City to consider suing owner of blighted Telegraph lot

September 6, 2011 9:00 am by Frances Dinkelspiel

The city of Berkeley holds $500,000 in liens against this lot at 2501 Haste Street. Photo: Frances Dinkelspiel

The city of Berkeley may finally be getting fed up with the vacant, rat-infested lot on the northeast corner of Haste and Telegraph.

The City Council on Tuesday will consider filing a lawsuit against Ken Sarachan, the owner of the lot, to collect $500,000 in city liens on the property. The idea so delights City Councilman Kriss Worthington, who represents the area and who has long been frustrated by an empty space in such a prime commercial district, that he sent out an email blast to his constituents on Friday.

He urged them to come to the City Council meeting on Tuesday – even though it is a closed session and is not open to the public.

“It’s time to take action NOW on the Berkeley Inn site at Haste & Telegraph!’ Worthington wrote in an email (the bold font is his). “After many years of repeated noise problems, trash, and problem rats overtaking the site, the Berkeley Inn will be on the City Council agenda this coming Tuesday, September 6th, at 5:30pm. It’s time to take action now. If the City Council takes a strong stance on the issue, it will either force the property owner to do something, or the Council will ensure that the property owner gives Berkeley taxpayers about $500,000 from the lien on the property, which hopefully will go to affordable housing to make up for the affordable housing which was lost by the fire. Either way, the City will get something happening in order to rectify years of blight.”

Sarachan, 59, the owner of Rasputin Records, Blondie’s Pizza, the old Cody’s building, and the large glass and steel shopping mall at 2350 Telegraph, could not be reached for comment.

For more than 80 years, the Berkeley Inn, a 75-room hotel designed in 1911 by the architect Joseph Cather Newsom (a relative of Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s) stood at 2501 Haste Street. It burned down in 1990, and the owner essentially abandoned the property.

The city cleaned up the debris at significant expense but could not collect reimbursement from the owner. It filed liens against the property as a result. A non-profit group tried to build an affordable housing complex on the property with Amoeba Records on the ground floor, but the plan was never realized. In 1994, Sarachan acquired the land, and, with it, the $500,000 in liens. It has sat vacant since then, and Worthington and others consider it a blight and a drag on the neighborhood. Rats come out at night and weeds grow through cracks in the concrete.

The city has offered over the years to forgive the liens if Sarachan would develop the lot. Berkeley first made the offer in 1998, and, when there was no response from Sarachan by February 2003, set a September 2004 expiration date. Nothing happened. Then, in July 2006, Sarachan submitted some initial designs to the city to build a five-story Asian-themed structure with towering pagodas, but he never formally submitted an application.

Rats scurrying around at night at the lot on Haste and Telegraph. Photo: Tracey Taylor

Sarachan told the Daily Californian in September 2010 that the city’s regulations and quota restrictions made it too burdensome for new projects to begin, including his ideas for a structure on his Haste Street lot and a “beer and books” business in the old Cody’s site.

“They don’t trust a free market in Berkeley,” Sarachan told the newspaper. “They might open too many yogurt stores and the world might end or something horrible might happen — like all the vacancies would go away.”

Worthington said he has been pushing for the city to take action on the lot for years and is not sure why movement is coming now. It may be the recent attention paid to the site by the media, including a video posted on Berkeleyside in January showing rats scurrying around, which was itself prompted by comments made by Amoeba Music owner Marc Weinstein at a Berkeleyside business forum. The video went viral and was picked up by many television stations. More recently a group of UC-Berkeley students made a video, also posted on Berkeleyside, which posed the question “What about that vacant lot on Haste and Telegraph?”

80 Comments

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  • Meliflaw

    That makes sense. Thanks, Guest.

  • reality knocks

    yes lets also line the streets with gold and give everyone in berkeley ten million dollars – its just as likely

  • http://www.flickr.com/parksdh D. H. Parks

    This People’s Park Annex is a fantastic idea. I propose we call it the Mos Eisley Spacepark as it would almost certainly be the universe’s most wretched hive of scum and villainy.

  • libraterian

    I find the empty lot’s presence a compliment to the slow torture Berkeley ‘progressives’ have visited upon us. It offers silent testimony to the fatuous moral posing of our talkative elite. A Berkeley Memorial that denies a current edit.

  • Berkeley resident

    Actually Ken’s motives are very clear.  He is not shy about sharing them and any one who has ever worked with him has a good understanding of his movites.  These are NOT rumors.  The man is very “unique”.

  • Berkeley resident

    Actually Ken’s motives are very clear.  He is not shy about sharing them and any one who has ever worked with him has a good understanding of his movites.  These are NOT rumors.  The man is very “unique”.

  • Berkeley resident

    This is a great idea.  I wonder if Ken would consider it.

  • Berkeley resident

    This is a great idea.  I wonder if Ken would consider it.

  • Berkeley resident

    Have you seen what he is trying to “develop”?  He is a genius with a lot of money and he does what he likes and he can afford to do what he wants. 

  • Berkeleyborn123

    Great article Tom-I’d recommend everyone check out the link posted by Tom…..

  • Joescanlon

    I came out here as a college student during a month-long break for the Christmas holidays during the 1968-1969 school year and spent ten days at the Berkeley Inn.  A single room there with a sink and a bathroom down the hall cost about $24 a week then, and mine had a window overlooking Telegraph.  I loved that old dark red building with its main entrance facing Haste.  It had one of those old-fashioned accordion door cage elevators.  There were no TV’s in the rooms, of course, but there was one in the front corner room off the lobby.  I watched Joe Namath and the AFL champion Jets upset the mighty Colts of the NFL in Super Bowl III on that TV.  I also remember Berkeley police banging on my door one night in pursuit of someone who had just robbed the Garden Spot, a small market across the street on Telegraph, and run up into the building.  The Avenue was almost like a carnival in those days, and I met several interesting people there during my stay.  With memories like these, naturally I think they ought to build another hotel on the property.

  • Alina

    Anyone have an update on what was decided at last night’s Council meeting? Are they going forward with the lawsuit?

  • Ethancc2

    Daily Cal just published a headline on the decision:
    http://www.dailycal.org/2011/09/06/city-council-unanimously-votes-to-foreclose-on-vacant-telegraph-lot/
    “City Council unanimously votes to foreclose on vacant Telegraph lot”

  • Alina

    Thank you!

  • Bryan Garcia

    I don’t think you could have possibly come up with a worse idea if you tried.  The last thing we need is People’s Park 2.

  • Charles_Siegel

    It wasn’t clear to me before that they were planning to foreclose.  That means the city is suing to take ownership of the property.

  • http://www.webhamster.com/ The Sharkey

    WOW! After so many years of inaction I wasn’t expecting something so… forceful from the City Council.

    This is gonna be a helluva legal battle. Should be interesting to watch.

  • Cal Grad

    A few years back, a local preacher would regularly set up at that corner, playing loudly amplified music and haranguing passers-by about their salvation:

    http://www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/news/print.asp?id=25933

  • LuvSet

    before being fenced it was a People’s Park Annex – and it started out rather charmingly but then it turned into a campsite and hangout. 

    the fencing was a relief. but it sure is discouraging seeing the space just sit there behind that ugly fence. 

  • GPO

    Agreed.  It was a great read.  My favorite vignette, because its implications go beyond the Inn itself, is this one, in which the “city social services” tries to get a deeply disturbed, drugged out young man who intentionally lights his own mattress on fire back into the Inn the very “next day” after he was evicted for endangering the lives of all the other low income residents/tenants…  This aptly symbolizes the mentality of our city social work bureaucracy.
     
     
    Early one morning a long time resident was returning from a night on the town whenhe smelled a whiff of smoke in the Berkeley Inn. A quick examination of empty earlymorning corridors brought him to a room where smoke was seeping out from under thehotel room door.
     
    The all-night carouser aroused the desk clerk on duty. The desk clerk got hold of the maintenance man who had a passkey. They hurried to the scene of the smoke. There was a brief discussion as to whether they had a right to violate the young man’s privacy by opening the room door.
     
    During the discussion the all-night carouser, the desk clerk, and the maintenanceman made one another aware that unstable young man had been seen earlier throwing foodaround a nearby hamburger palace named Kip’s. Later he had thrown water on the door ofthe room of a hotel neighbor. When asked why, he said he wanted to make the doortransparent so he could watch the television inside.
     
    Smoke continued to flow out under the door and into the corridor. The discussionended quickly. The passkey was used to open the door. Through the haze of smoke theycould see unstable young man sitting on his bed coolly smoking a cigarette and watching hismattress burn. He had put residents in grave danger. He was summarily evicted on the spot.City social services tried to get him back into his room the next day. They failed.
     

  • http://twitter.com/CounterReich Robert 3rd Reich

    They are doing this for the money.
    The vacancy is a non-issue.
    The rats were obviously a setup-look at the feed on the ground.
    The council and their tax obsessed friends would lower business tax to encourage new stores if they really cared about that.
    500k goes into the general fund to pay their absurd salaries and benefits.
    Meanwhile, there are plenty of vacant stores on Telegraph to put “value” into the neighborhood experience(which is comprised of a wonderful melange of drunks, homelessness, vagrants, teenage drugdealers and headshops.
    What’s the plan for the street, Kriss? Besides extorting money?

  • http://www.facebook.com/AlanCarlBrown Alan Carl Brown

    Hmm, yeah.  Seems like the liens should have been paid when the guy acquired the property.  Did the city make some kind of deal to not collect if he did some kind of development?  Should they have got it in writing?  

    Perhaps this agreement is what they are now acting on.  Its not clear to me. But having a piece of undeveloped land is not a crime.  Nor is having animals living on your land.Its unfortunate that there is garbage on the lot.  Perhaps the persons who dumped it there should be prosecuted instead of blaming the victim?I would suggest to the owner that he simply hire an unemployed person to spend an hour once a month removing any trash.  But these days that probably takes 18 forms and an environmental impact statement.

  • http://www.webhamster.com/ The Sharkey

    Putting bird feed on the ground does not make rats magically appear out of thin air. But I suppose it could be used to coax the dozens of rats that were already living in the lot out of their hiding places so that someone could photograph them all at once.

    If the City is doing it for the money, that’s great. They should have done it for the money long ago. I’d much rather they hunt down potential revenue streams like this than try to float another parcel tax.

  • http://francesdinkelspiel.com/ Frances Dinkelspiel

    Just so you know, Berkeleyside did not put down any food to attract those rats. Someone else feeds them.

  • Anonymous

    Ever heard of eminent domain?

    Why didn’t the city get paid on the 500K lien(s) when property was bought in 1994?  

    Why are they not assessing  serious fees and taxes even if just to deal with these type of landblighters?

  • LongTimeBerkeleyResident

    Are there plenty of vacant stores on Telegraph Ave? 

    The ones I can think of off hand are: 

    – Galaxie and Codys, which are both owned by Ken Sarachan. 

    – Gabiella’s Pizza, which attracted a business  and was remodeled but remains vacant because it does not have proper ventilation for a pizza oven.

    Can you think of any others?

  • Bob Wilkins

    Please, a garden on Telegraph avenue? How long do you think that’ll last with all the homeless and druggies that prowl the area.  I’d much rather deal with four legged rats then  the larger two legged variety that  insult and spit at you when you don’ t give them spare change.

  • http://lazyboysofas.net Steven

    Something should definitely be built on this prime piece of real estate. I am surprised the city hasn’t pressed for $500,000 that it is owed in this time of budget deficits. And it is pretty rich to hear that Berkeley doesn’t trust the free market from a guy who owns Rasputin and Blondie’s.

  • Karen

    Hi! I read your article and it was great! I wanted to know if you had any books/sources you could refer me to that you used when writing it, I am working on a research project about the Berkeley Inn and would appreciate any sources you may know of! 

    Thanks!

  • carl martineau

    let jim sharp lose on the property ..

    he ‘ll clean it up for free ..

    it ‘ll give him something to do
    besides tear down people’s posters ..
    and spray paint everything in town silver ..

    hopefully the rats wo n’t mind ..

    and will leave him alone ..

    but then who knows ..

    they might attack him ..

    or ken could have a big rasputin yard sale ..

    though amoeba might train the rats
    to attack him ..

    of course someone could outfit the rats
    with little knit vests
    with protest messages ..

    just think of all the alternatives we have here ..

    as henry kaiser’s wife would say ..

    “.. an opportunity in work clothes ..”

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