Tour de Emeryville

Josh Mukhopadhyay

Background:

Since Emeryville and the Bay Street development have been such frequent topics of discussion, I wanted to go take a look for myself. Fortunately I’m enrolled in a city planning course on economic development and just today we happened to get a tour from the city’s community economic development coordinator, Michelle DeGuzman.

Impressions:

For most of the 20th century Emeryville was a dumping ground for what Oakland and Berkeley didn’t want on their premises. Brothels, card clubs, and dirty industries like pigment manufacturing and asphalt production predominated the landscape. The city is tiny – less than one square mile – and their efforts to grow by filling in the bay have been stopped short by the BCDC.

With a population of about 13k, the city is now struggling to respect its blue collar past while moving forward and attracting more well-educated and affluent residents. Emeryville has an inclusionary zoning ordinance that requires 20% mod/low/very low income units for rental and ownership housing if the project is 30 units or more. This will soon be modified to reduce rental affordability requirements to 15%, but requiring 6% to be low/very low.

Practically the entire city is enclosed within two redevelopment areas that would at one time have qualified as brownfields. As such, money funneled to the city through the EPA pursuant to CERCLA requirements has been a huge driver for cleanup and subsequent economic development. The redevelopment areas and special powers that designation offers the city are key factors in Emeryville’s revitalization. One huge distinction between the Emeryville model and Downtown Berkeley is that the former occupies a redevelopment area while the latter does not. Without getting too involved in the legal details, redevelopment designation completely changes the city’s tax incentives and greatly expands their development authority.

Redevelopment agencies are able to reap property tax benefits unconstrained by Proposition 13 and plow that money back into physical improvements, often working in partnership with private developers. The redevelopment agency also uses its funds to cost-share on aesthetic improvements like façade replacement and street lighting.

As an example of the redevelopment agency’s role in the development process we can examine the Bay Bridge Center, located on the Emeryville/Oakland border near 40^th & San Pablo Ave. The site contains a Home Depot and other stores as well as the Bridgewater Apartments. The project was developed by Calletus out of a former rail yard. The redevelopment agency constructed the access infrastructure and remediated the contaminated site, and in exchange the developer agreed to an elevated 40% affordability requirement for the rental apartment component.

Emeryville now faces new challenges. Its population is growing and changing in character. Higher-income transplants disfavor the chain and big-box retail that helped the city get where it is today. Cultivating local merchants is difficult, expensive, and hard to rush. The redevelopment agency’s foray into master leasing commercial space and then offering subsidized subleases to local merchant tenants at 43^rd & San Pablo did not go well. Without chain tenants who could financially weather a slow start and challenging location long enough to draw in loyal customer traffic, the whole complex fizzled. The city has given up and a Starbucks will soon be moving in.

With growth and demographic changes, demand for city services like schools and parks and recreation is also increasing and Emeryville knows that its redevelopment cash register will not last forever. The city needs to beef up its general fund receipts, but the best way to do this is with the commercial retail development Emeryville residents increasingly dislike. Undaunted, the city is going ahead with an expansion to the Bay Street complex and is also examining developing mixed-use space where large parking lots currently stand. The city sees parking lots as a land bank, at first necessary to support big box retail, but eventually to be developed into something more productive. Emeryville is also venturing into producing art space, since many of their local artisans are being priced out of the market.

Sources:

Tour with Michelle DeGuzman, City of Emeryville Economic Development and Housing Department Community Economic Development Coordinator, in Emeryville, Cal. (Feb. 7, 2008).