A distinctive Tudor-style North Berkeley building that was home to the deli Poulet for more than four decades could be replaced with housing.
A developer submitted plans last month for a seven-story, 132-unit apartment building on the 19,875 square-foot lot at the corner of Virginia Street and Shattuck Avenue, according to city records. The project would include 14 subsidized units affordable for renters who are considered very low income, as well as 93 parking spaces.
The development blog SFYIMBY, which first reported on the housing proposal, identified the property’s owner as Art Kapoor, the owner of AKR Property Management.
The San Francisco Business Times reported the project was part of a flurry of 13 development proposals submitted to Berkeley planning staff last month, totaling more than 1,600 apartments.
The travel agency Going Places occupies a ground-floor space in the two-story building at 1675-1685 Shattuck Ave.; the owners of Poulet, a North Berkeley institution best known for its roast chicken, said little about why they closed the restaurant last summer, only citing family reasons.
While the structure is a recognizable feature of the North Shattuck corridor, and Poulet represented a gateway of sorts to the area’s famed collection of gourmet shops and restaurants, it is not a designated landmark.
Unlike other parts of the corridor downtown and to the south, where developers have built or proposed thousands of apartments in recent years, efforts to build housing on the northern blocks of Shattuck Avenue have been rare. According to a map of housing proposals maintained by realtor Eric Gellerman, the project at the former Poulet site is one of only two pending applications to build apartments on Shattuck above Hearst Avenue.
That could change in the near future, though — city officials pledged last year to consider rezoning North Shattuck, along with College and Solano avenues, to allow for taller and denser apartment buildings in an effort to add more housing in Berkeley’s wealthier neighborhoods.
