BERKELEY, California — Some of the city’s most affluent neighborhoods, bustling street corridors and empty single-family homes are being eyed to try and develop nearly 9,000 new homes over the next eight years, after the Berkeley City Council unanimously gave a 656-page plan the green light Wednesday.
Now, state housing officials just have to approve it.
The city will submit its state-mandated Housing Element, which lays out a roadmap and vision for denser development, to California’s Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) this month.
After HCD rejected Berkeley’s previous draft in November, the council worked to craft a clearer path forward to removing sluggish construction hurdles, spurring denser housing in historically exclusionary enclaves and augmenting a nexus of future projects as the city attempts to build three times the number of units it was required to tackle in its previous Housing Element.
Planning Director Jordan Klein declared that city staff “feel strongly that our Housing Element is fully compliant.”
If he’s wrong, what’s at stake is the city’s ability to control its own local land-use decisions, as well as access key funding for affordable housing and infrastructure. Lawsuits and fines are also on the line if state regulators decide the council’s latest plan still misses the mark.
Berkeley’s far from alone from feeling the pressure.
A majority of draft Housing Elements from across the Bay Area were sent back to the drawing board late last year—a clear symptom of the state’s dramatically increased demands.
By 2031, the entire nine-county region must approve more than 441,000 new residential homes across all income levels—double the number that local governments were asked to deliver—and generally failed to do so—between 2014 and 2022.
Next door, the city of Alameda—one of the few cities that got a thumbs up on its Housing Element in 2022—plans to accommodate just shy of 6,000 new homes on the island. For comparison, San Jose must plan for 77,500 new homes, while Oakland was assigned 26,500 units.
The nine-member Berkeley City Council unanimously supported adding an amendment to update the city’s zoning rules to allow for higher growth along College, Solano and North Shattuck avenues by the end of 2026—a change Councilmember Rashi Kesarwani authored to help “formerly red-lined and higher-resource areas” do their fair share of the big housing lift.
“Existing zoning is based on racial exclusion—single-family zoning was invented in the Claremont Elmwood neighborhood to keep people of color from being able to live there,” Kesarwani said during Wednesday’s meeting. The Housing Element previously only broadly promised to “evaluate” zoning maps across Berkeley. “The rules of the game are rigged against having real equity, and I’m really proud of the work that we’ve done so far and the fact that our motion is making our commitments very clear to try to undo that harmful racist legacy.”
If the current rules and regulations remained in place, a majority of new construction would likely be concentrated in downtown, West and South Berkeley.
But the council and public commenters were hotly divided on the suggestion to consider streamlining demolition of long-vacant single-family homes in favor of expediting approvals for “middle housing,” such as smaller, multi-unit buildings.
The proposed changes were submitted only 24 hours before the meeting, prompting several complaints that there wasn’t enough time to properly digest the suggestions and potential negative impacts, particularly focused on adequate protection of rent-controlled units.
“No notice was given to any rent board commissioners (or) any of our staff. No outreach was done on this proposal that would significantly open up the possibility of the demolition of rent-controlled units in the city,” said Rent Board Vice Chair Soli Alpert. “Because of the council’s failure to act before the November election, any replacement of rent-controlled units under AB 1482 that result from demolition in Berkeley are second class rent-controlled units that do not benefit from the protection oversight or enforcement of the rent board.”
After the amendment was heavily edited to exclude “residential structures of up to three units,” only “consider” eliminating permit requirements, require consideration from members of the city’s Rent Board and explore effects on historic resources, it passed in a 6-3 vote, with councilmembers Sophie Hahn, Kate Harrison and Susan Wengraf dissenting.
Wengraf went one step further in discussing her frustration with Wednesday’s meeting.
“I’m disappointed that we’re not emphasizing a different, more creative way to increase density in our city, other than demolition and new construction,” Wengraf opined, referring to environmental impacts of that kind of development. “After working on this for 18 months, the public deserves more time to consider, and, frankly, we had a council meeting last night that didn’t end until 10 o’clock, so I didn’t get to see these revisions until this morning.
“I don’t consider that adequate time to make important policy decisions.”
