Neighborhood Preservation Initiative History

In this address, given to commemorate the five-year anniversary of the Neighborhood Preservation Ordinance, NPO co-author Martha Nicoloff traced the story of the initiative from its conception through the hurly-burly of the 1973 election, where the initiative prevailed by a 60-40 vote.

Nicoloff’s speech captures well, from her perspective, the cat-and-mouse games that pro-development forces played with the initiative, whether by proposing a lookalike ordinance, full of loopholes, or by distributing an official-looking voter’s handbook .

It also boils over with indignation at the policies and actions of the former Berkeley Mayor, the Republican Wallace Johnson: as the Neighborhood Preservation Initiative was about to go to a vote, Johnson presided over the eviction of a poor mother who was living in a building he owned — an eviction that Nicoloff and others protested.

Date: 5/5/1978

Citation:

Martha Nicoloff, “Neighborhood Preservation Initiative History” (speech given at NPO’s fifth anniversary celebration at Julia Morgan Theatre), May 5, 1978, included in Ken Hughes and Martha Nicoloff, Neighborhood Preservation Ordinance: Documenting a Community in Action, folder held at the Institute for Government Studies Library, UC Berkeley.