Berkeley Rezones 30 City Blocks to Allow Taller Housing

The City of Berkeley is going tall in its latest effort to solve a severe shortage of student housing at UC Berkeley.

The Berkeley City Council voted unanimously this month to allow buildings as high as 12 stories in the densely populated Southside neighborhood adjacent to the university campus. The rezoning measure encompasses nearly 30 city blocks south of the UC Berkeley campus, according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Berkeley officials estimate that relaxing the height restriction in the area could permit another 2,652 homes to be built in the neighborhood bounded by Bancroft Way, Prospect Street, Dwight Way and Fulton Street.

In a region with a proliferation of historic buildings, the zoning adjustment will allow building heights to rise by 85 feet on streets including Telegraph Avenue, Bancroft Way and Durant Avenue, among others.

If developers include both affordable housing and middle-income housing, they would be eligible under AB1287, a new state density law recently signed by the governor, to rise as high as 16 stories. AB1287 goes into effect next year.

The City Council’s vote also directed the city manager to consider incentives for new housing projects that would allow for widened sidewalks, activated pedestrian spaces and green roofs, the report said.

Atlanta-based developer Niles Bolton Associates filed plans earlier this month to replace storefronts at 2450 and 2480 Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley with an eight-story, 111-unit apartment complex.

Plans call for the demolition of two commercial buildings at the site, including a Thai restaurant, a laundromat and a bicycle shop. The new apartment building will include 2K SF of ground-floor shots, a rooftop terrace and parking for 78 bicycles.

The housing crunch at UC Berkeley is so bad a judge last year ordered the university to hold back acceptances for thousands of students because of the lack of housing, forcing an intervention from the state Legislature.

UC Berkeley provides housing for only 23% of its student, the lowest rate of any University of California campus, the Chronicle report said.

A bill passed by the state Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom in September nullified legal challenges to UC Berkeley’s controversial plan to build student housing on a site that includes the counter-culture landmark known as the People’s Park since 1968.

In February, a state appeals court ruled that the project, which plans to build housing with 1,100 student beds, could not move forward because the increase in residential noise could be considered a form of pollution under the CEQA.

In a unanimous vote, the Legislature specified in its bill that residential noise is not considered a significant environmental effect under CEQA. The bill, signed into law by Newsom, also specifies that public universities will not have to weigh alternative locations for housing projects as long as the candidate site is five acres or less and has already been included in the university’s most recent environmental impact report.