Richard Spohn wanted the Berkeley City Council to know that the matter before it was nothing less than a “brazen bureaucratic subterfuge of city policy.” It was a “fraud,” perhaps even a crime, the resident of Berkeley’s tony Claremont District told the council, and certainly “a damn shame.”
The source of Spohn’s ire: his next-door neighbor’s plan to build a backyard hot tub.
Spohn, a regulatory lawyer who once led California’s Department of Consumer Affairs, spent $2,000 on a seven-month battle to block the hot tub, an effort that ended last week when the City Council rejected his appeal.
Berkeley has a colorful hot tub history. In the late 1940s, an Italian immigrant named Candido Jacuzzi, who owned a machine shop in West Berkeley along with his brothers, built a whirlpool bath that could be installed in homes; the product proved so popular the family name became synonymous with hot tubs. A South Berkeley home was locally famous for offering a communal, all-hours hot tub — a nearly 50-year tradition that ended in 2022 after its owner was found dead in the tub and the property was sold.
Homeowners who want to install their own outdoor hot tubs must get a permit from the city’s planning department, and those decisions can be challenged by neighbors.
Planning staff granted one such permit last July to Homayoon Kazerooni, Spohn’s neighbor. Kazerooni is a mechanical engineering professor at UC Berkeley who directs the Berkeley Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory. He is also the CEO of SUITX, a company founded at the lab that designs wearable “exoskeletons” to help workers with physically demanding tasks.
The two men live in multi-million-dollar homes on a quiet, tree-lined street a couple of blocks below the Claremont Hotel.
But according to Spohn, a member of the Claremont Elmwood Neighborhood Association’s board of directors, Kazerooni’s hot tub would shatter that serene setting.
Making his case in a letter to the City Council, Spohn raised the specter of a party in his neighbor’s backyard with “several jolly hot tubbers whooping it up over a long soak.” Even when not in use, he wrote, the sound of the hot tub’s pump would be a nuisance to his wife, who works part-time in a converted garage in his backyard, at a desk less than 10 feet from the planned tub. And he complained that he learned of the proposal from a representative of Kazerooni’s landscape architect, not from his neighbor directly.
Blocking the tub, Spohn argued, is “a matter of public protection and of civic self-respect.”
Spohn appealed the decision to grant the hot tub permit first to Berkeley’s Zoning Adjustments Board, which ruled in Kazerooni’s favor last October, then appealed the board’s decision to the City Council. That step cost $1,500, on top of the $500 he paid for the zoning board hearing.
Kazerooni told the council his project would address Spohn’s concerns about noise. There is already a 6 1/2-foot concrete wall separating the two backyards, while Kazerooni’s plans call for adding new vegetation along the property line and installing the tub on a sound-reducing mat.
“We did our best to actually satisfy the appellant here,” Kazerooni said at last Tuesday’s meeting.
City planning staff recommended the council grant Kazerooni’s permit, saying none of the issues raised in Spohn’s appeal were violations of the zoning code. If the tub or its users cause a racket, staff wrote, Spohn can make a complaint under Berkeley’s noise ordinance.
That won’t be enough, Spohn argued. He proposed the city only grant his neighbor’s hot tub permit if a “qualified noise expert,” hired at Kazerooni’s expense, were to certify that the tub wouldn’t cause excessive noise.
“If somebody can’t say that, then Berkeley should not authorize the thing,” he argued to the council.
During the brief hearing on Spohn’s appeal, Councilmember Sophie Hahn took a reconciliatory approach. Hahn said she often saw neighbors raise concerns about hot tubs during the years she spent on the zoning board, but never heard that the feared disruptions had come to pass once the tub was installed; she hoped “neighborliness and good relations” could prevail between Spohn and Kazerooni.
“I really do think it’s not going to be as bad as imagined,” Hahn said. Seated in the front row of the mostly empty meeting room, Spohn tutted and shook his head.
Moments later, the council voted unanimously to grant Kazerooni his delayed permit. The two neighbors left the meeting separately, without speaking, while the council moved on to other business.
