Berkeley, First City to Sanctify Single-Family Zoning, Considers Historic Reversal: Allowing Small Apartments

More than a century after becoming the first city in America to enshrine single-family neighborhoods as sacrosanct, Berkeley will consider charting a new course: legalizing small apartment buildings in many neighborhoods throughout the city.

The proposed changes might have been unthinkable only a half decade ago — when it wasn’t unusual for residents to wield a piece of backyard produce to protest new housing. The proposal comes instead amid a sea change of pro-housing activism across California, as state officials have taken an increasingly firm stance in forcing cities to approve more housing and as Berkeley leaders have committed to undoing past policies that have disproportionately impacted Black and Latino residents.

“I’m really excited,” said Berkeley City Councilmember Mark Humbert, whose district includes the Elmwood neighborhood. “We were a pioneer in exclusionary zoning, and I want to be a pioneer in inclusionary zoning.”

On Tuesday, July 23, the council will consider a proposal that Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín called “one of the largest up-zonings in California.” It would go beyond what state officials allowed in a landmark 2021 law legalizing duplexes, and instead permit small apartment buildings, no more than three stories high, that could range from as few as two large apartments to as many as 12 or more smaller ones depending on the size of the property.

But, said Lori Droste, there’s no guarantee the measure will pass. The former Berkeley city council member spearheaded the city’s effort to first study and then implement a plan to encourage so-called “missing middle housing.”

“I’ll be on pins and needles until then,” she said. “I think we have a real opportunity to be history makers.”

Opponents fear the proposal could radically remake the city’s neighborhoods, as developers demolish or transform bungalows to create two- or three-story structures. And for those who live in the Berkeley hills, with its notoriously steep and narrow streets, the capacity of evacuation routes during a potential wildfire is top of mind.

Others have cautioned that increasing the supply of market-rate housing — without provisions that some units be set aside as affordable housing — will only accelerate the loss of the city’s residents of color.

“Neighborhoods where housing values are the lowest are going to be impacted the most,” Nico Calavita, a former professor of urban planning told the city’s Planning Commission at a February meeting. “So you’re going to have market rate-housing going to neighborhoods, which are low-income and minority neighborhoods.”

Still others, however, have an opposing concern: that the apartments wouldn’t actually get built. A recent report from the Terner Center for Housing Innovation found that high costs for materials, labor and land, combined with onerous building codes and city fees, often make missing middle housing projects less profitable than single-family homes.

“We’re dealing with a country that’s made single-family homes so easy to build in the last 40 years that we have to find ways of making missing middle housing more profitable,” said Muhammad Alameldin, a policy associate at the Terner Center. “If one little aspect of the legalization of missing middle housing is wrong and it cannot pencil — so housing cannot financially be built — then we will see no housing get built.”

How Berkeley Embraced Apartments

When Droste first introduced a proposal in 2019 to study the idea of missing middle housing, Berkeley was seen as ground-zero for a Not-In-My-Backyard approach to housing.

There was zucchini-gate, a widely-ridiculed instance of a resident waving the vegetable at city officials to demonstrate that a duplex proposed for next door would threaten her ability to grow produce. There was an attempt at downzoning, a years-long campaign against building tall apartments on top of a parking lot near a major train station and other battles.

“We certainly have come a long way,” Droste said.

Arreguín acknowledged his own path from housing skeptic to champion, an evolution he said not only tracked with state leadership’s push for more housing, but also with Berkeley residents’ shift in views.

“Over time, seeing housing prices continue to skyrocket, seeing increased homelessness and people living in encampments on our streets, people living in RVs and the worsening climate emergency,” Arreguin said, “I came to the realization that the status quo is not working.”

Propelling the shift was a national racial reckoning in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a police officer. Along with that, Droste said, came a growing awareness among Berkeley residents of the ways in which zoning has been wielded to exclude people of color.

In early 2021, the council adopted a resolution from Droste that ended single-family zoning. The move was particularly symbolic because Berkeley had been the first in the country, in 1916, to designate some neighborhoods as off-limits to anything but single-family homes.

The Elmwood neighborhood was among the first to receive the classification, which came as a local developer sought to block a proposed Black-owned dancehall. At the time, officials justified the action as protecting property owners from the “evils of uncontrolled development” and ensuring “the permanency of character of districts” as a way to “to stabilize and protect property values and investments.”

The idea spread throughout the country. In California, roughly 96% of residential land is currently zoned exclusively for single-family homes, according to a recent survey by UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute. Researchers also found that jurisdictions with more restrictive zoning had fewer non-white residents.

In 1973, Berkeley further restricted the ability to build apartment buildings, including in many neighborhoods that already had them. As a result, housing production ground to a near-halt: Over the next three decades, the city added only 715 homes. And its population not only stalled, but declined, dropping from just under 117,000 in 1970 to just over 100,000 the following decade.

Since 2000, that trend has begun to reverse, with the city adding more than 13,000 new homes through 2020, according to the Census. And its population began to rebound, growing to just under 119,000. But the city’s Black population, which peaked in 1970 at about 23%, has fallen precipitously to just under 8%.

Berkeley resident and housing advocate Darrell Owens said it was a transformation he witnessed firsthand as the Central Berkeley neighborhood where he grew up began losing its Black residents.

“The neighborhood stopped growing,” Owens said. “So, like a game of musical chairs, wealthier people just outbid poor people.”

Owens’ own family was not immune to the transformation. When his grandmother died, her siblings sold her house to more equitably distribute the inheritance. But Owens said his parents couldn’t afford to buy another home in Berkeley. Instead, they moved to Solano County. Owens stayed to finish high school, and later to go to college. He now rents a home in North Berkeley.

“I still could never afford to buy a house here,” he said.

For Owens, himself a housing researcher, the evidence is clear: limiting the supply of homes increases their price. It’s a conclusion backed by several literature reviews citing dozens of studies.

But other residents worry that opening historically Black neighborhoods to more apartment construction will further accelerate gentrification.

“How is this upzoning going to affect African-Americans?” Willie Phillips, of the community group, Friends of Adeline, told Planning Commission officials at a February meeting.

Without considering that potential impact, he said, “You are destined to basically go back to the 1950s, because … African-Americans cannot afford to live here.”

A 2022 working paper by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, in collaboration with researchers at UC Berkeley and Stanford, found that building market-rate housing in areas experiencing gentrification does tend to benefit higher-income people more than lower-income people. But, the effects were mild. And when coupled with strong tenant protections, the researchers said those impacts could be effectively mitigated.

Owens said he isn’t worried about Berkeley becoming gentrified; that has already happened.

“Gentrification in Berkeley doesn’t look like new apartment buildings,” he said. “Gentrification in Berkeley looks like old bungalows that have existed for 100 years, being sold for $2 million when 50 years ago they sold for maybe $100,000.”

Middle Housing

The proposal coming before the Berkeley City Council would allow ministerial approval — without the need for public hearings — of housing projects with two or more units in single-family and otherwise low-density neighborhoods throughout most of the city.

There is no cap on the number of units in each building. Instead, city staff would regulate the size of buildings, ensuring they conform to height limits, setbacks and lot coverage requirements, among other restrictions.

The proposal caps building heights at no more than 35 feet at the front of the building, and 22 feet at the rear property line — which was an attempt to accommodate residents worried about three-story buildings looming over smaller ones, said Jordan Klein, director of Berkeley’s Planning and Development Department. Buildings also can’t take up more than 60% of the lot’s total area.

“That was responsive to public input,” Klein said, adding that his staff also included a 15-foot rear setback requirement to ensure homes wouldn’t shade neighbors’ rooftop solar panels — or their backyard gardens.

Each unit, or home, can be no smaller than 220 square feet, or about the size of a “small studio,” Klein said. But there’s disagreement about whether the city should place a cap on how large each unit can be.

Staff had initially proposed a maximum unit size. Buildings with more units would be allowed to have a larger envelope, and buildings with fewer units had to be smaller. Klein said the idea was to incentivize developers to build more units in each building. But the Planning Commission at its February meeting reversed that decision, setting no maximum unit size — a choice Klein said could lead to an unintended consequence: “The concern here is, ‘Are we going to end up with very large single family homes?’” he said.

Others, however, urged the commission to think of multi-generational families, who may need four or five bedrooms. Arreguín said that’s one aspect of the proposal he’s still wrestling with.

“I don’t want to create a situation where we…could be building an eight-plex and instead we have a McMansion,” he said. “So how we thread that needle, I think will be important.”

Klein said the council will also have to consider how to respond to concerns about increased building in the city’s high fire-hazard zones. For many residents of the Berkeley hills, the 1991 Tunnel Fire that killed 25 people and destroyed 3,000 homes is still fresh in their minds.

Berkeley resident Kelly Hammargren said that’s a particular concern for her, even though she doesn’t live in or own property in the hills.

“I think this increasing density in fire zones is absolutely crazy,” she told the Planning Commission in February. “We are a city where we are taking away cars and encouraging people to be on bicycles and on foot and on scooters. So if we have a big, fast, hot-moving fire, people aren’t going to be able to outrun it.”

Staff had initially recommended waiting to include the hills neighborhoods in the upzoning proposal until the fire department could complete an analysis, expected later this year. But the Planning Commission decided instead to include them.

“We figured it would make more sense to wait until we had the results of the evacuation study before considering upzoning the hills,” Klein said, adding that the council could decide to reverse the Planning Commission’s recommendation, or adopt the upzoning now and then amend it, if needed, following the fire department’s report.

Councilmember Susan Wengraf, who represents the area, declined to comment, as did representatives of the Park Hills Homes Association, an area neighborhood group.

Whatever happens with the proposal on Tuesday, Klein said he’s proud of the work his staff put in doing public outreach, as well as in drafting it.

“Are we ready to do this or not?” he asked. “It’s up to the city council to decide.”