Mending the Urban Fabric

Berkeley is working on a plan for the Adeline St. corridor, where the street was too wide to begin with and was made even worse by traffic engineers when BART was built there, fifty years ago.  I am proposing a plan to mend the broken urban fabric and to provide more affordable housing.

For example, at the south end of the corridor, one side of an old-fashioned neighborhood shopping street was removed to add a massively overbuilt intersection and unused landscaping, as you can see in this picture. 

My proposal removes the unneeded landscaping and uses a traditional block structure rather than this massive intersection, reclaiming enough land to create two small blocks that can be used to build affordable housing.

The plan has gotten some favorable response from neighborhood residents and from a city council member.  There will be a meeting about the plan this weekend, where I expect that about a dozen neighborhood residents will speak in favor of studying this proposal as one of the alternative in the plan.

For more information and proposals for other sites in the corridor, see http://www.preservenet.com/adeline/