How many times have we heard that single family zoning in Berkeley was instituted in 1916 to prevent a Negro dance hall from locating in the Elmwood? This is a false narrative that has been used as a rationale for the radical upzoning known as “the missing middle” initiative and oft repeated by former Council member Lori Droste and Mayor Jesse Arreguin to insinuate that single family zoning has been a racist institution from its inception in Berkeley.

In 1916, the African American population of Berkeley numbered a few hundred scattered in central and south Berkeley, with a growing number along lower Ashby Avenue, not sufficient as a clientele for a dance hall and certainly not one in Elmwood Park.

Local real estate interests and city planning advocates instigated the 1916 ordinance (#452) because they saw in the nascent zoning movement in Los Angeles, New York, Minneapolis, and other cities, a way to strengthen the exclusivity of their upscale residential projects and keep apartments and shops out. Their ordinance featured an inefficient petition and review system conducive to insider manipulation. Charles H. Cheney, an architect and leader of this cohort, was explicit about their intentions in a speech he delivered to the 9th National Conference on City Planning held in Kansas City in May 1917, “Districting Progress and Procedure in California”, which has been digitized by Google and is available online.

In this review of the first year of their ordinance, Cheney mentions petition #8 for a Class V designation allowing apartments, boarding houses, hotels, and restaurants and a protest from the neighbors on Prince, Harper, and Ellis Streets, who became “alarmed over the possible location of a negro dance hall on a prominent corner” probably on busy Ashby Avenue. 32 neighbors formally protested on April 27, and the matter was resolved on June 1 by assigning Class II allowing single family and “flats” (duplexes). The City Council minutes of April 17, 27, and June 1, 1917, available through the City of Berkeley Records Online, traces these events as does a Berkeley Gazette article “Zone Created in South Berkeley” on June 1.

How a minor brouhaha, most likely within the small Black community, got amplified into the raison d’être of single family zoning is the result of poor scholarship, specifically the failure to follow a footnote in an article by Marc Weiss and a desire to create a distraction from the further deregulation of development in Berkeley.

Toni Mester, a resident of Berkeley since 1972, is retired from City College of San Francisco