He joked that he should have invested in porta potties a decade ago because the number of home improvement projects taking place in residential neighborhoods “is astounding.” The landscape changes taking place in Berkeley are happening at all scales, he said. There are more cranes now in downtown Berkeley than in downtown San Francisco.” “The building boom here is like something many of us have never seen, maybe not since the postwar period. “It has been really astonishing to watch how the place has changed,” King said. It was almost like Wall Street.” She wanted to know King’s criteria for what makes a building good or bad. “I walked downtown in Berkeley and there are all these big buildings overtaking the sky, I couldn’t even see the sky in parts. “What the hell is going on in Berkeley?” asked Sylvia Paull, a club vice president, in introducing King. King’s half-hour talk, accompanied by his cell phone photos and interjections from an enthusiastic audience, was followed by a question-answer period. 3 at an informal “fireside chat” (without the fire) at the Hillside Club titled “The Lay of the Land.” The crowd was made up of mostly white seniors, many of whom are club members - a demographic that’s statistically the most likely in the Bay Area to oppose new construction, according to a recent poll by the Bay Area News Group. “Berkeley is suffering from a debate over housing that tends to be so lazy and divided,” he said, “where it’s either ‘nothing should be built unless it’s ideal by every possible standard’ or ‘the more stories the better, the more units the better’ instead of ‘how can we grow in ways that we generally agree improve our surroundings and improve Berkeley as a place to live and a place to walk around.’” King said some residents’ responses to the new construction will only hinder the creation of the thousands of new homes the city will need by 2040 to escape a housing crisis that’s caused property and rental prices to climb to stratospheric heights and driven people out of their homes in Berkeley and, in some cases, onto the street. John King, the San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic. In Berkeley, where cedar-shingled Craftsman homes are often held up as the epitome of the city’s architectural character, John King, the San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic and a 30-year Berkeley resident, urged the 30 or so audience members at the Hillside Club to broaden their definition of Berkeley architecture and not allow nostalgia to prevent change in the midst of a major building boom. “Yet that does not translate into ‘therefore it shouldn’t be done.’ You shouldn’t not change the landscape because the changes might impinge on your memory.” Credit: Sylvia Rubin “When that abruptly got torn down, it tore away memories from my 20s, that vivid time of life,” SF Chronicle urban design critic John King said at a talk in Berkeley. building that housed 46-year-old French spot Au Coquelet Cafe was demolished in June to make way for an eight-story development. Shuttered in 2020, the 2000 University Ave.
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