Preservation......Livable Neighborhoods.......Public Service

By Jim w. Novosel

In the neighborhoods, calm traffic to make our streets safe and welcoming and promote greenery, street trees and open spaces. In our downtown, create a Center Street Public Square, reroute traffic to provide quiet pedestrian spaces, establish landmark historic districts and seek broader retail services.

I seek District 4's Council seat to continue my efforts to improve Berkeley and especially our neighborhoods. My family and I love our neighborhood; it's a great place to live. Having lived in many other Berkeley districts from the hills to the lowlands, I believe that District 4 neighborhoods offer wonderful places to raise families and to retire.

-I will work for the continued preservation and renewal of our neighborhoods.
-I encourage the continued restoration of our well scaled homes along with their abundant greenery, open space and street trees.
-I encourage families to move into our neighborhoods and empty nesters to stay in their homes.
-I will support incremental growth of our housing through well designed additions and backyard studios.

As an example of my beliefs, my wife and 3 sons restored and moved into an abandoned Victorian that neighbors had the City landmark out of fear that it would be demolished. We now live in a house with a 2,000 square foot vegetable/flower garden, bee hives and chickens. I will help residents do likewise and guide them through the complicated City approval processes for home improvements. With neighbors and Council Member Dona Spring, I helped create the large California Street Island at Dwight Way which has calmed traffic and made our street safer.

What I hope to accomplish for our Downtown:

Since helping on the 1990 Downtown Plan, I have dreamed of creating a public square along Center Street and Shattuck Square that would allow political rallies, urban fairs, festivals and musical events at the center of our town. As Chair of the Streets and Open Space Improvement Plan Committee (SOSIP), I am helping with other Commissioners to define how we can green our streets and make them more pedestrian friendly. We are voting for wider sidewalks, rain water retention landscaping, more trees with no net loss of parking, pedestrian walkways and courts throughout the Downtown.

I will propose landmark districts in the Downtown Plan where there are clusters of historic buildings. We should continue to honor those historic buildings that we cherish while we appreciate all the recent apartments that have been created by developers and their architects. Landmark districts can go hand in hand with plans for a limited number of higher buildings foreseen by every Plan presented over the last few years. I believe in a "quid pro quo" solution to the land wars in the downtown. The anticipated growth of apartments, hotels and University buildings can be balanced by historic preservation in order to ensure that our downtown retains the urban character we appreciate.

My own architectural work on restoring historic buildings while helping to create over 240 housing units throughout the City has given me the leadership to know how we should save, restore and cherish our older buildings while developing new, well scaled buildings. On the Council, as an independent, I will work with other Council members to build consensus on a Downtown Plan that can gain City wide support.

We need to champion the Downtown's amenities that can only get better if we recognize and build upon its present benefits and current successes. There are tourists, returning alumni, urban trackers, parents of students and people from nearby towns who come to enjoy our city and cultural activities. There are great places to stroll around and discover like Trumpet Vine Court, the restaurants along Center Street, the view into Strawberry Creek at Oxford Street, the poetry sidewalks of Addison Street's Theatre Arts District, the skate boarders at Grinders Park/Constitution Square and the Saturday Farmers Market.

We have abundant theater and entertainment cultural life with the Berkeley Pep, Aurora Theatre Company, Rep's School of Theatre, Freight and Salvage, Jazz School, Marsh Theatre, Becket's, Down Low Club, 24 movie screens, Berkeley City College, Habitot Children's Museum, Kaplan Center, Dharma College, Language Studies Institute, Mangalam Centers, Brower Center's many institutes and the University of California. The Downtown is an unparalleled regional attraction and destination.