Tag: Housing in Berkeley

Officials push forward with affordable senior housing project for West Berkeley

Posted on by Emilie Raguso
1900 Sixth St. could one day feature multiple stories of affordable housing for seniors. Image: Google Maps

The Berkeley City Council voted Tuesday night to analyze the possibility of service-rich senior housing on the parcel now occupied by the West Berkeley Service Center.

Councilwoman Susan Wengraf originally had asked the city, in 2016, to review all the properties it owns to determine which might be the best fit for affordable housing. That evolved into a proposal, the next year, to explore the concept of senior housing at three senior centers, in North Berkeley, West Berkeley and South Berkeley. Council ultimately put the West Berkeley Service Center, at 1900 Sixth St., on its “high priority” list for senior housing.

The idea, according to the staff report for Tuesday’s meeting, is to build senior housing with on-site services, “maximizing the number of affordable units.” The council vote Tuesday gives the city manager the authority to look at a range of possible “build-out scenarios” for a three- to seven-story project.

Although the vote took place as part of the consent calendar, which meant there was limited discussion about the item, several council members expressed excitement about the idea.

“I think it’s a wonderful location for us to be considering building senior housing,” Wengraf told her colleagues. (Wengraf took part in Tuesday’s meeting by phone.)

The West Berkeley site is promising, according to the city, because of its proximity to transit, shopping and existing services for seniors. And its zoning already allows for multifamily development. By contrast, the senior centers in North and South Berkeley have more restrictive residential zoning. In addition, the proximity of the BART tunnel to the North Berkeley Senior Center limits what can be built there.

A 2017 analysis of the site by the city found that, while nearby buildings are just one or two stories tall, there are four- to five-story buildings on University Avenue a block away. The staff analysis found that “changing the zoning could help maximize the site’s development potential,” while also noting that “Demolishing and replacing the service center … would add significantly to the cost of housing development at the site.”

Councilwoman Sophie Hahn thanked Wengraf for bringing the item forward, and thanked Mayor Jesse Arreguín for his work to develop the idea over time. She said the consent calendar item was a testament to the fact that council’s new committee structure — where several council members hash out items in smaller groups before bringing them to the full council for a vote — is working.

“The mayor was very patient and took a lot of input from the commission and from staff,” Hahn said. “It was a good item when it came to us [on the committee], but I think it’s even better as it came through and as we see it now on our agenda.”

While the ultimate height of the building has yet to be determined,  all “scenarios should also incorporate space on the ground floor for resident amenities, supportive social services, and community space,” according to the staff report. The ideas that come from the staff analysis will go before the City Council and Planning Commission, among other stakeholders and city bodies, for review.

Council says senior housing should be a priority, in part, because that segment of Berkeley’s population is “expected to skyrocket over the next decade,” according to Tuesday’s staff report. In 2000, adults 65 and older made up about 10% of the city’s residents. The city says that number is expected to double by 2030.

Meanwhile, as with other segments of the population, the housing supply has not kept pace with the demand. According to the city, “Affordable housing is particularly limited with wait lists for some senior housing projects between 6-8 years.”

The West Berkeley Service Center, at Sixth Street and Hearst Avenue, is located on a 31,000 square-foot parcel. The site has “plentiful” access to public transit “with several high-frequency AC Transit routes and Amtrak located within half a mile.” The Fourth Street shopping area is nearby, as are a number of community health care facilities, according to the city.

As currently conceived, the project would focus on universally designed, affordable housing for older adults; incorporate the latest in technology; offer services and provide a community hub; have an assisted living and memory care component; and seek to maximize sustainability and energy efficiency.

Tenants currently located at the site include the city’s Aging Services staff, the Black Infant Health Program, Public Health Nurses and the Meals on Wheels program. In addition, services from the North Berkeley Senior Center are being provided at the West Berkeley site until 2020 while the North Berkeley center undergoes renovations.

The city initially planned to update the West Berkeley Senior Center as a Measure T1 project but later determined that “what this site needs is beyond an infrastructure upgrade, and its history as a hub for senior services presents an opportunity,” according to the staff report. “West Berkeley has an extremely limited number of affordable housing units for seniors, despite being in a location that is easily accessible to various medical and aging services.”

The city says the new project would likely be funded by Measure O, along with tax credits and other sources, and could become “the gold standard for aging in place in our community, and the region.”

Zoning board gets first look at 209-unit project planned in downtown Berkeley

Posted on by Emilie Raguso
Logan Park: View from Shattuck and Durant avenues looking southwest. Image: Johnson Lyman Architects

A block of Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley could see major changes in the next few years with the construction of an eight-story, 209-unit housing complex between Channing Way and Durant Avenue.

William Schrader Jr., of The Austin Group, has become a familiar name in Berkeley development circles, having already built large projects, such as the eight-story StoneFire on University Avenue and the 79-unit Varsity Apartments at 2024 Durant Ave., downtown in recent years.

His new project, dubbed Logan Park, is slated to be built just east of the Varsity building on Durant, wrapping around the Shattuck Avenue block where Staples, Extreme Pizza, Heat Café, Endless Summer Sweets and Chase bank now operate. Schrader told the zoning board he is working closely with all of those businesses so that the new retail spots fit their needs. Logan Park, if approved, would be located on the largest parcel in downtown Berkeley, he said.

Thursday night’s hearing was a preview session, where Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) members give feedback to an applicant and staff about project changes or information they would like in the future. The optional advisory meeting takes place before a vote, which would be scheduled at a later date. Schrader said he’d like to be back before the zoning board for that vote later this year.

Logan Park will be built in two phases, Schrader told the board. Phase 1 will see construction at the Staples corner on Shattuck and west on Durant. Phase 2 would see the construction of the rest of the Shattuck frontage down to Channing Way. The phased construction approach will allow the businesses to stay open while the project is underway, he said.

Schrader said his primary goals with Logan Park are to “design the largest project possible allowed under the downtown plan and the density bonus,” and to keep the existing tenants.

Logan Park: View from Shattuck Avenue and Channing Way looking northwest. Image: Johnson Lyman Architects

The project includes two courtyards, a seventh-floor terrace and 86 parking spaces. Building residents would not be eligible for residential parking permits to park in the neighborhood.

The few people who spoke during public comment said they thought the building was too big. Several of them reside in senior living facility Stuart Pratt Manor at 2020 Durant. They recalled the Varsity’s construction as a difficult time in the neighborhood, posing challenges in their efforts to get around the block. A number of the Stuart Pratt residents are blind or disabled, they told the board.

Zoning board members were sympathetic to those concerns and advised Schrader to come back with a robust plan to address safety issues and logistical challenges during construction to make it easier for neighbors.

Members of the board were also largely unified in asking Schrader to reduce parking for the project, noting its proximity to BART and AC Transit. They said he might be able to build some ADA units on the ground floor, add more below-market-rate units or reduce the project height if he could take out some of the parking.

Their comments were at odds with the sentiments of some of the neighbors who spoke, who said there wasn’t enough parking in the project as it is.

Schrader told the board he believed the parking ratio would be appropriate, based in part on his experience determining the parking needs at the nearby Varsity building. That lot — which has 34 parking spots for a 79-unit building — is full, he said. He also noted that financers won’t fund housing projects if they don’t consider parking plans sufficient.

Logan Park, which is a density bonus project, is set to include 15 very-low-income units. Schrader said he will also pay approximately $4.5 million into the city’s Housing Trust Fund to fulfill the city requirement for affordable units.

Commissioners noted that Logan Park is also a Housing Accountability Act project. The state law significantly limits what the city can change as long as a project complies with the zoning code. Schrader said Logan Park is fully code compliant.

“We commissioners here do not have the power to change the state law,” Charles Kahn told the sparse group of attendees who had come to hear about the project. “We’re trying to do our best up here by the community that we all live in and care deeply about. But this is a state mandate.”

Kahn said the city had learned the lesson about the limits of its control the hard way: “Lawsuits come out of that and the lawsuits have been lost in the past by the city of Berkeley.”

Thursday night’s zoning board meeting did not draw many attendees. Photo: Emilie Raguso

Commissioner John Selawsky said he wanted to make a similar point regarding zoning board authority for those in the room and those who might be listening to the meeting from elsewhere.

The zoning board, he said, “has less and less discretion over some of these projects. Our hands, I wouldn’t say are tied. But there’s limited discretion in what ZAB can do on some of these projects. And, quite honestly, sometimes it annoys me.”

Selawsky said he thought an eight-story building was too tall and that it didn’t respect the existing neighborhood.

Commissioner Darrell Owens, who was sitting in for an absent member of the board, took a different position.

“We do need to respect the inhabitants of the existing neighborhood — but I don’t want to give the impression that someone who lives in an eight-story building is any less part of the neighborhood. There’s all types of diversities of housing. And, frankly, you know, 40 years from now, this may be considered a historic structure.”

Read the staff report. See more project materials on the city of Berkeley website.

UC regents to vote Wednesday on Upper Hearst project in Berkeley

Posted on by Emilie Raguso
Upper Hearst Development: Residential and parking at Hearst and La Loma avenues. Image: Solomon Cordwell Buenz

The Regents of the University of California are scheduled to vote Wednesday on the Upper Hearst Development project to create campus housing, a parking garage and a new academic building for the Goldman School of Public Policy on the north side of UC Berkeley.

The vote is part of the board’s agenda for its May 14-16 meeting at the Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF. The board is slated to consider whether to approve the project design for Upper Hearst and certify its final Supplemental Environmental Impact Report (SEIR).

According to the latest designs, from architecture firm Solomon Cordwell Buenz, the project includes a five-story, 150-unit residential building over a three-story “mostly subterranean” parking structure, as well as a four-story academic building over one basement level. The project also includes “a Minor Amendment (#4) to UC Berkeley’s 2020 Long Range Development Plan to accommodate the proposed housing land use on the project site.”

The city of Berkeley has taken issue with campus population estimates included in the project documents and recently said it might sue the university if the two sides can’t find a way to see eye to eye.

According to UC Berkeley, faculty members will be the primary target audience for the residential units, which also will be available to visiting scholars and postdoctoral students if there is room. The bulk of the garage, 90 spaces, will be reserved for building residents.

Monday, the city sent a 29-page letter to the regents, calling the final SEIR “inadequate” and saying the document “does little to address the concerns raised in the City’s comments, especially concerns related to the Project’s impacts on City services.”

The city of Berkeley has said the university’s annual fiscal impact on the city “has increased from an estimated $11 million in 2003 to over $21 million in 2018.” In response to that claim, the city argues, “the University asserted simply that it is exempt from ‘local regulations and local taxes.’ But this assertion does nothing to undermine the City’s calculations. Moreover, it fails to address the significant environmental impacts associated with this new burden on public services, including the need for new facilities.”

The university says it paid the city of Berkeley $1,770,698 in 2018-19. Those payments are set to continue for at least two more years.

Mayor Jesse Arreguín and Berkeley Councilwoman Susan Wengraf are expected to address the regents during public comment Wednesday morning.

In early May, the university released new designs for the Upper Hearst Development. Some of them appear below.

Upper Hearst Development: The residential and parking building as seen from La Loma Avenue and Ridge Road. Image: Solomon Cordwell Buenz
Upper Hearst Development: The academic building on Hearst Avenue. Image: Solomon Cordwell Buenz
Upper Hearst Development: The academic building on Hearst Avenue. Image: Solomon Cordwell Buenz

Note: The Upper Hearst Development is primarily aimed at faculty members, according to UC Berkeley. Berkeleyside corrected the story Tuesday night to reflect this.

Update: City of Berkeley, UC Berkeley grapple over campus growth impacts as possible lawsuit looms

Posted on by Emilie Raguso
Upper Hearst Development. Image: American Campus Communities
Upper Hearst Development proposal. Image: Solomon Cordwell Buenz

Update, May 1, 2:40 p.m. In a statement Wednesday afternoon, Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín wrote that “this lawsuit is not about the Upper Hearst Project, but about holding the University accountable.” He said council members are very much in favor of university efforts to add housing, but that “The Upper Hearst Development is a worthy project and should not be saddled by a flawed EIR or cramming the issue of greater student enrollment into the report.” See the full statement on the mayor’s website.

Update, May 1, 1 p.m. The Berkeley mayor’s brief announcement Tuesday night about a council decision to give the city attorney authority to file a lawsuit against UC Berkeley provoked statements Wednesday from the university and city staff to clarify what each side sees as the key issues at play. The original story, filed Tuesday night, appears below. This is the third update.

Berkeley city spokesman Matthai Chakko said Wednesday afternoon that the lawsuit under consideration is primarily focused on what the city describes as the “dramatic impact of exponential population growth” at UC Berkeley and the university’s failure to plan for it. Chakko cited a third-party analysis, requested by the city, that put the university’s “net fiscal impact” on the city, in 2018 alone, at more than $21 million. That relates to everything from city police, fire and public health services to wear and tear on city streets to exacerbating the housing crunch, Chakko said.

A spokesman for UC Berkeley told Berkeleyside earlier in the day (scroll down) that campus impacts have been lower than projected. He said UC Berkeley paid the city close to $1.8 million during the current fiscal year and would continue to make similar payments into the foreseeable future.

But Chakko took issue with the idea of lower-than-projected impacts. He said the university previously projected a 5% population growth rate that is now estimated to hit 29%. He said the Upper Hearst Development itself — referenced Tuesday night by the mayor in his remarks — is not the city’s main worry, but rather what appears to be an attempt by the university to hide its “massive population growth” in that project’s environmental analysis. That’s why the city believes the Upper Hearst EIR is flawed and why it’s considering filing suit, he said.

Update, May 1, 10:48 a.m. Dan Mogulof, UC Berkeley’s assistant vice chancellor of executive communications, told Berkeleyside on Wednesday morning that “the campus is prepared to successfully defend its position in court,” but hopes it will not come to that.

Berkeley’s mayor announced Tuesday night that the city is prepared to sue the regents over a proposed development on Hearst Avenue and a recent environmental report. (Scroll down for the original story.)

Mogulof said in a prepared statement Wednesday that the university “is ready to continue payments for the mitigation of its impacts at current levels pending completion of a new Long Range Development plan” (LRDP) — and has informed the city of this — even though a recent supplemental environmental impact report found that campus impacts have been lower than projected.

Mogulof told Berkeleyside in February that the university paid the city of Berkeley $1,770,698 in 2018-19, which included payments from the Chancellor’s Partnership Fund for projects deemed to improve the quality of life in Berkeley. Those payments are set to continue for at least two more years while the new LRDP is underway.

“We hope that continued dialogue will lead the City to decide that litigation is unnecessary, and not worth the extraordinary expense,” Mogulof said in Wednesday statement. He described the university’s work with the city to date as “continued, constructive collaboration.”

“Rather than relying on the zero-sum outcomes of litigation,” he said, “we see great value for our institutions and communities in continued dialogue and negotiation.”

Original story, Tuesday, April 30: The Berkeley City Council says it is prepared to sue the University of California regents over a campus housing project proposed north of UC Berkeley and a supplement to UC’s 2020 development plan, the mayor announced Tuesday evening.

Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín told the public that the closed session council vote, which took place Monday, was unanimous.

Arreguín told the public, at the beginning of Tuesday evening’s regular council meeting, just before 6:50 p.m., that officials voted to authorize the city attorney to initiate litigation against the regents, who make up the 26-member governing board of the University of California.

The lawsuit would focus on the 150-unit Upper Hearst Development that the Goldman School of Public Policy is working on at Hearst and La Loma avenues, and the university’s amendment to its Supplemental Environmental Impact Report (SEIR) for its 2020 Long Range Development Plan, which is related to the Upper Hearst project.

The mayor warned the university earlier this month, in a letter, that UC Berkeley should not include a jump in student enrollment in the update to the environmental impact report for the new academic and housing complex on Hearst Avenue. The 1-acre residential and academic complex involves the demolition of the entire parking garage that’s currently at the site. The university has said it hopes to start work as soon as September.

The jump to 44,735 students on campus by 2022-23 differs significantly from the 2020 Long Range Development Plan (LRDP) the university signed off on in 2005, and to which the city of Berkeley agreed, Arreguín wrote in the letter. His position was that UC Berkeley should prepare a separate report on the enrollment increase rather than use the environmental analysis for the Upper Hearst project as a way to update the 2020 plan.

“Increase in campus headcount by 11,285 students and its impacts were not studied in the 2020 LRDP and are, therefore, not ‘consistent’ with the project,” Arreguín wrote. The 2005 report said “the student population would grow by only 1,650 students between the 2001/02 academic year and then stabilize at that number by 2010. Instead, the student population has increased by almost seven times over that studied in the 2020 (report).”

UC officials have argued that the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) requires the university to include updated enrollment figures in its examination of Upper Hearst. They also contend that the impact of increased enrollment has been less than what was expected in the 2005 LRDP and that the university has actually reduced its impact on the city in many ways, including a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, solid waste and water use.

Dan Mogulof, a campus spokesman, told Berkeleyside by email earlier this month, that “CEQA requires that the campus compare the potential impacts of a housing project such as the Upper Hearst Project with existing environmental conditions at the time the CEQA review occurs. Those environmental conditions most certainly include the current campus headcount. It is only by comparing the project with these baseline physical conditions that the campus can determine whether an impact is significant.”

Read the stories below for more detailed information. Berkeleyside will continue to follow the story. 

Note: UC Berkeley says the housing element of the Upper Hearst project is focused on faculty. It will be made available to visiting scholars and postdoctoral students only if there is room. Berkeleyside updated this story May 14 to correct the record.