Budd's Blog: Oakvale - My Street in Berkeley

My street in Berkeley is Oakvale Avenue. It's a short street, just one block long, in a nice Berkeley neighborhood called the Claremont District. The defining street of the district, Claremont Avenue, is at the west end of Oakvale, and Domingo Avenue is at the east end. Both streets lead to the large, white, sprawling, historic Claremont Hotel, which, on a clear day, you can see from San Francisco. Started in 1905, just a year before the great San Francisco Earthquake, when the area was bucolic, the hotel was completed in 1915. In those days, the hotel was a country getaway from San Francisco, reachable by ferry, since the Bay Bridge was not completed until 1936. (Actually, my late wife's grandfather worked on the Bay Bridge as an itinerant laborer, only to have the granddaughter he never met buy a house in the area that the bridge opened up.) Nowadays, it is still a retreat, retitled the Claremont Resort, where I work out and swim, where we sometimes have ceremonial dinners and where our visitors stay from time to time. The hotel is now surrounded by streets and houses and some small retail establishments. It is so livable.

Our house on Oakvale, 38 Oakvale, was built in 1912.

We are at about the middle of the block, which now has 33 houses on it, all single family houses except for one duplex, which looks like a single family house. Some of the houses have in-law units. Oakvale is widely admired as a fine street, the product of the original neighborhood development plans from the Mason-McDuffie company to encompass the natural context of the area into the development, and appreciated by those of us who live on it. It's a nearly level street, so kids can skateboard on it, ride bicycles, play basketball, and have a catch. Large trees line the curb up and down the street, and there are even redwoods on some of the lots. Rumor has it, which I believe to be true, that a Boy Scout troop planted the redwoods many years ago. In the front yards across from me, right in a row, are six of them.

In my own little back yard we have two, a coastal redwood (sequoia sempervirens) and a dawn redwood (metasequoia glyptostroboides, the only deciduous redwood, thought to be extinct until some were found in China in the 1940's). A small stream named Harwood Creek comes down to our street from Claremont Canyon in the Berkeley Hills. While nearly dry in summer, it roars for a day or two after winter rains. The creek courses under a house across the street (a John Hudson Thomas craftsman house), proceeds alongside the curves of the street for 100 yards or so, goes under part of another another house and a garage, under a little bridge, and coursing under Claremont Avenue on its way to the Bay. Sometimes the creek even hosts little fish.

My wife and her first husband Bruce bought our house in 1972, thinking it would be one of a series of houses they would live in. But they got divorced and I moved in with Ann in 1979. We lived here together until 2022, when she died, but I still live here and don't intend to move. It's my home.

In the 40+ years I have lived here, there has been some turnover on the street, although not so much as you might think. It's more like a prized destination street rather than a way station, for the most part. Why haven't people moved away?

I think that's because it's a wonderful place to live, not only physically, with the trees and stream and flowers, but because of the neighborliness. It's an old-fashioned street. We are not a small town gossipy street, so far as I know, where everyone knows everyone else's business, but word does get around, illnesses and contretemps get known, but the ears are mostly sympathetic. We look to support one another. We have a little street organization, based on earthquake awareness and preparation, which featured yearly get togethers at either the Moscow's house or the Pearlmans’ house, or the Schwartzburg's house before that. And lately we have an email group to alert each other and to trade tips. Ann once suggested we think of moving to another house, but we didn't because of the neighborhood and because of the neighbors. Also, I told her, as you get older and the kids move away, you're supposed to downsize, not upsize, and while the house was really too small for our horde, it's now just right.

A street with long-time residents will have its lore, and Oakvale has it, to be sure. The redwoods and the Boy Scouts are part of the lore that none of us can personally remember-- its just passed down. But we do remember the events of our own time. In the 1980's the owner of the John Hudson Thomas house, whose father was the one who had it built, organized the street to apply for the Berkeley pilot program for undergrounding the wires. It's an absence that you don't notice, but when you think about it, you bless it. The other owner of the house, his wife, organized the street for the curbside city-planted trees. She wanted oak trees on Oakvale. Strangely, next door to me, there is a gap in the trees. The story there is that the then-owner of the house, a close friend of my wife and a lifelong friend of the writer Jimmy Breslin's wife Rosemary back in Queens, took exception to the organizing neighbor's prickly personality and refused to get a tree out of irritation or spite. It's just one of those stories that hits you now and then.

July 4 is an event for the larger neighborhood, centered on what we call Circle Park just a block away, where a tiny band of musicians on a small flatbed truck wends its way around the block as the neighborhood follows, ending up back at Circle Park for songs, a patriotic speech from one of the neighbors, and refreshments. Later on, Oakvale used to have its own little celebration as dusk fell, as some of the neighborhood kids and even parents gathered on the Williams' brick front steps and waited for my son Peter to bring the firecrackers.

Sometimes events seem more than random. Before they left their Philadelphia home to come here, present Oakvale resident Joanna announced to her local ACLU board meeting that she would be moving to Berkeley. In the group happened to be my sister-in-law, Susan. Susan asked her where in Berkeley she was moving to.

“Do you know Berkeley?” asked Joanna.

“Well, I know one street,” said Susan.

“Our street will be Oakvale,” replied Joanna.

“That's the street!” said Susan.

Since then, Joanna's husband David and I have grown close over the years. Between our houses is a depository for our trash cans, and as David and I discuss events and interests, often right there between our houses, we've come to refer to our chats as trash talk. We even put in a little joint garden there, with a sign that proclaims it “Jose's Folly,” after our gardener.

Another coincidence. Who lived across the street and two houses down from us? My brother Bob's close friend from the University of Michigan with whom he shared rides home to Philly. And then a few houses up the other way on the street, there was a grade school friend of my sister back in Philly, a writer who lived there with her pediatrician husband, but who moved in with the architect right across the street from her, and then they all moved away. I don't know how these Philadelphians like me accumulated here. It's unusual.

Time's arrow runs only one way. You can't substitute the time you have spent together. Memories are alive, not dead. Memories and place are actually biologically connected in the brain – you are probably aware of how sometimes, when you think of something, the place where you were when you learned that jumps right into your mind. It's probably connected with evolutionary advantage – it no doubt helped to remember things connected with place when we were hunters. But even now when we're not, memories and place matter to us, and for many of our memories, that place is somewhere on Oakvale.

I recently noticed something else on Oakvale that seemed unusual. A remarkable number of the houses are now occupied by a single person, and most of these houses are right in a row, on the south side of the street starting from the Domingo corner. Counting down, of the first nine houses, seven have single residents. All but one started out occupied by families, but three women have stayed in their houses after divorce, and three men have stayed in their houses after their wives died. There are three other single-occupied houses on the street, two houses on the other side of the street where two women stayed on while their ex-husbands moved away, and on our side of the street, one other man whose wife died. That's a lot of houses with single occupancy on a small street. We would have had one more instance of a widower living alone, but he has gotten remarried. It's also interesting that the women are post-divorce, and the men are widowers. I don't know what to make of that. Maybe that's not so significant, because not long ago there were three widows in houses, but then they died.

Is this a strange situation, or should it be expected? I do remember that maybe 15 or 20 years ago, two houses down from me where a charming couple now live, the wife died of leukemia and the husband just stayed on until he died, too. Maybe that's just what people do.

Is there any reason that so many single dwellers should be all in a row? I'm sure that the most likely explanation is just chance. If you flip a coin, there will be runs of heads or tails and you would bet that the coin is weighted, but you would be wrong. Random chance allows for lots of consecutives. You might think that the houses with single residents would be distributed somewhat evenly, but not necessarily; randomness is like that, it isn't uniform.

But there's also this explanation: how attractive it is to live on a lovely street with solicitous neighbors, a real neighborhood! So people don't want to move. I've read heart-rending stories in the paper about women alone in lower income areas who rent their homes, who are attached closely to their neighborhoods but are then priced out by rising rents as their area gentrifies. So, of course, that's what people do, they want to stay in their neighborhoods when they can.

Our area is more affluent, of course, and most of us are home owners. Still, in another state, that might have proved a problem. Our street (like much of California) has seen amazing house price inflation. From the $52,000 my wife and her first husband paid for our little house, it could be worth now more than $3 million, our little house. Sure, we've improved it, but that's not the explanation. All property is increasing in value, and our lovely street is so near to everything. With these increased valuations, even as homeowners, we could be priced out, not by rents, but by taxes. But that doesn't happen here in California, because of California social policy, embodied in the famous Proposition 13, law since 1978, and approved by 65% of voters. Prop 13 stated that the housing assessment for purposes of taxes would have a ceiling of 2% increase per year unless the property changed hands. The acceleration of housing prices had just begun, and people were seeing their tax bills accelerate accordingly. The state government happily took in the new excess cash to their coffers, all the while the residents were still living in the same house that gave them no financial advantage until they sold it. The sponsors of the proposition were right-wing Republicans, very leery of government, but in fact, you can justify Prop 13 by citing Marxist economics. Marx distinguishes use value from exchange value. The use value of the house wasn't changing by property inflation, it was still the same old house used in the same way, it was only the exchange value that was changing. Therefore, why should a citizen pay more taxes for the same house he or she had always had, and which yielded the same use value as always?

So Prop 13 has ensured that when people's life circumstances change, or when the exchange value of the home changes, that does not mean they have to leave their homes. They can afford to stay where they are, and continue their lives undeterred, so long as they can afford the property tax, which rises gradually. It's a total mitzvah for those who want to live stable lives among friends and neighbors, and oak trees and redwoods, and the flower shop and the grocery and the dry cleaner, and the book stores and the hairdresser and the furniture shops, and the amenities of a functional neighborhood, by which I mean, the friendships.

But of course, while I look at all the people with stable lives on our street despite the vagaries of their relationships and health, there are those who see other priorities. Ideologues and the envious view my street as the home of the plutocrats, whom they view unworthy of protection – even though many of us would be judged wealthy only because the exchange value of our houses has risen. We have widows, widowers, divorcees, professionals, housewives, professors, and the rest. Now it's true, when the time comes to turn over the houses to others, when the exchange value will become the operant conditioner of taxes, only the liquidly wealthy will be able to afford them. Techies and financial people and others of wealth are already moving in across the street and down the street. But as of now, among the older homeowners, we have a mix of wealth and occupations, and we are richer for it.

Other would-be reformers point to streets like ours as part of the crisis of housing – why not change our street into multistory and multifamily dwellings – and, I imagine, get rid of those pesky redwood trees – after all, what value do they bring, what square footage of housing do they confer? The city council and the mayor of famously progressive Berkeley want to get rid of zoning restrictions, which they trace to racist origins, as though that were the effect and purpose now. They look at our precious street, the refuge we have had as we get older, the neighbors who cherish and support one another, as standing in the way of housing more people – why not take Manhattan as the model, is what I guess they think, where people don't talk about “my house, but about “my building.”

The university urban planning department is in agreement – let's all squash in together, they think, that would be better ecologically – as the university inexorably expands without making any provisions for increased housing, so they must eye Oakvale and other livable neighborhoods and think – yes! Crowd them together! And meanwhile, their beautiful campus is immune from building housing – let the neighborhoods take the hit! Ah, the good old university, dressing their self-interest and self-protection in a “it's good for everybody this way” mantle, and their righteousness as “we educate the young people, our greatest resource.” Universities are corporations, and that's the way they think.

And we also can't forget that as the city leaders propagate the mantra of higher-density, they harbor the vision of the higher revenues that higher-density would bring, much as the state loved the property inflation starting in the 1970s. Plus, there is always that element in society that is envious – why do they have better than what I have? Shouldn't we all be able to live on Oakvale? Why only those who are already there?

Well, Berkeley is famous for free discussion, and I'm sure there is more of it to come. I hope the resolution is a good one. I would suggest one thing, however, that I don't think has been talked about enough. Our trees are such a precious resource. As the law stands now, all those wonderful redwoods and other gorgeous trees that stand on private property, the heritage of us all, all those trees could be cut down at the whim of the property owner. And remember, as time goes by and owners move on, the city and the university seem intent on incentivizing developers to become the new owners, and to transform the lots to multifamily units. If that should happen, getting rid of the trees could further their aim. So, one thing I would suggest would be for Berkeley to adopt laws that other communities have, that restrict the rights of owners to take down trees without a full review by an official commission, with the chance for other interested parties, such as neighbors and conservation groups, to weigh in.

So, yes, Oakvale is one little street in Berkeley, and one must not cling to the past, and change is inevitable. But for now, for our neighbors and our neighborhood, appreciation and solicitude and preservation are in order. Our lives are tied to our places and our friends, and in some cases to our persistent irritations, to the continuity of our lives. We can hope that our successors will have the benefits of life roughly as we have had them, we can do what we can to offer it to them, but in the end, it will be up to them to take the torch and pass it.

Those trees are the living embodiment of our history and our culture and our neighborhood, and they should endure.