Capitol Ideas/The Battle for Berkeley
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS THE BATTLE FOR BERKELEY Berkeley, California Last month the Berkeley Property Owners Association met for supper and speeches at Spenger's Fish Grotto, which is in the western,...
...An increasing percentage of the student population now lives in Oakland, which is not the safest city in the world but doesn't have rent controland therefore does have places to rent...
...But they want to transfer all the benefits of that ownership to their friends" among the tenants...
...Not on substantive matters, such as the annual general adjustment to rents, because she herself owns thirteen rental units in Berkeley...
...Muriel Rosenkranz is a feisty lady who bought a six-unit apartment building in 1964 with a small inheritance from her father...
...Berkeley rents are now down to about 60 percent of the Bay Area average," he said...
...These families will jointly buy the building (there may be half a dozen names on the title) and then move in en bloc, with family members displacing existing tenants (as is permitted by the law...
...In fact, black owners were being hurt perhaps even more than whites, because they often lacked the resources to mount a legal counterattack...
...In picking him over ideological whites the left made an uncharacteristic mistake, however...
...They might have been gathered together from some Winnebago encampment in Middle America...
...Buildings can be sold for a much higher price if they have no tenants when sold...
...The free market rent would be over $600...
...Inez Watts is a property owner, ladies and gentlemen, and therefore not allowed to vote, because in so doing she would be voting her own self-interest,in violation (so the city of Berkeley maintains) of California's conflict of interest laws...
...They won't fight for their own property...
...t dinner I found myself sitting opposite one of the board members of the Berkeley Property Owners, Michael J. Sandel, who is in the property management business in the Bay Area...
...According to an article in the Daily Californian by the university's Director of Community Affairs: "Campus studies show that more than 3,000 private housing units—apartments and houses—available to students in 1979 are no longer rented to students...
...Some buildings on Telegraph Avenue, all but expropriated by regulation, are no longer maintained...
...You're like everybody else," said his neighbor...
...They want you to retain the legal ownership," he told the nominal owners...
...Or they are being kept vacant...
...One speaker was Vincent Cook, a Berkeley graduate student in biophysics...
...The left-wing activists of the Berkeley Citizens' Association were bent on "waging class warfare," he said...
...She described rent board commissioner Betty Olds, who was addressing the group that night, as a "knee-jerk hill liberal from way back" (referring to the Berkeley hills...
...One of the authors of this book, Eve Bach, is now an assistant to the Berkeley city manager...
...Like other students, he said, he had found out how difficult it had become to find housing in Berkeley...
...The campus radicals of the 1960s took effective control of the city government in the late 1970s...
...Tenants now living in Berkeley can save $20,000 in five years," Sandel said...
...The restaurant is a few blocks from Interstate Highway 80, permanently crowded with traffic roaring between Oakland and Richmond...
...Inez Watts is a 56-yearold black lady who is a grandmother and a secretary in the Oakland unified school district...
...And that's conservative," he said...
...Homemade "Apartment Wanted" posters are to be seen all over the University of California campus, offering finders hundreds of dollars in "rewards" for vacant apartments...
...The Berkeley Property Owners, over 100 of them, were seated at long tables in the dark-paneled Atlantic Room, decorated with sportsmen's trophies, mounted fish, gun cases, and ships' wheels...
...They don't care about tenants or the future of rental housing...
...But she expressed frustration at the difficulty of getting property owners to organize in their own self-defense...
...Spenger's is a very popular, very middle-class sort of a place, with big rooms and large tables crowded with parties of seafood eaters...
...Years later she found out the hard way that the city wanted to expropriate it in the name of rent control...
...I phoned their Northern California office and spoke to Elaine Elinson about the Inez Watts matter...
...I was told that most of the association members are small owners (no more than six units each on average), and they looked it...
...Cook ended his speech with a ringing call for "property rights and the right to contract"—something one had not expected to hear from a Berkeley graduate student...
...They mostly had a worried look...
...about the same thing: the slow but steady political expropriation of their property by rent control...
...On the far side of the highway is San Francisco Bay...
...McConnell figured out the radical design of Berkeley's rent control—an attempt "to regulate life, not prices," as he told me later...
...Today he is a consultant advising property owners how to cope with Berkeley's regulatory maze...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1988 13...
...I told her that I was impressed by the potential activism displayed by the property owners—City Hall could have a fight on its hands...
...Some owners were "real passive," she told me...
...She told me later that she was a registered Democrat, and a supporter first of Jesse Jackson, then of Michael Dukakis...
...Proposition I would restore the voting rights of property-owning rent board commissioners...
...The cohesive nature of these families allows them to circumvent the redistributive intent of the law...
...This is essentially community expropriation in favor of tenants...
...But she refused the offer...
...People's Park now looks like something out of the Third World—Kingston, Jamaica, maybe...
...You hear amazing stories of extended families of Indians and Chinese who are able to defeat the purpose of rent control, which is to rob from the owner and subsidize the tenant...
...Last night Joe Brooks, the director of the Rent Board, told the board that they had 16,800 registered apartment units today...
...We also heard a short but brilliant speech from Gregory McConnell, a black, 38-year-old Howard University Law School graduate who was brought 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1988 in from Washington, D.C., where he was executive assistant to the city's Rental Housing Commission, to become executive director of Berkeley's rent board...
...Improve the law' means triple damages for overcharging...
...A one-bedroom apartment will probably rent for $300...
...As was pointed out to me by Muriel Rosenkranz, a former president of the Berkeley Property Owners Association, this decline in the value of rental property was approvingly predicted by those who initially agitated for rent control...
...But Inez Watts, gray haired and mild of manner, wearing a print dress and rhinestone glasses, is not allowed to vote on the rent board...
...Once legal ownership was theirs, he could not rely on his children to treat the property as though it were in reality still his...
...They were all of them worrying Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...Since other private owners would be unlikely to buy the property in such an unfavorable climate, the city could purchase the property at below market prices or aid tenants in convertTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1988 11 ing the property to cooperative ownership...
...But she has wised up on the rent board...
...The man on my right, who did not wish to be identified, said he owned six units in Berkeley and that he had offered a woman living in one of them $8,000 cash if she would leave...
...It would restore full civil rights to Inez Watts...
...CAPITOL IDEAS THE BATTLE FOR BERKELEY Berkeley, California Last month the Berkeley Property Owners Association met for supper and speeches at Spenger's Fish Grotto, which is in the western, semi-industrial part of the city, known as the Berkeley "flats" (as opposed to the Berkeley hills, which are not at all industrial, inhabited as they are by a leisured professoriate class...
...The great majority of apartment buildings in Berkeley are ten units or less, which means the rent board has to contend with a large number of owners, all independently taking selfby Tom Bethell protective action against government expropriation...
...We do not have the fire in our guts that the left has," she said...
...Improve the law' means to tighten the screws and make it more punitive," McConnell said...
...Stringent rent control in Berkeley's speculative real estate market would greatly cut the value of rental property...
...It's almost like a trust," McConnell told me a few days later in his Kensington office, north of Berkeley...
...And they want you to retain the legal responsibility...
...He told me that the number of rental units in Berkeley has declined by at least one-third since 1980...
...In 1980 the city of Berkeley enacted a Rent Stabilization and Eviction for Good Cause Ordinance, "to protect tenants from unwarranted rent increases and arbitrary, discriminatory or retaliatory evictions, in order to help maintain the diversity of the Berkeley community and to ensure compliance with legal obligations relating to the rental of housing...
...The man sitting next to me told me that, although he had several children himself, he would nonetheless be reluctant to put any of his property in their name, for fear they would "take the property and run...
...I would say I'm treated allright on the rent board," she said meekly, "except that I'm not allowed to vote...
...Where's the ACLU now that we need it...
...McConnell lasted for two and a half years as executive director but then quit...
...Rents may only rise by a maximum of 40 percent of the Consumer Price Index...
...But so far I haven't heard anything...
...But he promptly converted...
...We're all in various stages of wising up...
...Owners who complain that they are not being treated fairly may submit to a costly, time-consuming inquisition by the rent board, but if an error is detected in the owners' records, which will be scrutinized minutely, then the allowed rents may be reduced even further...
...Sandel said that in eight years rent control has eroded about 40 percent of the value of Berkeley's apartment buildings...
...In particular, he soon realized that blacks with small property holdings were by no means exempt from the left's confiscatory designs...
...There were 27,000 in 1980...
...It also means it will be impossible for you to evict tenants who don't pay rent...
...The units are disappearing because one way or another they are being occupied by owners or their relatives...
...Improve the law' means you pay attorneys' fees for alleged victims...
...After dinner he told me that "in terms of paid membership, the College Republicans are now the largest political organization on campus...
...This loss has translated into a decline of the student population living in Berkeley from nearly 70 percent to 55 percent, despite a 30 percent increase in campus-operated housing and a less than 4 percent enrollment increase in the same period...
...Among them were many minorities, ethnics, Orientals, and women...
...roposition I was one of the main 1 points of discussion at Spenger's, and in a sense Inez Watts was Exhibit A that night...
...McConnell told his audience at Spenger's that the radicals now say they merely want to "improve the law," to which end they have placed a number of propositions on the November ballot...
...After dinner we heard from some of the candidates running for rent board commissioner (owner-supported candidates must win two of the four vacant seats to gain a majority on the board...
...According to The Cities' Wealth: Programs for Community Economic Control in Berkeley, California (1976): "By enacting rent control and thereby restricting increases in future rents, a city may actually reduce the present value of a property...
...It is fair to say that the result has been a disaster for Berkeley...
...But this was no picnic...
...There are nine seats altogether...
...It will also create life estates for senior citizens 65 years and older . . ." McConnell ended by saying that he had concluded after studying the modus operandi of the radicals that they really do not want to transfer the titular ownership of property from private to public hands...
...In 1986 she was elected to the Berkeley rent board, receiving 19,355 votes, the highest vote ever cast for a rent board member...
...Most of us are or were muddle-brained liberals," said Peggy Schioler, the current president of the Berkeley Property Owners Association...
...I will have one of our attorneys who deals with voting issues get back to you," she said...
...In this respect his family was probably like most other American families: the centrifugal forces of individualism were stronger than the binding force of family...
...The purpose of the meeting was to introduce several candidates running in November for the four open seats on the city's Rent Stabilization Board...
...They thought they had themselves this typical bureaucrat," Peggy Schioler told me...
...Landlords become the caretakers of the homes of the tenants...
...e'd like to sell our buildW ing," said a man sitting a couple of places down the table from me...
...One of the speakers they had come to hear was Inez Watts, who was elected to the rent board in 1986...
Vol. 21 • November 1988 • No. 11
