Shared from the 3/28/2023 San Francisco Chronicle eEdition

Berkeley’s downtown is facing major changes

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Santiago Mejia/The Chronicle

Only one tower above 13 stories has been built in downtown Berkeley since 1971. That could be changing.

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Photos courtesy of DLR Group Proposed high-rises for downtown Berkeley include a 26-story residential tower with ground floor retail and cafe space at Center and Oxford streets.

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Six tall buildings proposed for downtown Berkeley would stand out; the city currently has only three downtown towers above 12 stories.

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Downtown Berkeley, more than any spot in the Bay Area, shows how statewide housing policies could soon alter the scale of our local cities — for better or worse.

Six buildings of 16 to 28 stories are proposed in the central core, a setting where only one structure above 13 stories has been built since 1971. An eclectic two-block-wide corridor of buildings of various dimensions and architectural styles would be joined by chunky structures of a much different scale, three at heights that rival UC Berkeley’s Campanile.

One reason for the shift is that more Berkeley residents — and those in other Bay Area cities — now accept that the region needs to provide homes for all types of people. But there’s another factor at work: Legislators in Sacramento have passed a raft of bills to make it easier for developers to build residential buildings, meaning that cities like Berkeley have little choice.

“Ultimately, this is a big change,” said Mayor Jesse Arreguín, who also is president of the Association of Bay Area Governments. “Because communities for many years have refused to permit housing, the state has stepped in to remove those obstacles. … It does affect our ability to shape the urban form.”

The half-dozen tall buildings that are on the drawing board wouldn’t stand out in downtown Oakland or northeast San Francisco. But Berkeley, though a city of 115,000 people that includes a university with 45,000 students, has only three downtown towers above 12 stories; the most recent, an 18-story hotel, opened in 2022.

It’s also a city where, after a downtown plan allowing a handful of taller buildings was approved in 2012, opponents tried to overturn it via ballot initiative. (They lost.) The first tower to be proposed endured more than 30 public meetings and a lawsuit before all the hurdles were cleared — only for developers to pull the plug in 2020, saying the economics no longer worked.

But the playing field is different now, and not just in Berkeley. There’s a state-mandated density bonus of up to 50% for building proposals that include lower-income housing on site, while limiting a city’s discretion to seek design alterations or “community benefits” (financial concessions) beyond what are spelled out by prior law. This even applies to cities like Berkeley and San Francisco, where affordable housing requirements exceed what Sacramento now requires. In other words, developers seeking to build in those cities almost automatically qualify for the bonus.

Equally important, cities and counties can now hold no more than five public hearings before voting on a project. Bluntly, growth-averse municipalities can’t stretch out the public process.

How might this change the look and feel of where we live and work and play? The proposals for downtown Berkeley make this all too plain.

The most startling example is the 26-story apartment building proposed to rise across from the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive on Center Street, the main pedestrian route into the campus from downtown. It would replace two low-slung buildings that, for decades, held a procession of small storefronts; some now are vacant, but such student-friendly perennials as Top Dog and Bongo Burger remain.

At 288 feet, the height would be 19 feet shorter than Sather Tower, better known as the Campanile, the beloved icon from 1914 that can be seen for miles in all directions. The newcomer also would stretch 295 feet from east to west, with no setbacks along the way.

To put this girth in context, the Campanile tapers from 33 feet at its base to 30 feet where the pyramid-like cap begins, barely one-tenth the width of what developer CoreSpaces is calling “The Hub.” Here’s a contemporary measuring rod — the Skylyne apartment tower at the MacArthur BART Station, which opened shortly before the pandemic. That gray shaft rises 240 feet and is “just” 161 feet wide.

The lone rendering is angled so as to emphasize the structure’s northeast section, which would wear a reddish cladding that “accentuates the verticality of the building,” the developer’s planning submission tells us. (The rest of the facade is mostly white.) But there is nothing towering in what is proposed. It is a slab, pure and simple, wider than it is tall.

An even taller would-be addition to the skyline is proposed at University and Shattuck avenues, where a single-story block of small eateries and a cozy saloon would be replaced with an apartment building reaching up 28 stories and 317 feet, 10 feet beyond the Campanile. Thankfully, though, the northern end of the block-long proposal steps down to 14 stories. The design by Berkeley’s Trachtenberg Architects also pulls back the top floor on all sides and caps it with a cornice-like overhanging roof.

The Shattuck-University corner is home to a McDonald’s, incidentally. I hereby dub the replacement “Big Mac.”

The third higher-rise, also the work of Trachtenberg Architects, is a proposal that would replace the Walgreens at Shattuck Avenue and Allston Way with 25 stories of apartments topping off at 260 feet. It would share the block with what is now downtown’s tallest tower, a 186-foot office building from 1971.

The other three downtown proposals of significant height are relatively modest, but still substantial — mid-block structures of 15 to 17 stories. Two would rear up from behind the vintage facades of movie houses on Kittredge Street and Shattuck Avenue, both of which have closed since the pandemic.

The issue isn’t height, which people tend to fixate on (wrongly). It’s bulk. Developers and their planning consultants figure out how much space they can jam onto their site using the new bonus, then wrap it in “architecture.”

Some costume jobs are better than others; the design for Shattuck and University is far more promising than the one across from BAMPFA. But they’re exercises in packaged volume, rather than expressions of how Berkeley and other mid-size cities can grow upward with inventive style.

And while the two tallest shafts would meet the ground with ample landscaping, good materials and tall retail spaces, gone will be the ecosystems that fostered the varied scenes now found along Center Street and the McDonald’s block of Shattuck. There might be new spaces, but there won’t be the old rents, the funkiness of each space evolving at its own pace.

There’s another issue, one raised by growth critics like the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association: The new structures, in large part, would hold university students, erasing the dividing line between town and gown once and for all.

Arreguín, a progressive who resisted downtown growth initiatives when on the City Council but now says, “My perspective has evolved over the years,” has little sympathy for older residents upset that students shouldn’t be housed in certain parts of the city.

“We need housing for all people,” he said. “We have a tremendous shortage of housing for students in Berkeley, and that has a ripple effect” on the rental market in distant neighborhoods.

In a telephone interview this week, however, you could sense Arreguín’s discomfort with the state intervening the way that it has.

“As a building got taller, we wanted it to get more narrow,” he said of the downtown plan that, ironically, set the stage for the current proposals by agreeing to a handful of 180-foot towers. That provision, and other modest zoning height increases, set the base that developers would now blow past.

That said, “On the whole, I’m very excited about the transition happening,” Arreguín hastened to add. “Downtown is an appropriate place to have dense, transit-oriented development.”

He’s correct. It’s also wrong and hypocritical to treat student apartments as second-class, especially when the university’s attempts to build apartments on its own land are fought tenaciously by opponents in court.

But there’s a danger in the idea that housing production is an absolute good in today’s California, especially with a dollop of “affordable” units mixed in. Developers reap a windfall by pushing state policies to an extreme. If the result is something that mocks everything around it, we can’t turn back the clock.

Reach John King: jking@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @johnkingsfchron

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