April 15, 2004
IN
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Houses in the Bayview neighborhood
of Arcata. Photos by Bob Doran.
Story & photos by BOB DORAN
Editor's note: Journalists
normally steer clear of activism. In this case, as you will see,
Bob Doran embraced the role and proved himself an effective community
organizer. Rather than not letting him write about the issue
he was embroiled in -- the call most newspapers would have made
-- we decided to do the opposite. What follows is an account
that, while hardly disinterested, is in our view nonetheless
journalistic.
IT BEGAN WITH A KNOCK AT THE
DOOR on Leap Day, February 29. It was Thea Gast, one of Arcata's
many former mayors, out canvassing for Measure G, the city's
utility tax. Once I had assured her that I planned to vote for
the tax, we shifted to small talk. She lives just a few blocks
from my house and hadn't realized I was a neighbor. I explained
that I had moved into Arcata fairly recently.
Then she asked a question. "Have
you looked at Humboldt State's new Master Plan?" I had heard
something about it, but admitted I didn't know the details. "The
university has plans for this neighborhood," she warned
me, suggesting that I take a look at the plan online.
It wasn't hard to find the HSU Master Plan Web
site; it was a mere click away from HSU's main page. Finding
the plan was a bit harder. There was some discussion of the planning
process, but the Master Plan itself was not exactly there. Instead,
there was a collection of documents with meeting notes and "presentations,"
PowerPoint slide shows turned into bulky digital files.
I downloaded
something called "Master Plan Planning Backgrounds and Scenarios"
and worked my way through pages full of photos and architectural
drawings, all with scant text, apparently designed as prompts
for a speaker.
There was no hint at what was
planned for our neighborhood until slide No. 17, a map of the
existing campus with "potential development sites"
shown in yellow, acquisitions in blue. Large red arrows
radiated outward from the center of the college grounds, reminiscent
of those maps you see in history books showing the movement of
troops during wartime. The most worrisome, an arrow that began
at 14th Street, pointed at a large block of blue reaching into
the residential area south of campus. My new home.
What they had in mind became
apparent a few slides later: An architect's drawing depicted
the neighborhood transformed into a "student residential
village," with most of the 15-block area filled with apartment
buildings "up to three stories high" accommodating
"eight-10 students per house." My home and my next-door
neighbors' homes were gone, replaced by what looked like a soccer
field covering a section of C Street.
A later draft would identify
the same drawing as a "campus residential village."
I would learn that the area was chosen, in part, to satisfy city
officials who want the university to take care of housing needs
caused by proposed growth -- and not just the housing needs of
students. The "village" would offer low-cost, high-density
housing for incoming faculty and staff, allowing the university
to recruit people who could not afford Arcata's soaring home
prices.
Raising
awareness
This most recent revision of
the Humboldt State University Master Plan began last October,
around the time my wife, Amy, and I were finally getting settled
in our new home in Arcata after living in McKinleyville for 20
years.
We were able to buy what seemed
the ideal place with help from my mom, who moved into the mother-in-law
unit in back. It was within walking distance of town, important
since my mother does not drive, and the proximity to the campus
made it easy for her to enroll in the university's low-cost Over-60
Program. At the age of 83 she became a student at HSU, my alma
mater.
We found that we weren't just
moving into a house, we were moving into an established neighborhood.
Our next-door neighbors, Serge Scherbatskoy and Renee Menge,
welcomed us with open arms. Tom Simon, who lives behind us, baked
us an apple pie. A potluck at Scherbatskoy and Menge's over the
holidays gave us the chance to meet more of our neighbors.
When I discovered the university's
plan, I printed out one of the maps and the architect's drawing
of the "residential village" and shared them with the
people on our block.
Most knew nothing about the
revision of the Master Plan; some knew a little. Menge, who serves
on the city of Arcata's Design Review Commission, said that
converting this area into high-density housing was not at all
in line with Arcata's General Plan. She mentioned that we are
included in something called the "Bayview Neighborhood Conservation
Area," a portion of the city's plan designed to "assure
that new construction, modifications or alterations of noteworthy
structuresare harmonious with the existing character of the neighborhood."
Everyone agreed we had to do
something to let the university know we were not going to let
our neighborhood be transformed, even if it wasn't going to happen
overnight.
Quizzing
Schulz
A call to the university's public
relations branch steered me to Master Plan point man Bob Schulz,
head of plant operations, recently renamed "facilities management."
I arranged a meeting.
A few days later we settled
in on either side of Schulz' desk in the recently remodeled Feuerwerker
house. A licensed architect, he took over as director of facilities
management at Humboldt State University about two years ago,
replacing Ken Combs. It wasn't an easy time to step into the
job. The university was embroiled in a battle with the city over
the proposed Behavioral and Social Sciences building. With guidance
from newly hired HSU President Rollin Richmond [photo below right] , the building was moved to a slightly different
location and redesigned to reduce its visibility.
"We moved it in part to
generate improved relations with the city of Arcata and the neighbors,"
said Schulz, admitting that the battle was rough. "I was
kind of startled at the level of vitriol that some community
members pointed at the university. I was startled at how many
names I've heard Ken Combs called."
The
last time the HSU Master Plan was overhauled was 1990. That plan
showed a major extension of the campus' boundary east of campus
with residential complexes and other buildings integrated into
the woods, a carryover from the 1970 plan. "That was a potential
acquisition of forest real estate," Schulz explained, property
owned by the McDowell family. The idea was ultimately abandoned.
Schulz recalled a recent exchange
between one of the university's architects, Susan Painter, and
a student over the earlier expansion plan. The student, Schulz
said, "was pretty adamant that trees are precious resources
[and] asked, `Why in the world was the university talking about
building in the forest?'
"Susan, probably trying
to be witty, said, `You've got neighbors to the south, and frankly
nobody speaks for the trees.' The student looked at her kind
of fiercely and said, `They do on this campus.'
"And I think that's a true
statement," Schulz said. "I think it's fair to say
we have a consensus opinion, certainly among our students, that
tearing down that second-growth redwood forest as a way of developing
new buildings is not what they want to see."
Schulz made clear that the "campus
residential village" would be intended primarily for faculty
and staff, although "there could [also] be graduate students
or married students with families; we won't prohibit anyone from
being in there.
"The whole idea is to develop
substantially more housing opportunities very, very close to
the campus, instead of everybody having to get in a car to drive
to campus."
He emphasized that the university
had no intention of seizing the neighborhood through condemnation.
"The idea is, as people are interested in selling their
property -- willing sellers, we would buy individual properties
as they come on the market. We're not talking about taking it
from anybody, not talking about eminent domain."
At the same time, he acknowledged
that the university's vision for the neighborhood was not sharply
focused.
"Instead of these being
single-family houses, what they become is structures that look
like single-family houses, but have three, four or more units
inside of them. They could be condominiums; they could be for
ownership, they could be apartment style. We don't know. I want
to be honest, [this development] has no more thought than what
you're seeing in the block diagram for the addition for the library."
Getting
going
In the days that followed I
would discuss these ill-concieved plans with my neighbors,
especially with Scherbatskoy and Menge. We knew we had to do
something to get our neighborhood off the plan, but what?
Advice came unexpectedly while
I was working on an unrelated story for the Journal. Talking
with Randall O'Toole of the Oregon-based Thoreau Institute, who
came here for a forum on the local retail economy, I asked about
his background as a community activist. He told me the story
of his battle against a redevelopment plan in his Portland neighborhood.
Working with his neighbors, he successfully fought a government
plan to replace his residential neighborhood with high-density
low-income housing.
How did they do it? They put
together a simple leaflet describing the impact of the plan and
invited those concerned to a neighborhood meeting. The show of
unity that followed was effective enough to halt the plan, at
least in his part of town.
A
leaflet and a meeting? That shouldn't be too hard to pull together.
After a sidewalk conference with Scherbatskoy and Menge, it was
decided that they would contact Arcata City Councilmember Connie
Stewart and see if she could make arrangements for us to use
the D Street Neighborhood Center, right around the corner, for
the first meeting of a group we dubbed the Bayview Neighborhood
Alliance. Stewart got us the hall for a meeting to take place
just over a week away on a Monday night.
I spent a Sunday afternoon working
on the leaflet, a one-page affair illustrated with a drawing
of the expanded campus on the front; the architect's sketch of
the proposed "village" filled the inside. I printed
out a first draft, took it next door and edited it with Scherbatskoy
-- who by the way is the owner of Brio Breadworks -- over a glass
of wine. After juggling some graphics and rewriting some of the
text, we were ready to print -- and then to blanket the neighborhood
with an invitation to gather and "speak your mind."
Distribution was split with
three other families; Amy and I would cover the four-block area
closest to campus. Going door-to-door on a Wednesday afternoon,
we found just a few people at home. Alma Vincent, a silver-haired
elderly woman, set aside her needlework to talk with us briefly
about the university's prior Master Plan, the one that called
for extending into the woods east of campus. "Back then
they talked about only coming as far as 14th Street. They might
have to cut a tree, but that's better than taking my house."
Vincent's
next-door neighbor, Hollyanne Iska, told us that she had lived
in her house for 52 years. "Alma moved in the year before
me," she said, explaining that both their houses were built
for them by Scotty Rylander, whose son Roy lives in the house
next to Alma's. When it came to the Master Plan she seemed resigned.
"It's the university. They do whatever they want,"
she said, asking with a shrug, "What can we do?" Amy
responded with passion, "We can at least stand up and tell
them what we think. That's why we're having this meeting. If
we stand together we're stronger."
A
testy meeting
When the day came for the meeting
at the Neighborhood Center, March 22, Iska was the first to walk
in the door, aside from the organizers. She immediately gravitated
to two tables in the back where Winnie Trump [photo at right] ,
a retired schoolteacher, was setting up a display of photos she
shot of around 100 individual Bayview homes, all mounted on poster
board. Trump has lived on D Street with her husband, Dan, since
1960. They saw the freeway expansion take all the houses on the
other side of D. They also successfully fought a university plan
in the '70s that called for replacing their block with a parking
lot. Trump and Iska swapped stories as they got to know each
other for the first time after living just blocks apart for more
than four decades.
The crowd swelled as 7 p.m.
approached. By the time Scherbatskoy and I began introductions
at 7:15 there were 70 people in the hall, a few of them city
officials, but predominantly neighbors who saw the flier and
wanted to learn more about the plan. We were thrilled at the
turnout.
We had invited Schulz to give
his PowerPoint presentation. [photo
below left] He worked his way through
explanations about why increasing the number of students to 12,000
(from the current 7,000) is important for the university
to "remain relevant." He then provided details of several
expansion "scenarios" with differing arrangements of
new buildings and parking structures. It took him a while to
get to the real issue, the one thing all the proposed scenarios
had in common: the university's long-range plan for the Bayview
neighborhood. As before, he readily admitted that the details
on how the plan might work were not really thought out. "This
is just a quick sketch by the architects," he said defensively,
referring to the drawing of the village.
"I've had a lot of questions,"
he continued, "about how ownership will happen, how development
will happen, what are the numbers. I don't have the answers to
any of those questions."
He explained that development
might follow "the Santa Cruz model," as in "a
dense, beach-town type community."
"You mean like Isla Vista?"
an audience member interjected, making reference to what is perhaps
California's most notorious high-density university housing project,
adjacent to the University of California Santa Barbara campus.
The remark elicited laughter from the crowd, but not from Schulz,
who tried to put the presentation back on track. But a question
about high-rise student housing again put him on the defensive.
"This is not student housing," he insisted. "We're
talking about providing 2,000 additional beds for students on
campus, but this [village] is not that."
My
wife, Amy, said assertively. "We really don't care whether
it's student housing or who's going to live there. You're talking
about bulldozing our houses. We don't care if it's for
staff. This is our neighborhood. These are our homes."
As he continued, the crowd peppered
him with questions. Who will decide if this plan will go forward?
Schulz explained that it is ultimately up to the California State
University Board of Trustees. But before that, he added, plan
approval is up to HSU's president: Rollin Richmond.
"You say it's up to the
trustees," someone said in the front row. "What do
they need to hear to know that this neighborhood is not available
to the university?" The crowd applauded, then Scherbatskoy
stood up to ask what would prove to be the key question. "How
closely is this bundled with the Master Plan?" he wanted
to know. "Can you separate it from the Master Plan and deal
with this [housing] issue separately?"
Schulz conceded that that was
possible. "We could actually say we're not concerned with
housing in Arcata, but we've been told by the city that we probably
should be concerned about housing in the city of Arcata."
Returning to the issue of the
campus expanding into Arcata's residential districts, Schulz
contended that it was something that began when the college came
to town in 1913. "For its entire existence the campus has
been expanding through the footprint of Arcata because there's
no other place to go."
More questions and comments
followed. Not one person spoke in favor the village plan. After
a break we turned the floor over to Stewart, of the City Council,
and Larry Oetker from Arcata's planning department.
Oetker spoke about the Arcata
General Plan: 2020, a document finalized two years ago that foresees
a much different future for Bayview. "This [campus village]
concept was never included or envisioned with any of the city's
plans," Oetker said. "The city plans are to retain
this neighborhood as it is, as a residential low-density neighborhood.
No documents that I have seen show any conversion of this into
a high-density, three-story neighborhood."
Stewart talked about how she
sees the university as something akin to a second city adjacent
to Arcata -- while the two sometimes have different needs and
goals, it's important for them to learn to work together.
She
introduced Alex Stillman -- another former Arcata mayor -- who
suggested that since the Bayview neighborhood has a number of
historic homes, residents might try to get the area placed on
the Historic Register -- a designation that would provide greater
protections than the current Neighborhood Conservation Area.
As we walked out into the night,
I talked with a few of my neighbors. The common feeling was that
the meeting was a success: People knew more about the university's
plans, and while no one assumed we had changed Schulz's mind,
at least he was aware of the resistance growing in our neighborhood.
With a rising sense of empowerment, we agreed to keep fighting.
Coming
to a head
The next Sunday, March 28, a
dozen of us met at Scherbatskoy and Menge's to hammer out a battle
plan. Someone had already turned the dozens of information forms
we collected at our first meeting into the beginnings of a database
with names, addresses, e-mails and phone numbers. Someone else
agreed to look up ownership details on all the other houses in
our area to show that there are far more owner-occupants than
absentee landlords.
Mark Wheetley [photo at right] ,
who lives down the street from us, suggested that the city and
the university go through a process, in partnership with the
community, to look into public and private sector opportunities
for expansion. He pointed to a possible site for off-campus housing
in the Northtown area just over the pedestrian bridge, where
deteriorating high-density housing like Humboldt Greens could
be redeveloped. He said there was also undeveloped land near
campus like the Franke property, a former mill site below Arcata
High, or another old mill site on the other side of the St. Louis
Road bridge.
Suzanne
and Ned Forsyth [in photo
at left], who live two doors down
the street, shared their idea for something they called "The
Charm Offensive," essentially a letter-writing campaign
with each household drafting a personal note to President Richmond
so that he will "think of our neighborhood as unique homes
filled with families leading meaningful lives, instead of as
real estate."
Meanwhile, Stewart was drafting
another sort of letter, one to President Richmond to be presented
at the City Council's next meeting and signed by the mayor. It
asked that Bayview be removed from the Master Plan while inviting
the university to work with the city to explore options for addressing
housing issues in some other way.
Expectations were high as we
headed into another tumultuous week. On Friday, April 2, Trump
called to say that a small meeting she had arranged with Schulz
was getting bigger. The entire Bayview neighborhood was invited
to talk with members of the university's Master Plan Committee
the following Wednesday. As soon as we hung up, I sent out an
e-mail announcement, which led to a new subgroup producing another
flier, this time delivered to an even wider area.
On Monday, April 5, Connie
Stewart and Ann King Smith, an Arcata planning commissioner who
also happens to own a home in Bayview, met with Richmond. They
were rebuffed when they asked him to reconsider plans for the
Bayview neighborhood. Nonetheless, at its regular meeting two
days later, the Arcata City Council was to discuss Stewart's
letter formally urging Richmond to remove the Bayview neighborhood
from the HSU Master Plan.
By chance or perhaps by design
we had two significant meetings at exactly the same time. We
were torn, not sure which was more important. We needed to let
others on the Master Plan Committee, besides Schulz, know how
we felt, but we also wanted to make sure the city was on our
side. Scherbatskoy and Menge favored a bold stance at city hall,
in part for the press, perhaps picketing as Richmond entered
the building with signs saying "Stop HSU's Land Grab!"
Then, just a few hours before
the council meeting, Stewart met with Richmond again -- he had
changed his position. We were off the plan.
What changed his mind? Perhaps
it was the charming -- but forceful -- letter hand-delivered
by Trump Wednesday morning. She reiterated her opposition from
the point of view of a retiree, emphasizing the "positive
neighborhood atmosphere" and the potential impact on families
and on the value of everyone's homes.
Before the 7 p.m. council meeting
I put together a bouquet of flowers from Amy's garden and Menge's,
presenting it to President Richmond just before he announced
that the housing plan for Bayview was off the Master Plan "for
the time being." The crowd applauded. Connie cried tears
of joy. Bayview residents, myself included, walked away elated.
But we didn't walk home. Instead
we sped up to the campus where members of the Master Plan Committee
were meeting with over 100 other Bayview residents. Some were
learning for the first time about the university's plans. Schulz
was delivering his slide show as if nothing had changed. Ironically,
when we walked in the door he had reached the slide showing the
so-called campus residential village. Hands shot up and he was
pelted with questions. Hadn't we just heard that the village
plan was off the table?
At that point President Richmond
entered the room and repeated some of the speech he had delivered
to the council, but with a few variations. He admonished those
of us who had led the opposition to the plan, saying that we
had overreacted. He restated his promise to "take away this
irritant," but this time he seemed to say that he would
remove Bayview from the Master Plan only if we could find him
some alternative place for a housing development.
Schulz, who apparently did not
agree with Richmond's decision to alter the plan, did not back
down. Despite the seemingly good news from Richmond, the mood
turned ugly, with someone accusing Schulz of arrogance for not
taking the community more into account. There were those who
spoke of working together to solve a common problem, a lack of
low-cost housing, but many of us left wondering what might happen
next. Were we really off the plan? Was the battle over? We weren't
sure.
Seeking
clarity
One thing was clear. The sweetness
and light story that ran in the Times-Standard Thursday
morning under the headline, "Neighborhood acquisition nixed
from HSU plan" told only part of the story.
I called President Richmond's
office that day and arranged an appointment that afternoon. I
began by telling him I was still wondering just what it was I
had heard the night before. I wasn't sure if our neighborhood
really was off the HSU Master Plan.
His response, "You heard
that, for the time being, the university is going to try to find
an alternative way to accommodate the housing needs of the university
over the next few decades by working with the city of Arcata
and possibly some developers -- we're a fan of working with local
people -- to see if we can find other alternative
areas within the Arcata region that will satisfy our needs for
somewhere in the region of 100 to 150 residences, to satisfy
what we think will be the turnover in faculty within the next
decade."
While describing the plan to
extend HSU's campus boundary southward as "a natural idea"
he emphasized that "this suggestion came from our master
planners; it didn't come from somebody in the university -- it
certainly didn't come from me. All that I said to them was that
I worry about housing; we have to do something in the long term
to meet the housing needs of our faculty."
Did the university recognize
the potential for resistance from the neighborhood? "Sure.
It's always difficult to predict how people are going to respond
to plans. If we proposed to come in there with bulldozers and
bulldoze all those houses and build high-rise apartments, I would
understand [your resistance] completely, but what we proposed
to do was to slowly acquire houses as they came on the market,
at fair market values, and use that land as ways to provide housing
for faculty and staff."
He conceded that other sites
for housing were "not systematically explored," adding,
"We are going to do that now. We're going to work hard at
it. I would like to see the city and the university work much
more closely together in ways that I think will benefit both
the city and the university."
What happens next? The Master
Plan Committee's timetable calls for finalizing a plan by May
6, when a draft will be presented at a public forum at the Arcata
Community Center. Is that enough time to come up with some new
plan for housing? Or is off-campus housing off the table for
now?
"I will be straight with
you guys -- I'm hopeful," Richmond said. "In fact,
Connie Stewart and I have arranged a meeting to explore some
of these possibilities locally. I think that the odds of coming
to a solution soon are quite good at this point. And with the
cooperation of the City Council my guess is that we'll have an
answer in a month."
If not?
"I'm not interested in
having a battle [in front of the] trustees, or with you and your
colleagues in this community. I'd rather that we get down there
[before the trustees] and agree that this [university]
is an important institution for California and especially for
this area. We would all like to see it prosper and we'd like
to see it fit in with this community.
"If we can't solve [the
housing problem] within a relatively short period of time, then
I think that we need to sit down and say, `All right, can we
move forward with the Master Plan without a housing component?'
And the answer to that is probably yes. Should we? Probably not.
"But, I'm convinced that
the city and the community will work together with us to help
us [find] a solution, whether it happens six months from now
or three months from now. So yes, I am perfectly willing to go
forward with a Master Plan that doesn't have a housing component.
But we still need to solve the problem -- and it is as much your
problem as it is our problem."
So it seemed we had won this
battle after all -- at least "for the time being."
As I set about the arduous task of retelling the story, an e-mail
came from Suzanne Forsyth, initiator of the charm offensive.
She had seen President Richmond on the TV news repeating his
complaint that we had overreacted. I dare say it hurt her feelings.
"Somehow HSU never did
get that we are not only concerned about ourselves and our life
spans here, but about the future look and character of Arcata,"
she wrote.
"They still don't understand
that replacing unique neighborhoods with uniform villages is
not going to be any better of an idea in 10 or 15 years than
it is now. I hope you say something about that in your article
-- that we are not just thinking about what's good for our own
particular selves and homes, but what's good for Arcata and hence,
I would say, for HSU.
"And wasn't that a nice
day in the sun yesterday!" she added.
Yes, it was.
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