The city of Berkeley has reached a landmark agreement with the developer who owns a parking lot atop a sacred Ohlone site to transfer the land permanently back to Indigenous peoples after years of litigation and community outcry.
Under the terms of the deal, the owner, Ruegg & Ellsworth LLC, will receive $27 million in exchange for the property, with the vast majority of the money originating from the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, a women-led organization that works to return Indigenous lands.
Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, which recently received a $20 million donation from a private foundation, will contribute $25.5 million of the cost, while Berkeley will put up $1.5 million. The Berkeley City Council voted unanimously, 7-0, to approve the deal on Tuesday afternoon.
Corrina Gould, the Ohlone leader who spearheaded the effort to return the land, has developed a plan for the area that includes exposing the creek nearby, creating open space with native plants, and building a 40-foot-tall mound covered with poppies that will house an educational and memorial component.
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The news heralds the end of a messy and expensive development fight in Berkeley that has pitted developers, housing advocates, Native American tribes and the city against each other for more than a decade. The site has become a symbol of the national effort to make reparations to Native American communities amid growing consciousness about the country’s colonial history and brutal dispossession of land inhabited by Indigenous peoples.
“This is a significant move to right past wrongs, let people know the Ohlone people are still here, and really set an example of how we can, working in partnership with indigenous leaders, rematriate lands,” Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín said in an interview.
Gould said the news made her speechless, calling the agreement one “that acknowledges we’re not just the past, but current and available to come to the table as equal partners to protect our sacred places.”
In addition to stipulating the transfer of the site, the settlement will end the yearslong legal case filed by the developers against the city for its efforts to stop development there. A trial was set to begin next month into potential financial damages owed by the city to the developer.
Berkeley City Council Member Sophie Hahn called the move “the most significant land-backed action ever taken by a city in California,” and said it demonstrated the strength of Berkeley’s commitment to addressing historic wrongs.
Dana Ellsworth, a principal at Ruegg & Ellsworth, said the company’s agreement was with the city of Berkeley, which will then turn over the land to the trust in a separate deal.
“We’re happy to have the case settled and move forward, and we wish all the best to the land trust,” Ellsworth told the Chronicle.
The council voted on an ordinance to authorize the city to acquire the property, at 1900 Fourth St., and then transfer its title. “The purpose and intent of this Ordinance are to rematriate a portion of the historic West Berkeley Shellmound to the Ohlone people from whom the land was unjustly taken without compensation or consent prior to the founding of the City of Berkeley,” reads the text.
The path to the deal was paved by the $20 million donation to Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, which came from the Kataly Foundation and was announced this month. The foundation, which says its mission is to empower Black and brown communities through economic justice measures, is run by members of the Pritzker family, whose holdings have included Hyatt hotels and the Royal Caribbean cruise line. The Sogorea Te’ Land Trust called it the “largest known cash gift to a Native land trust in history.”
Discussions about preserving the site, which is now a parking lot, date back more than 20 years, though questions have been raised over the years about the exact location of shellmounds in the area, and whether one of them is indeed under the parking lot. An investigation funded by the developers did not find evidence of a shellmound on the site, Ellsworth said.
Ohlone representatives and archaeologists at UC Berkeley have said that the site, one of the last open and undeveloped spaces at the location of an ancient village where Strawberry Creek used to run into the bay, is sacred and historically important — part of burial and ceremonial grounds dating back more than 5,700 years.
The parcel, a 2.2-acre patch of flat land that abuts the Fourth Street shopping corridor and train tracks in West Berkeley, has been paved for more than 50 years, and was for many decades a parking lot owned by Spenger’s Fish Grotto, which was Berkeley’s oldest restaurant when it closed in 2018 after 128 years.
In 2000, the Berkeley City Council designated the site, known as the West Berkeley Shellmound, as a landmark.
That same year, Ruegg & Ellsworth bought into the property in a joint ownership agreement with Spenger’s, Ellsworth said. In 2022, the development firm bought out the Spenger family’s share for $9.5 million, she said, valuing the property at around $19 million.
The tug-of-war between the city and the developers heated up in the 2010s, with a proposal for a mixed-use building for residential and retail space to be built there. In 2018, Ruegg & Ellsworth changed its plans and sought to use a new state law, SB35, which gave projects that set aside at least 50% of their units at below-market rates the ability to cut through red tape on local permitting processes. The goal was to construct a 260-unit building.
Berkeley, however, shot down the proposal, arguing that the development was not eligible under SB35 because it would demolish a historic structure, in this case the remnants of the shellmound under the lot.
That kicked off a yearslong legal battle. Berkeley’s decision was originally upheld by an Alameda County judge in 2019, but it was overturned by the 1st District Court of Appeal in San Francisco in 2021. That court said the development served the urgent need for affordable housing and would not harm the historic site.
In 2020, the site was named an “endangered historic place” by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
The city of Berkeley said that although the developer was issued a building permit in 2022, no work began. Instead, Ruegg & Ellsworth pursued further litigation against the city, which had to settle a $1.4 million claim for attorney fees last month.
Reach Eli Rosenberg: [email protected]
March 12, 2024|Updated March 13, 2024 8:55 a.m.
Eli Rosenberg comes to the San Francisco Chronicle most recently from NBC News, where he covered tech and economic issues. Before that, he was a reporter at the Washington Post for four and a half years, covering labor on the business desk. He has written about misinformation campaigns, politics, immigration issues, and fires and other disasters across the country. He spent years in New York as a metro reporter, at the Brooklyn Paper, Daily News, and the New York Times, and is looking forward to getting back to his roots as a local reporter. He lives in the East Bay with his family, and enjoys cold plunges, beach camping and exploring the Bay Area food scene when he's not on deadline.
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