City of Richmond disfunction

A Richmond housing project mired in Design Review Board insanity and City Council antics has been axed. Instead of gaining a bunch of new housing, the city holds on to a toxic dump for the foreseeable future, leaving the taxpayers on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars of recurring monthly costs and potentially millions in remediation fees.

A photo from a post-apocalyptic future where zombies have...no, wait, that's a photo of the housing site back in 2014, when this project was a few years into the battle with the city of Richmond in its first iteration. The warehouse on the wharf is about a hairpin drop's earthquake away from falling into the bay, releasing all kinds of lead paint into the water. // photo from Google (sepia tone and noise added)

Six years ago, I went to a Design Review Board hearing for a project at the Richmond waterfront. The first thing I thought of when I saw the design was that it was fantastically expensive. It turns out that it was completely economically infeasible. 

By chance, they discovered and hired us to reboot the project. The architecture, site plan, and housing type would be completely different. It would be single-family detached housing with some duplexes instead of luxury podium condos. Instead of a project that looked like it would cost $600/SF to build, we targeted something that would be around $100/SF though with lower density.

This was the summer of 2020.

We developed a site plan for them and they went completely silent. We figured the project completely died.

We received a phone call in the late spring of 2022, saying they have been talking with various officials in the city to try to move this next iteration forward. They were now ready, after nearly two years of talking to the city, bargaining over who knows what. Oh, and we only had three weeks to do the actual work which would normally take two months, because apparently, this government-owned land had time restrictions on entitlements. How insane is this, where someone, who wants to build housing, has to negotiate and wade through red tape for two years, but only three weeks to do the actual work of designing the project?

This was a theme throughout the project. Every time the Design Review Board chair demanded we acquiesce to his insane rantings, they had around a month to review the designs, but we only had a week to do the actual work of redesigning. This was like demanding an author write a book that would take twelve hours to read, and only giving the author three hours to write the whole thing, expecting it to be sufficient time to write a perfect story.

After the first round of designs, it was obvious that my suspicions were correct. The design review board forced our client in the previous go around to a prohibitively expensive project. Immediately, the comments flowed in that we should have done this and we should have done that. All of them racking up the dollar bills. Some were good suggestions, architecturally speaking, though questionable economically. Some were just personal preference demands. And others were just plain dumb.

Bizarrely, the Design Review Board continued to demand that a retail building be built on-site. I looked up and down the street on satellite images and it was just out of the way with no critical mass of residents to support a retail shop. Our client reached out to several major retail analysts and the results were unanimous: retail will die there. The DRB basically responded with, "Data?? We don't need no stinkin' data. Or studies. Or analysis. I know because I've been there and see lots of people using the trail that would love to be able to buy a drink, but couldn't!" Right. One would think that the lack of a food truck, with drastically lower overhead than a brick and mortar shop, being parked there would clue them in that no, the demand isn't all that great. If the truck can't park there because of city regulations which is no rare scene, well, I've found your problem.

In the most surreal meeting I've ever had, which is saying something, we, along with the client, met with two members of the Design Review Board. One was the chair and the other was the vice chair, who was actually pretty fair. In a conference room at city hall, the chair pulled out some drawings he made, as if he was the architect. I was told years ago, when doing the previous project, from a very connected landscape architect in the city that the chair ran a one-man architecture firm, but could not attract and retain clients. I was told this time around that he hasn't held a job since he had to close it years ago.

I wasn't surprised.

It was already a someone tense meeting, as bad blood had developed over the years, as one would expect when one person holds power over another. When the drawings came out, the head of the developer team, a soft-spoken Australian, was sitting on the opposite end of the table. So he got up and walked around to stand next to the DRB chair so he could see the drawing. At the smallest amount of pushback from the design team, the insecure chair threw a fit that would make my four-year-old proud. He started yelling about how if we didn't want to listen to him anyway, why did we ask for this meeting, as he rolled up his drawing and tossed it aside. He then proceeded to accuse the head of the developer team of trying to "intimidate" him. In shock at the accusation, the Australian stepped back with his hands up, explaining that he walked up because he couldn't see the drawings from his seat. It took a bit of time to coddle the chair into calming down.

Granted, not all his ideas were bad, though most were. He had an idea to raise the backyard patio of the houses that backed onto a street to give it an additional veil of privacy. That is, honestly, a good idea. If you completely ignore economics. Artificially raising a patio is expensive. Any landscape contractor worth his salt will tell you that it's the vertical that really tacks on costs. Our client ended up agreeing to this idea as a gesture of goodwill, while axing the rest, including the rather hideous elevations he came up with. 

Obvious that this would be a hostile relationship all the way through, we recommended the applicant take SB 330, which would restrict the number of public hearings the city may declare, and require the plans be approved if zoning laws are followed. For whatever reason, the client decided not to pursue this, which to me, is like turning down an AR-15 and instead bringing a plastic knife to a gunfight.

Sure enough, this dragged on until winter, when, in a shocking turn of events, the Design Review Board actually voted to pass the project! With conditions, of course.

The mayor has long had issues with this project and in a December city council hearing, I heard firsthand for the first time his tirades. He complained about the opaqueness of the project then later that very meeting voted to deny the developer from giving a presentation. Later on, he bemoaned how the city attorney "handcuffed" the DRB by limiting its scope and laughably extolled its virtues by making the architecture better. Has he taken a look around Richmond? Does he know the level of housing shortage Richmond has? Quickly, his tirade reached the level of the DRB chair as he started lashing out at the city attorney and then started insulting the developer when he was done insulting the city attorney. He called out the developer's "professionalism" (while acting like a prepubescent teenager) by designing an economically infeasible project. It's too bad the mayor wasn't there at the DRB meetings of the previous version of the project when, at the approval meeting, the board basically praised the developer for essentially acquiescing to their expensive tastes. If the head of the development group had a fault, it was being too nice a guy and thinking kindness and bending over backward would get the project approved. Finally one of the city council members interrupted the clown show and the body voted to end the charade.

With the DRB chair terming out and the mayor terming out as well after 27(!!) years (is Richmond any better off now than 27 years ago, aside from paying the local organized crime to move to Antioch?), we thought things were looking up.

We were wrong.

After we held a meeting to discuss the next steps, our client went to the city council for approval.

The new city council, in a surreal meeting, denied the project. 

The vice mayor said, "We don’t want to put our heads in the sand, we want to keep our eyes open. If we don’t, we are really not being responsible."

The rationale is truly bizarre, considering the current land is a toxic dump. The developer would have to spend $21 million to clean the land from industrial waste that had accumulated over the decades, remove the wharf building with lead paint, and stabilize the shoreline. Without this cleanup, the city has to continue paying twenty grand a month for around-the-clock security on the site as well as structural demolition and remediation to prevent environmental catastrophe to the tune of $4-5 million. And the site may be awarded to some affordable housing project (That will pay $21 million to clean up the site?? Unlikely.) on a site with premium bay views which the city will have little to no say in due to bureaucracy and existing laws. There doesn't appear to be any plan in place, any affordable housing developer lined up, or any other use envisioned, evidenced by her stating her confidence that they can eventually "find something". 

The East Bay Times article also alleged that the developer dragged its feet as many have done in the past. Maybe if the author bothered contacting someone, anyone, part of the applicant team, she could find out what actually happens behind closed doors. As mentioned, we had to urgently push things out in a week while the city dawdled reviewing everything. The entitlement process before we came into the project, took 7.5 years. No developer wants to spend money on carrying costs and paying consultants for 7.5 years, and the developer complained about the length of time it took the last time around in public city council hearings. Seriously, can we just declare journalists to be an endangered species now?

The city council then had the gall to declare, a few months later, a housing crisis in the city. Unsurprisingly, nobody looked inwardly for the problem. Instead, the article touts $10 million from federal funds that were used to "open 1,000 new affordable rental units in Richmond." The article makes it seem like $10 million built 1,000 new units. Does the author really think it only costs $10,000 to build one dwelling unit, or is she intentionally misleading with her language? It's a drop in the bucket of the hundreds of thousands of dollars it takes to build one unit. Other than spending another $10 million of federal funds to do little to nothing to put a dent in the tens of thousands of housing units it needs, the city council has unsurprisingly nothing else really to offer with the declaration.

The only times I have been to Richmond were once to buy things at the Columbia Sportswear employee store on invitation, and all other times to deal with project issues. My one "highlight" of Richmond was by chance, running into Terrance Kelly's (a high school football star who was looking forward to leaving Richmond before being murdered in Richmond) father and talking to him briefly as he stood outside the van that he used for his charity work to get kids out of bad neighborhoods before he himself was killed in Vallejo. He may have been the last good thing in Richmond. 

You do you, Richmond. I hope I never have the misfortune of ever having to step foot in that city again, let alone have another project there again.