Request:

The time has come for neighborhoods to begin to develop their own autonomous modes of making decisions about the future of their community.

If we wait for City Council to do it, we will end up with more market rate housing, and more people displaced by arbitrary and often illegal rent increases.

Come to our meeting on Jan 27, at the West Berkeley Library, 2 pm, to learn about how neighborhood assemblies can produce neighborhood democratic power.

Our principles


Our main principles are

  • The self-organization of neighborhoods

  • A politics based on dialogue rather than the monologue of hearings and speeches

  • The principle of democracy that those who will be affected by a policy must be the ones who make that policy that will affect them. That means articulating the issue, developing solutions and or resolutions through dialogue, and voting on the result.


The situation we face
Massive development along the San Pablo corridor has been mandated by Plan Bay Area (by amendment to SB 375 in 2013). The effects of this development will be the following:
·        Building high income (market rate) housing, and little or no affordable housing.
·        These new buildings will be massive, out of context with the neighborhood.
·        The construction process will demolish many affordable housing units and small stores.
·        Driving local stores that form the neighborhood’s economic infrastructure out of business.
·        Clogging the streets with many new cars.
·        Inducing arbitrary rent increases that will drive many residents out of their homes.
·        Massive dislocation of the people (many old time residents) from the neighborhoods. 

We are not opposed to development, but it must be development that does not sacrifice or destroy the neighborhood, but rather serves it. There are areas in the neighborhoods of San Pablo Ave. that are blighted. But they should be developed to serve the neighborhood and not destroy it. 


To prevent neighborhood destruction at the hands of gentrifying development, we call on the residents to organize themselves.
  • ·        Our main demand is to get a place at the planning tables for each project that will affect us.
  • ·        To get a place at the planning tables, we should organize neighborhood assemblies that have the right to say what can get demolished in their neighborhood, and what cannot because they need it.
  • ·        The neighborhood assemblies are needed to send people to planning tables who know what the neighborhood needs and has decided.
  • ·        These assemblies should be centers wherein neighbors and residents discuss what we need and make policy for the neighborhood.
  • ·        They should develop to the point where they can demand that city officials come to the neighborhood meetins, rather than residents going to city meetings. That way, we can subject officials to dialogue, rather than being subjected to monologue status by city hearings.

Other neighborhood issues:
Along with the issues of housing, there are other issues that we as neighborhoods need to confront:
·        Air pollution from industry that fails to keep its fumes in check.
·        Maintaining hospitals in the city. The ones we have left are proposing to move out of town.
·        A moratorium on market rate housing,  until the city resident’s need for affordable housing has been met.
·        That the university be charged for the city services that it uses, so that the money can be spent on affordable housing.
·        That the money to be used to prepare the city for new high income residents be used instead for local public transportation, for instance, a network of small buses run on a non-profit basis that can take people all over town.

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