Five years after the passage of the Neighborhood Preservation Ordinance, Berkeley Gazette reporter Eleanor Edwards reached out to its supporters and detractors to survey its impact.
According to Edwards, a major plank of the NPO — its mandating of community review of development projects — had larger succeeded in winning over former skeptics. At the same time, its requirement that one out of four new apartments be reserved for low-income housing had not produced a rise in low-income housing stock. In fact, low-income housing stock had not increased since the NPO’s passage — a trend that Ken Hughes, who wrote the NPO, chalked up to a national slowing of new construction, but that others traced to the NPO.
