Editor’s note: This is Part Three of our series on how Adena Ishii came out of nowhere to win the race for mayor of Berkeley. Parts One and Two are here and here.
A sympathetic press played a major role in Adena Ishii’s victory in the Berkeley mayor’s race.
The most conspicuous example of this support was the joint endorsement she received on Oct. 31 from the East Bay Times and The Mercury News (the two Bay Area News Group papers share an editorial board), an accolade that her campaign amply exploited. The only other paper that endorsed in the 2024 Berkeley mayoral race was the Daily Californian, which gave its nod to Harrison on October 30. The Daily Cal endorsement of Harrison deserves to be cited at length, because its measured tone highlights the imprudence of the EBT/Merc editorial.
The Daily Cal endorsement of Harrison
The editorial board of the independent, student-run newspaper began by observing that the Berkeley council’s response to “a year of international conflict has brought to the fore issues of transparency over [its] proceedings” and caused “many citizens [to] have lost faith in the way our leaders are carrying out their duties.” Given this context, the board wrote, “we need a leader who will first recognize that the city faces them, and second come equipped with the experience needed to tackle them. Kate Harrison checks both boxes.” The board disagreed with Harrison’s decision “to step down in the face of adversity” but “hope[d] that [her] recognition of the flawed system she worked within shows a commitment to reforming it if elected.”
As to Harrison’s rivals, the Daily Cal “admired” Ishii’s “community work, ambitious goals, and truly progressive platforms,” but “could not ignore her lack of experience in City Council.” The challenges facing the city, including a new city manager and a tight budget, required “institutional knowledge” that she lacks.
Hahn, by contrast, has the knowledge. She “has accumulated an impressive eight years of service on council.” What she lacks is insight: “Hahn appeared to be too absorbed in the status quo of the city council to see—or much less admit—that the current state of Berkeley’s governance is in dire need of something different.”
The Daily Cal board viewed Harrison “as a sort of middle ground: Her experience…lends her a degree of understanding about Berkeley’s processes, while her commitment to fresh ideas opposes” the current “sense of complacency” on the council. The editorial concluded by listing what it thought Harrison would do as mayor: “continue to pursue community models of transitional housing,” help students qualify for below-market rate housing, provide housing before sweeping homeless encampments, improve Berkeley’s vacancy-ridden downtown by effectively “working for a more diverse and higher density district and then “implement those efforts city-wide.”
The East Bay Times/Mercury News endorsement of Ishii
The EBT/Merc editorial was presumably written by Opinion Editor Dan Borenstein. He alone interviews candidates seeking an endorsement from the two papers. On November 30, I emailed Borenstein asking if he constitutes the entire editorial board of the two papers; he hasn’t replied.
Like the Daily Cal, the EBT/Merc began by commenting on Berkeley’s troubles. But where the Daily Cal cited the loss of public confidence in the council’s accountability, due to the body’s evasive response to “international conflict,” Borenstein cited staff departures, councilmember meddling, and fiscal pressures:
Berkeley is struggling to retain city workers, both rank and file and key top administrators. Even the city manager left unexpectedly.
The problem has been exacerbated by some councilmembers who have placed excessive demands on staff and overstepped their authority.
At a time when important city revenues are flattening while expenses, especially in personnel-related costs, continue to rise, the city needs elected leaders who will stay in their lanes and prioritize balancing the books and providing foundational city service.
In light of those concerns, the EBT/Merc endorsed Ishii. “We were impressed by her temperament, desire to bridge compromises and recognition that the council needs to rein in its focus.”
To support this assessment, it offered two examples: “‘[S]he rejects some councilmembers’ past suggestions of severely cutting police funding, but she’s willing to look at creative ways to more efficiently deliver public protection. And she wants to expand housing throughout the city, but she’s mindful of the potential fire risks in parts of the hills.”
Neither the EBT/Merc editorial board’s concerns about Berkeley government nor its assessment of Ishii’s qualifications hold up under scrutiny.
Public safety
Contrary to the claim that she “rejects some councilmembers’ past suggestions of severely cutting police fund,” Ishii told the Green Party that she wanted to go “Full Steam Ahead on Reimagining Public Safety,” the plan that was initially proposed in June 2020 by Arreguín; introduced at the council by Councilmember Robinson; and approved by the council in July 2020 on an 8-0-1 vote (Councilmember Davila abstained).
The goal was to shift police work that does not need an armed response to civilians and to create a new Department of Community Safety that would oversee a range of initiatives. The ambitious program would be rolled out over a number of years. Ultimately, the police department’s budget would be halved.
When the next phase of the plan came up for a vote in 2022, Councilmembers Lori Droste and Rashi Kesarwani voted No, “citing concerns about whether the city would be able to appropriately staff and fund so many new initiatives.”
If Ishii expressed reservations about the plan approved by the council majority, I haven’t found them.
Wildfire danger and more housing in the hills
Also problematic is the EBT/Merc claim that Ishii’s has a “mindful” position on fire danger and more housing in the Berkeley hills. Her response to the Berkeley Democratic Club’s question about the subject tells a different story. (The brackets in the text appear in the original. Just so readers would know which side the club was on, it corrected what it deemed inaccuracies in Hahn’s and Harrison’s replies, but edited Ishii’s replies only for clarification.)
5. Do you support efforts to end exclusionary zoning and what does that mean to you? What if any restrictions on new housing do you feel are appropriate in the Berkeley hills and in other neighborhoods in Berkeley that have a particularly exclusionary history?
I absolutely believe that we need to get rid of exclusionary zoning in the city. I’m a big supporter of [ending exclusionary zoning], and I’ve been following missing middle [housing legislation] as it’s been going through the Council. There are many folks who came out from District 6 and District 7 who were unhappy with changes to housing [policy]. They stated that they were concerned about fire danger in the hills. I recognize that fire danger is absolutely a concern. There are many folks who will be unable to get down from the hills during a fire, and that would be an absolutely horrible disaster.
And then, a string of caveats.
At the same time, I think that many folks don’t realize that the number of units that would actually be created up in the hills is actually a lot smaller than they expect. Many folks I’ve spoken to have talked about high rises and thousands of people moving up into the Berkeley Hills. That’s not actually what we were talking about there, so I think it’s important to make sure that folks understand what does it actually look like? What is the impact of making changes? I am interested to see what the evacuation plan looks like and have more information to know what the actual impact on the hills with more housing; but generally I am supportive of allowing more housing to be built and not having too strict restrictions, because I think it does really show how we have continued to discriminate when it comes to housing.
The question isn’t whether, as the EBT/Merc contended, Ishii “is mindful of the potential fire risks in the hills.” She said: “I recognize that fire danger is absolutely a concern.” It’s whether and how she connected that recognition of that danger to permitting more housing in the area.
In fact, she pushed back against any such connection, ascribing hill residents’ opposition to more housing to ignorance. In her view, their fears are unfounded, because they don’t understand “what we were talking about there.”
Her opinion might be more persuasive if she’d specified how much new housing in the hills is actually permitted by the Missing Middle Housing proposal, and how much onsite parking the proposal requires. She showed no familiarity with the maxed-out parking conditions in the hills, and for that matter, in many other parts of Berkeley where the streets are narrow, and the original builders didn’t expect households to own two or more cars, or to park any of them on the street. Many older, single-family homes and fourplexes have a garage next to or behind the residential building.
Most telling of all is Ishii’s reflexive declamation of the Yimby supply-side catechism. She supports more housing in general and deems “too strict restrictions” as evidence of “exclusionary zoning.” The unstated, accompanying syllogism: greater supply lowers housing costs; low-density zoning raises those costs; thus, building more housing in the Berkeley hills will make housing there affordable to low-income households.
I doubt it, given the cost of land, for starters. In any case, it’s hard to see how greater density in the Berkeley hills, with the area’s narrow, winding streets, or for that matter anywhere, results in greater safety in a wildfire.
But what really needs debunking is the notion that low-density zoning is “exclusionary.” All zoning excludes some uses; that’s the point of zoning. What Yimbys such as Ishii and the Berkeley Democratic Club mean by “exclusionary” is “discriminatory.”
If low-density zoning were discriminatory, why in the mid-twentieth century did Black households flock to the southwest Berkeley neighborhood around San Pablo Park, as documented by Brown University historian Robert Self in his magisterial 2003 book, American Babylon?
The answer: that’s the only part of town where they were allowed to purchase homes. What barred them from other neighborhoods were the racist practices of the real estate and mortgage banking industries that were advising federal agencies—the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration, and the National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae).
More generally, Black people suffered from ongoing employment, entrepreneurial, and educational discrimination that severely limited their economic opportunities, and thus their incomes and wealth. When they heroically managed to overcome those barriers, many of them chose to buy and to live in single-family homes.
In Berkeley, zoning alone wasn’t—and isn’t—the problem.
The EBT/Merc smears of Harrison and Hahn.
Having hyped Ishii, Borenstein proceeded to bash her two major opponents. He prefaced his attacks with a general comparison:
We were impressed by [Ishii’s] temperament, desire to bridge compromises and recognition that the council needs to rein in its focus.
That stands in sharp contrast to the two other major mayoral candidates: former Councilmember Kate Harrison and current Councilmember Sophie Hahn.
Conversations with about ten current and former city employees made clear to us that both candidates have treated staff poorly and bypassed the city manager to directly make demands on city staff.
Borenstein never detailed these accusations. Instead, he proceeded to berate Harrison.
It’s mindboggling that Harrison is running for mayor. She abruptly quit her elected City Council seat in January after reading off a perplexing list of grievances. Now she wants a seat on the same council that she just declared she couldn’t stomach, this time holding the gavel.
The link takes you to a Berkeleyside tweet that features an image of Harrison’s press release, so tightly cropped that it’s incomprehensible. (Here’s a link to the entire text, as posted by the Daily Planet.)
Contrary to the EBT/Merc, what’s perplexing is not Harrison’s resignation statement, which was perfectly lucid, but her decision to resign from the council.
For all its vitriol, the criticism of Harrison was mild compared with the attack on Hahn:
[S]he has wielded power with an inflated sense of self. Barry Fike, a retired Berkeley teacher and former president of the teachers’ union, described to us and in an op-ed for Berkeleyside a meeting in which Hahn disclosed that she had been the driving force behind the departure of multiple city employees. Fike’s account buttressed what we had heard from others who didn’t want their names used for fear of retaliation.
Hahn told me that Borenstein never asked her to respond to the accusations. If he had asked, she might have observed that Berkeley has a city manager form of government. To blame staff dissatisfaction on one councilmember is to ignore the record of former Berkeley City Manager Dee Williams-Ridley, who resigned in May after eight years in the office and an hour after the council was scheduled to meet in closed session to evaluate her performance.
In a June 2023 report covering fiscal years 2018-2023, the Berkeley City Auditor’s office found that “more employees left the City than were hired in each year of the audit period, contributing to the staff shortage,” but that the town lacked “a clear strategy to improve retention”; that “[s]urveyed employees reported dissatisfaction with workloads, professional development opportunities, and communication and support from city leadership”; and that “the City lacked reliable data to monitor trends and address staff shortages.” Forty-eight percent of the respondents to a staff survey disagreed with the statement “City management cares about employees.”
In light of these findings and the immediate context of Williams-Ridley’s resignation, the EBT/Merc’s observation that “even the city manager left unexpectedly” is comical.
Similarly unfounded is Borenstein’s claim that Berkeley’s “revenues are flattening.” The city’s Annual Comprehensive Financial Reports, which are prepared by the city’s Finance Department, show that revenues rose in fiscal years 2021-2023 (the report is published each January). See here, here, and here.
Another indication that the EBT/Mercwas shooting in the dark is its call for “elected leaders who will prioritize balancing the books.” The appeal is inane. California state law requires cities to balance their budgets; a city’s estimated revenues must equal its estimated expenditures. Berkeley’s books are always balanced.
Ishii’s campaign flaunted the EBT/Merc endorsement on its x page, posting the headline and a link to the entire piece. Then it had its canvassers drop a two-sided reprint of the scurrilous editorial at voters’ homes.
