Strawberry Creek Daylighting

Josh Mukhopadhyay

Background:

This posting summarizes several articles that discuss the possibility of daylighting Strawberry Creek in Downtown Berkeley. I specifically avoided using information from the various interest groups, such as Friends of Strawberry Creek Plaza, to focus on the marginally more objective coverage from the SF Chronicle.

Strawberry Creek flows down from the hills above UC Berkeley’s campus to the San Francisco Bay. The creek’s two branches meet on lower campus, near the Valley Life Sciences Building, and the creek continues through the city on its way to the sea. In the early 1900s, practically the entire watercourse was diverted into culverts and covered over. The culverts mostly run under Allston Way, though in the early 1980s a stretch between Sacramento Street and Bonar Street was returned to its original channel, allowing the creek reach the surface at Strawberry Creek Park. In the 1990s a number of community groups began advocating for a similar daylighting effort along Center Street between Oxford Street and Shattuck Avenue. This project is known as Strawberry Creek Plaza.

Summary:

A review of the Strawberry Creek daylighting effort suggests the issue is more complex than presented to us by Patrick Kennedy. While Mr. Kennedy casually suggested that the Strawberry Creek Plaza would be too expensive and people who want to see the creek can simply ‘walk up a block to campus,’ this ignores the possibility that the daylighting project would create benefits not available on the lower campus area upstream of the culvert. With respect to the cost issue, Mr. Kennedy mentioned the project could cost ‘tens of millions’ of dollars. However in 2004, Berkeley Public Works Director Rene Cardinaux estimated a much more modest project cost of $3-4 million. Furthermore, the daylighting would allow the city to avoid a $1 million repair job to the culvert where Strawberry Creek currently flows under Allston Way.

Many Center Street merchants are on record as opposing the project because it would hinder access to their stores, but a similar project in San Luis Obispo suggests that a well-executed daylighting plan can greatly enhance the local ambiance and improve the business climate. Strawberry Creek Plaza supporters and a few city council members visited San Luis Obispo several years ago and came away impressed. There are also daylighting projects in places ranging from Seattle to Seoul that support the notion that Strawberry Creek Plaza could increase property values and business sales.

With regards to alternative funding sources, we can look back to how Strawberry Creek Park was financed. Money from a 1974 parks and recreation bond measure was used for that 3.7 acre project. If the ownership group behind the prospective Charles Hotel has agreed to support a Strawberry Creek Plaza proposal, perhaps they could further provide funding or promote a similar bond measure in exchange for necessary entitlements.

There is yet another benefit to daylighting; for the past several years the city and private landowners have been struggling over how to deal with repairing the miles of century-old culverts underlying Berkeley. The city argues that since the culverts run through private property, the owners must pay for culvert repairs. The property owners vehemently disagree, claiming that since the culverts provide a public drainage service, the city should pony up the funds. To the extent that Strawberry Creek flows under city-owned streets in Downtown Berkeley, the greater culvert repair issue is not relevant to the Downtown Area Plan. However, if the Strawberry Creek Plaza project were to succeed, it might convince homeowners elsewhere in the city who have culverts on their private property to consider daylighting as well. Regardless of how the repair fees are shared between the city and private homeowners, daylighting is cheaper than digging up a crumbling culvert, repairing it, and reburying the whole mess.

Compounding the repair cost conflict, in 1989 Berkeley passed a law making it illegal for landowners to expand or rebuild any structure within thirty feet of a creek, above ground or otherwise. This policy, when combined with the city’s position of culvert repair cost attribution, makes for an understandably unpopular pairing. The ordinance has since been amended to address some of the homeowner complaints, but this does not deal with the repair cost issue, which will loom ever larger as the culverts continue to crumble away.

Unfortunately for daylighting proponents, neither the city nor UC Berkeley appear very interested in the project, whatever its cost. Mayor Bates is on record as saying that daylighting, if it should happen at all, should occur on the stretch between City Hall and Berkeley High School on Allston way between Milvia Street and Martin Luther King, Junior Way because there are no businesses located there. There are understandable concerns that Strawberry Creek Plaza would soon be ‘colonized’ by the homeless, since its combination of open space, access to transportation, and proximity to business establishments would be attractive to panhandlers and those looking for a place to make camp. This concern played out long at People’s Park, and the University’s plan to clean up the park, along with the City Council’s recently unveiled their ‘Public Commons for Everyone’ initiative, should be closely followed.

Sources:

Patrick Hoge, Creek considerations; City mulls logistics, costs of opening up covered waterway, S.F. Chron., May 24, 2004, at B1.

Patrick Hoge, Who owns the creeks, culverts? Homeowners, city fight over costly question, S.F. Chron., March 23, 2004, at B1.

Carolyn Jones, Creeks proposal making waves; Environmentalists, homeowners clash over proposed rules, May 30, 2006, S.F. Chron., at B1.

Carolyn Jones, UC Berkeley seeks public’s views to plan new path for Peoples’ Park, S.F. Chron., January 13, 2007, at B1.

John King, Berkeley’s Center Street at the center of redevelopment reveries, S.F. Chron., May 15, 2007, at E1.

Katherine Redding, Water Warriors; United Creeks Council quietly brings streams to light, S.F. Chron., April 4, 2003, at EB1.