The Berkeley City Council signed off on looser design rules for housing at the North Berkeley BART station Tuesday, with a vote that effectively ends the five-year planning process to redevelop the parking lot that became a focal point of the city’s housing debate.
The council decision clears the way for a development team to submit its proposal to build 750 apartments at the site, half of which would be affordable, for city approval early next year.
The development group, which calls itself North Berkeley Housing Partners, had requested several changes to the design rules, arguing they would help the project get the funding it needs to break ground in 2025. Pro-density organizations that have long rallied for development at the station supported the changes, and Berkeley’s Planning Commission endorsed them in October.
“I want us to do everything we can to ensure that these affordable homes can get built, so that is why I think it is important to provide flexibility in the event that it might be needed,” said Councilmember Rashi Kesarwani, who represents the area and has championed the project. “I am asking us to do a little more than we originally thought we could so that somebody else can have what we already have: the opportunity to live in this wonderful neighborhood.”
The changes were adopted over the objections of many of the station’s neighbors, who have long argued that the housing envisioned for the site is too large. Many said the regulations, known as objective design standards, would result in an imposing project that didn’t reflect the desires of existing residents.
“The changes in the [objective design standards] being proposed are not minor tweaks — they essentially obliterate all of the concerns that were expressed by the community,” said one station neighbor, who described the rules as “a betrayal and a slap in the face to those who do not think it is a good idea for their neighborhood to look like Emeryville.”
The revisions that were approved Tuesday included reducing required building setbacks to 5 feet, from 8 to 10 feet depending on the size of the structure, and exempting building facades that are less than 200 feet wide from having to provide “massing breaks.”
The regulations also allow the developer to entirely forego the requirement for breaks — a mandate that many station neighbors contend is necessary to keep the project from being too bulky, and pro-density groups oppose because the features cut into space for housing — if they decorate a facade with “ornamentation.” Councilmembers Kate Harrison and Sophie Hahn expressed skepticism about that provision and how it could be used at Tuesday’s meeting.
Harrison pressed representatives from North Berkeley Housing Partners for commitments to limit any use of the ornamentation rule and not seek exemptions from the design standards, which they could be entitled to under California’s “density bonus” law.
Officials from the group — made up of the market-rate builder AvalonBay and nonprofits BRIDGE Housing Corporation, East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation and Insight Housing — mostly stopped short of making firm commitments about how the design standards would affect their project. Designer David Simons told the council that the group envisions making only “really minor changes” to a conceptual design put forward in September.
The City Council won’t have a direct say in whether to approve the final proposal for the station site. That’s the result of state housing laws that speed up the approval process for projects with affordable housing and those on BART property: City planning staff will only review the proposal to ensure it complies with the design standards and zoning, and can then grant approval without any further public hearings or votes.
It’s a far cry from the deliberative process that brought Berkeley to Tuesday’s vote. Across more than 50 public meetings since 2018, an at times heated debate played out over how much change the neighborhood of primarily single-family homes around the station should accept amid what many see as a critical effort to address the housing and climate crises by encouraging dense development around BART.
“This is our last opportunity to meaningfully influence this project,” Harrison said. “I appreciate the need for flexibility and to maximize housing, but I also appreciate the need for the people who live in the neighborhood now to have some reasonable expectation of what is going to occur.”
Harrison proposed the council change the design standards to limit how the developer could use the ornamentation provision, but was outvoted 6-3, with Hahn and Councilmember Susan Wengraf joining her. Eight council members then voted to adopt the revised design standards, while Harrison abstained.
