The City’s Wealth and the City’s Limits

Abstract

The history of housing policy in Berkeley over the past thirty-five years provides a case study in the limits that state government can place on local government efforts to increase social equity. In 1976, a group of visionary planners and activists wrote The Cities’ Wealth: Programs for Community Economic Control in Berkeley, California. Berkeley’s progressives won control of the city government and tried to implement the proposed housing policies, which included strong rent controls to shield tenants from rising rents and using taxes and exactions to divert part of the city’s increasing real estate values toward production of nonprofit affordable housing. Conservative antitax activists and real estate interests were able to use appeals to the state courts, lobbying the state legislature and statewide initiatives to weaken or block many of the progressive programs.