In a letter sent to the Berkeley City Council ahead of its June 26 zoning meeting, a homeowner concerned about the city’s new Middle Housing Ordinance expressed a familiar fear: They wrote that the new change wouldn’t help “ordinary working people” and that “solar panels will be shadowed.” The rhetoric appears uncontroversial in a city as deeply liberal as Berkeley, an especially blue pocket of a county which favored Kamala Harris by 74 points. The concerns appeared to be good and progressive — who, in a city like this, would want to back a policy that’s bad for workers and solar energy?

There’s just one problem: The resident is wrong.

The Middle Housing Ordinance would allow for the construction or conversion of duplexes, multi-family homes and small apartment buildings on individual lots, which would dramatically increase density across the city. “Middle housing” could, by some projections, cut the income required to purchase a new house by more than 50%, help remedy the lasting segregationist influence of redlining and drastically reduce transit-related emissions.

How could a citizen so progressive and so clearly invested in local politics be so wrong? Are they just misinformed? Is it all in a strange, ideologically rigid variety of bad faith?

It’s not that simple. Rather, the letter belies a much deeper problem with housing in Berkeley. Despite their ostensible commitments to Berkeley’s unique character and community, Berkeley homeowners — organized into activist groups with uncontroversial names such as “Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods” — consistently block the new development which would allow it to flourish. Across projects over the past half-decade, these neighborhood organizing groups have filed lawsuits and organized citizen action campaigns to squash attempted construction.

Housing in Berkeley remains unaffordable, driving long-term residents out of the city and squeezing the budgets of low- and middle-income renters. A clear disconnect has emerged between Berkeley’s progressive aesthetics and the reality of living in the city without access to enormous wealth.

One of the most divisive pieces of legislation amongst Berkeley housing activists is the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, which establishes that new developments must conduct environmental impact reviews prior to construction and allows nearby residents to file suits about the potential environmental and noise impacts of construction.

Janis Ching, chair of the neighborhood organizing group Berkeley Neighborhoods Council, explained, “The only reason why we have laws against building on top of toxic land is because of CEQA … you can’t throw out the entire environmental impact of a new development.” However, she didn’t say where she thought residents should live instead.

To the progressive raised on the fare of 1960s anti-development environmentalism, this appears to be an abundantly good idea: What civic-minded Berkeley resident doesn’t want to protect the environment? In practice, the law significantly slowed the pace of housing development on empty lots and largely protected wealthy white neighborhoods. CEQA remained a core tool in the arsenal of a particular kind of Berkeley progressive; namely, the townhouse owner who purchased or inherited a home that cost $23,000 five decades ago but remains committed, ideologically, to left principles. When reforms limiting its scope were finally proposed, they were stringently opposed by neighborhood organizers.

Harvard economist Benjamin Enke might describe the progressivism that these homeowners engage in as a luxury moral value. No longer burdened by rent, this group of largely wealthy, white homeowners can instead turn to second-order issues such as an abstracted concern for local environmental wellbeing and their neighborhood’s “character.”. The median Berkeley renter, who would need to make $91,800 per year to comfortably afford a one-bedroom apartment, can entertain no such luxury.

A clear divide has emerged amongst Berkeley progressives. On the one hand, a materialist, necessity-driven progressive movement makes demands such as middle housing, rezoning, and more in search of an affordable Berkeley. On the other, a postmaterialist progressivism remains content to peddle nostalgic aphorisms about environmental conservation (never mind the fact that density is demonstrably linked to reduced emissions).

The latter groups focus entirely on a superstructural issue — that their community exists in a certain way — rather than an issue of economic base that argues the material realities allowing for community formation have changed. These homeowners exist in a state of pure cognitive dissonance, believing themselves to be the real progressives championing a working-class spirit despite their rejection of policy proposals that would allow the working class to live in the city.

Among this crowd, concerns about Berkeley’s look and so-called “livability” die hard. Aesthetic supersedes need; political energy surrounds buildings rather than communities. Christopher Kroll, vice chair of the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council, described his opposition to early sketches for a housing project at the North Berkeley BART station’s parking lot.

“We have an established neighborhood here and we want some acknowledgement of the existing development pattern.”

This dynamic turns ugly at town halls. Libby Lee-Egan, an organizer for the pro-density group North Berkeley Now, said these groups “didn’t believe that we were normal residents. They thought we were all shills or plants (for developers.)” For the anti-development progressive, to favor development becomes an outgroup signal regardless of its necessity. In turn, their politics become empty and aesthetic, better embodied by lawn signs declaring support for science and the climate in the abstract than by actual progressive political organization.

In analyzing these fights, we may be tempted to conclude that the operant ideology motivating opposition is exclusively class interest. Maybe anti-development homeowners are simply unwilling to put their money where their mouth is, authentically believing in truisms like “housing is a human right” until it comes to their backdoor.

Much more interesting, however, is the mass nostalgia which seems to loom underneath this opposition. Lee-Egan described this problem succinctly: “When a lot of these folks moved here, it was the ’70s … they think that things have changed for the worse.” When speaking to the anti-development crowd or reviewing comments submitted to the City Council, this appears largely accurate. Neighborhood groups attempt to immortalize a version of Berkeley which no longer exists.

This pattern of mistaking nostalgic reversion for progress is described by cultural theorist Mark Fisher as a core tenet of “capitalist realism.” Rather than thinking beyond problems of scarcity and unease that are generated by an uncontrolled neoliberalism, Fisher argues we revive old forms of progressive advocacy to feel as though we’re doing something about political and economic issues we observe. Often, this leaves us with a false sense of progress that satiates an appetitive neoliberal guilt.

To be anti-development in the 1970s was tantamount to being progressive, and Berkeley was a nexus for both movements. Now, it is little more than a museum exhibit detailing what progressivism used to be and expecting that the city’s problems will resolve themselves. It diffuses real left sentiment felt by homeowning residents into an easy-to-understand reboot of the anti-development left rather than a creative policy solution.

Luckily, housing in Berkeley appears to be nearly a settled issue. Recent CEQA reforms have dramatically lessened the act’s scope and allowed cities to build much more housing in spite of opposition from particularly vocal citizens acting against public interest. Further, in Berkeley specifically, new policy such as the Middle Housing Ordinance and potential changes to the city’s zoning seem to promise a dramatic expansion of housing availability, with the City Council broadly supportive of these efforts. Mobilization against these changes, where it exists, appears to be subdued.

Nevertheless, Berkeley’s housing conflict is instructive for understanding political reality both in Berkeley at the national level.

The idea that yearning for a bygone era will somehow deliver us from present political evil has infected the strategy and ideology of the American left. It is evidenced by Biden-era Democrats’ insistence that what politics needs is a “return to normal” rather than radical reorganization. It can be seen in hundreds of thousands of ballots cast by New York Democrats for Andrew Cuomo after proclaiming their concern about issues such as affordability. And it is reflected in congresspeople who celebrate the activism of the 1960s while abandoning or ridiculing those who protest genocide in Gaza or police brutality today.

If an effective counterauthoritarian left is to surface, it must start by centering progressive realities over progressive aesthetics and antiquated ideological luxuries. Berkeley must seize this rare opportunity to remake its political environment alongside its built environment. As this city— long the Eden for a particular variety of ineffective, defanged progressivism — finally moves to allow dense housing, change is in the air. The established consensus that we must attempt to reconstruct a utopic vision of the 1960s is finally showing cracks, in Berkeley and elsewhere. Lee-Egan said it better than I could:

“(Anti-density organizers) know that being a NIMBY is a bad thing. They know that people don’t like that … so they don’t want to be that.”