this over the course of the last year, they would know that the comparative zoning in Seattle, San Francisco, Portland, and other cities has actually been discussed in great detail.
If Gammon had done even the tiniest bit of homework, he would know that what the city council adopted actually downzones downtown, putting in place height limits where there were none before and reducing permitted density in most areas.
Pathetic.
What type of journalism can you expect from bottom of the barrel style of writting, prostitution funded East Bay Express!
This paper suck!
Totally unreliable....
Mr. Gammon,
The main source in your article who suggested we needed more low-rise zoning downtown was an architect named Pyatok. Mr. Pyatok designs low-rise housing developments. He also provided you with a number of incorrect statements of fact that could have been easily verified.
When your source has a conflict of interest, it's up to you as a journalist to do some fact-checking. You didn't.
When a journalist writes about local politics, it's appropriate for them to attend public meetings. You don't. (Well, OK, you went to one and watched the victim of one of your hit pieces get exonerated. Haven't seen you at one before or since).
Journalism FAIL.
For good local reporting, turn to abetteroakland.com and oaklandliving.com
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