HomeMy WebLinkAboutPapp council testimony 2020 6 2Yesterday morning, I never imagined I’d be standing in front of a line of cops in riot gear.
Yesterday morning, I never imagined that line of cops would take the knee. I was standing with
fifteen hundred young people who realized the world has changed. Encased as they were in
armor, the cops realized the same thing. My question to council is: Do you?
Most of those changes are going to be bad for most of us. The rich are going to do exceptionally
well, the poor exceptionally badly, and the people in between will disappear, the pattern for
forty years hitting with massive new force through a twin pandemic of disease and
joblessness—unless we make a massive, sustained, and unified effort to fight back. The kids
who took the freeway yesterday, the cops who took the knee, were just beginning that fight.
And here I am asking why, once again, the city is suspending its guidelines, ignoring extant
mitigation, avoiding new environmental review so a multi-millionaire can build million-dollar
condos for other multi-millionaires with glorious views of the ninety-nine percent in the
canyons below?
We’re sick and tired of listening to the city bang on about housing when what you mean is
ultra-luxury housing with a penthouse skybridge and twelve-foot ceilings to solve the Great
California Pied-à-Terre Crisis.
We’re sick and tired of the cynicism of pitting old against young, as if it’s impossible to build
new affordable housing that doesn’t shatter the beloved sense of place that long-time locals
and restoration pioneers have fostered in the North Higuera neighborhood.
Where, calling out, has been this project’s constituency? 545 Higuera doesn’t benefit the
people in its working-class neighborhood. It sure as hell doesn’t benefit the kids I marched with
yesterday for a brave new world.
545 is vertical sprawl: nearly twice the volume and land use per comparable unit as the new
developments across the street. That’s not dense, sustainable, affordable or a good neighbor to
a sensitive historic area. The future is small, not sprawl. There has to be a moment when the
rich aren’t allowed to just buy their way out of the climate crisis.
Why is Community Development skirting CEQA for this project? Wealth, class, and race have
always been privileged in law. The kids yesterday didn’t know they were marching over the
bones of Frog Hollow, SLO’s ghetto, plowed under by the freeway in 1954. But now the law’s
different.
Staff have not presented precedents to challenge any of the six bases of the appeal. The case
needs to succeed only on one. It is not Friends of 71 Palomar, where I happily assisted the city
and was invoked as an expert.
But why go to court? What’s in it for the citizens of SLO to suppress disclosure of impact? 71
Palomar is a strong addition to its neighborhood because it adhered to the guidelines and went
through environmental and CHC review. Of the eight multi-unit projects CHC approved in my
first year, only one has been completed, 71 Palomar. Good review is not the bottleneck for
development, poorly conceived projects are.
CEQA was passed by a Republican legislature and Ronald Reagan in an era of protest and
optimism. Why is a progressive government a half century later so terrified of it? A government
that started the environmental era with Ken Schwartz, the visionary mayor, the design review
mayor? Again and again Community Development shows up in the full body armor of
infallibility with the weapons of directorial omnipotence and clairvoyance to quash review. I can
only respond with what we chanted outside the police station yesterday:
I don’t see a riot here,
Why are you in riot gear?