P is for Penthouse: By DAVID BLAKE  Tuesday September 07, 2004
For over 20 years, Berkeley law has required developers of new
apartment buildings to offer 20 percent of their units at levels
affordable to people with lower-than-average incomes. It’s a
trade-off with developers (for which they’re handsomely
rewarded) to make sure that, as Berkeley develops, poorer people
aren’t steadily forced out of the city. That same law requires
those units to be evenly dispersed throughout the building,
because poor people shouldn’t be sequestered in special poor
sections of apartment buildings.   But in all apartment
buildings erected in the last five years, the top levels are
free of these affordable units. (When you get in the elevator,
don’t press “P” if you’re poor; that button’s for penthouse
residents, not for you.) So instead of poor-people ghettos in
new apartment buildings, we’ve made poor-people-free zones. How
did a city that prides itself most of all on its commitment to
fairness end up violating its own law