The development team that wants to build a long-debated transit village with more than 700 homes atop the North Berkeley BART station’s parking lot has submitted its plans for city approval.
The project application calls for 13 mixed-use and residential buildings ranging from three to eight stories tall, spread across the eight-acre site and interspersed with nearly 50,000 square feet of redesigned public outdoor space. The plans, which the development team first detailed publicly last fall, also call for building a child care center and “community-serving retail” within the new neighborhood, along with a parking garage with 176 spaces for residents and another 120 spots for BART riders.
City records show a more than 1,400-page application for the project was submitted to planning staff Tuesday; it was first reported by SFYIMBY.
The project team North Berkeley Housing Partners, which is made up of one market-rate and three affordable housing developers, plans to break ground at the site next year. The group said more specific timelines will depend on how soon it can pull together the funding needed to build subsidized affordable apartments that make up just over half of the project’s homes.
In an application statement, the team wrote that its project “will reestablish the station as a community gathering place that welcomes pedestrians and bikers, provides much needed housing, and provides a strong local setting for the BART station.”
While the effort to plan for housing at the parking lot stretched across dozens of meetings over more than five years, there won’t be a public hearing about the project application itself. Instead, city planning staff will only review the proposal to determine if it complies with development rules for the station site and approve it if it does. That’s the result of state housing laws that streamlined the approval process for projects on BART property, as well as developments that include affordable housing and agree to wage standards for construction workers.
Berkeley Planning Director Jordan Klein said staff plan to complete their review of the project within the next four months.
For-profit developer AvalonBay plans to construct two market-rate buildings with 358 of the project’s 739 total apartments, down slightly from 750 homes mentioned in earlier plans.
The development’s 377 planned affordable units, which range from studios to three-bedroom apartments, would be built by nonprofits BRIDGE Housing Corporation, East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation and Insight Housing, formerly known as the Berkeley Food and Housing Project. In addition, those buildings will have four units for on-site managers.
The affordable apartment buildings would be made up of homes set aside for renters at several different income levels, ranging from 20% to 70% of Berkeley’s area median income. That means renters on the high end of the scale would make up to $72,520 as an individual, or $103,530 for a family of four, based on this year’s income limits.
