Local Candidate Questionnaire: Ben Gould, 2018 Candidate for Berkeley City Council, District 4
Here at TechEquity, we believe that voting down the ballot is crucial for active, local citizenship. While a lot of the national spotlight is on congressional races, there are a multitude of local candidates that have the potential to make significant impacts on your communities.
We’ve reached out to candidates for San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Oakland Mayor, City Councillors of Oakland and Berkeley, and CA State Assemblymembers to answer our five-part questionnaire. Check out our index of the seats on the ballot and the candidates who have responded to our questionnaire.
Below are the questionnaire responses from Ben Gould, 2018 Candidate for Berkeley City Council.
Disclaimer:
We’re a nonpartisan 501c3 non-profit, which means we cannot and do not endorse candidates. With that in mind, we gave every candidate that we could reach an opportunity to fill out our questionnaire.
Displayed are the unedited answers from each candidate as they came to us. We are publishing these questionnaires to educate voters on candidates’ positions; we do not endorse their positions nor statements.
Candidate’s Name:
Ben Gould
Office for which Candidate is Seeking Election:
City Council
Jurisdiction in which Candidate is Seeking Election:
Berkeley, District 4
Candidate’s Website:
The East Bay has changed drastically as a result of the growth of the tech sector in our region. What role do you think the city should have in attracting companies to our city or in reducing negative effects created by their arrival?
Berkeley is in a unique situation as home of the top public institution in the country, while still being a relatively small college town in a metro area of much larger cities.
We have an exciting opportunity to support the growth of fledgling startups coming out of UC Berkeley, but at the same time, Berkeley’s small size, neighborhood scale, and lack of office space makes it a poor environment for those companies to grow rapidly and find space they need to expand. I believe it’s important to support the growth of new companies, especially for advanced technology firms coming out of the cutting-edge research developed at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, but for the foreseeable future, companies seeking to grow to thousands of employees or beyond will likely need to find space elsewhere.
I want to expand City-UC partnerships to encourage the growth of these fledgling firms, dedicated startup zones with office and/or laboratory space available close to transit and amenities, and a pathway that enables these businesses to expand and relocate as they outgrow Berkeley’s available capacity, and in order to keep space available for new startups.
The housing crisis is the most urgent issue for our members, and it is TechEquity’s top advocacy priority this year. What is your view on how we can solve the housing crisis and make the Bay Area an affordable place to live for people at all income levels?
We need to create more housing, throughout the Bay Area, in order to effectively tackle this crisis. Affordable housing is especially important, and we should work to ensure developers provide as much affordable housing on-site or pay as much money as possible into the affordable housing trust fund. Right now, the biggest problem we see is that tenants have to compete for landlords, enabling property owners to drive prices through the roof and charge sky-high rents, driving displacement and gentrification in historically low-income communities. Building expensive new homes in already higher-income neighborhoods can help capture some of that demand for housing and reduce pressures on existing, naturally affordable units. Ultimately, our goal should be to see landlords competing for tenants, driving prices down and protecting existing residents.
How will you address the homelessness crisis? Do you think the City’s current budget allocation for homelessness is adequate? What solutions do you think are working, and what else would you implement?
I want a long-term, regional, housing-first approach to addressing homelessness, and will start by partnering with other cities throughout Alameda County to create a regional fund and land trust, which cities can pay into and contribute land towards to support the creation of affordable housing with wrap-around services, including mental health, drug rehabilitation, and job training services as needed.
Right now, Berkeley has a proposed project to create over 80 units of housing for the homeless, but the City has currently failed to allocate the necessary funds to see it through to completion. After voting to make closing the $10 million shortfall the Council’s top priority for affordable housing money, the Council subsequently spent nearly $2.5 million on a temporary shelter costing over $4,000 per bed per month, and their appointees denied housing proposals that would have brought in nearly $2 million in additional funds. I would make funding affordable housing for the homeless an actual priority.
How would you create more stability for renters in our city, especially for low- and middle-income renters?
We need to flip the table on landlords — they should be the ones competing for tenants, not the other way around. In order to achieve this, I’ll support creating new green and affordable homes, in addition to finding ways to permit new market-rate housing, particularly in existing high-income neighborhoods, to reduce the incentive for landlords to drive out existing tenants by taking higher-paying tenants off the market. I’ll also continue to be a strong supporter of Berkeley’s rent control and tenant protection laws — as a rent-controlled tenant myself, I rely on them to remain in this city.
I’m proud to have the endorsement of UC Berkeley Professor Karen Chapple, Founder of the Urban Displacement Project, because she knows that my policies and approach will be the most effective at preventing displacement and creating more affordable housing.
How do we modernize the city’s transit and mobility system to accommodate the rapidly-changing needs of the city’s residents?
Berkeley needs to expand transit and bike lanes, support the expansion of vehicle-sharing systems and fleets including car, bike, and scooter sharing, and identify strategies for managing and directing the demand for ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft.
Too many of Berkeley’s residents are either forced to rely on private automobiles for personal transportation, or find that other options are unreliable, unaffordable, or inaccessible. Berkeley’s future, however, does not lie in the direction of more driving, more parking, and more cars — we simply do not have space to accommodate that. Instead, we need to create and expand alternative options, making it easier to get around without a car, and in doing so improve the quality of our environment, reduce air pollution, and enhance public safety and public health at the same time.
I am excited about the opportunities that electric-assist bicycles and scooters provide for common, distributed access to mobility. I want to support the responsible and safe use of these transportation options by expanding bike lanes and encouraging the use of scooters in them, and identifying bike & scooter parking options and policies to ensure our sidewalks remain accessible to all. Additionally, I want to work with AC Transit to expand bus service and improve reliability throughout Berkeley, through dedicated transit lanes, priority and express bus service, and bringing bus rapid transit to Downtown.
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