Upzoning plans in Berkeley could come at a major cost, shop owners warn

BERKELEY — As Bay Area cities grapple with the need to add more housing in their urban cores through changes in zoning rules, a plan to allow buildings in Berkeley to soar higher in three business corridors has sparked a movement among shop owners and residents who worry they’ll be pushed out.

Still in the drafting stage, Berkeley’s Corridor Zoning Update proposes raising the number of homes allowed to be built on sections of Solano, College and North Shattuck avenues. A core principle of the project is equity, Mayor Adena Ishii said.

By allowing building heights of 4 to 9 stories along those corridors, wealthier parts of the city would take on their share of housing growth after decades of changes being thrust upon the historically underserved areas of South and West Berkeley.

“We want to encourage more housing, all different types of housing, so we can keep people here in our city. It’s a big part of protecting our people here and making sure they have a safe place to live,” Ishii said.

Not all feel protected by the plan.

Save Berkeley Shops, a nonprofit recently founded by concerned residents and business owners, argues that what’s been proposed will lead to skyrocketing property values that could drive up rents, make it harder to obtain long-term leases and ultimately force businesses out as large developers move in.

Two founding members of the group are David Salk and Claudia Hunka.

Salk was only 25 in the mid-1970s when he opened Focal Point, an opticians office in the Elmwood neighborhood. About five years later, Hunka and her late partner Bob opened Your Basic Bird, a pet shop specializing in birds, on College Avenue.

Both businesses survived decades of economic ups and downs, a shift to shopping malls and then to online shopping and, most recently, a global pandemic that resulted in countless shuttered businesses. They said the proposed zoning changes are the most challenging and radical obstacle yet.

“There are so many potential speedbumps or worse, landmines, that are part and parcel to this and we don’t want to duplicate mistakes that have been made,” Salk said.

Save Berkeley Shops organizers are adamant that their cause is not anti-housing.

Hunka, Salk and Berkeley-based attorney Donald Simon, an Elmwood resident working pro-bono on the initiative, said they’d support more affordable housing being built across the city, but assert that’s not what the proposal will bring.

Scenarios being studied under the Corridor Zoning Update currently include increasing building heights from 2 stories up to 8 stories on parts of Solano Avenue, 2 stories up to 6 stories on College Avenue and 3 stories up to 9 stories on North Shattuck Avenue.

The taller heights would be achieved in part by factoring in the state density bonus, which allows developers to build bigger depending on the amount of affordable housing they include in their projects. Some calculations could mean building heights of 14 stories, Simon warned.

Staff and the city’s consultant team from the firm Raimi + Associates don’t believe each parcel in the corridors would be redeveloped into those heights, Ishii noted. Larger sites are more likely to be redeveloped, meaning “the mass removal of our local businesses is not as big of a concern as people are worried about,” Ishii said.

But Simon notes developers could purchase and combine multiple smaller parcels to create more feasible developments. And state law now prohibits jurisdictions from downzoning, meaning the city would not be allowed to reverse the changes even if they prove to be harmful to the business corridors.

“It just seems to be ‘let’s just build housing however developers want to so we can get as much of it as we can,’ and that is a very basic and uninformed approach to a serious issue that deserves and requires more thoughtful analysis,” Simon said. “You’re talking about changing city law to encourage developers to come in and destroy thriving retail corridors and replace them with God knows what, and that doesn’t seem responsible.”

All someone needs to do to be convinced the group’s fears are valid is walk through downtown Berkeley, the three Save Berkeley Shop members said. Vacant storefronts line blocks of city streets poised for redevelopment, making it “a shadow of what it used to be,” Salk said.

Imagining the quaint business corridors along College, Solano or North Shattuck becoming “collateral damage” in the city’s pursuit for more housing is heartbreaking, Hunka said. Whether in their neighborhoods for decades or just recently established, she said the corridors’ small independent business owners have put everything into their shops, and she’d like to see them all thrive.

“I came to this neighborhood because of the love of this neighborhood. And to see that destroyed, I think, is criminal,” Hunka said. “It’s this community, it’s this neighborhood that has taken decades and decades to develop. You destroy that, you lose that, it will not come back.”

A number of factors have led it to the current state of the city’s downtown, Ishii said, including the COVID-19 pandemic, a resulting economic downturn and tariffs on construction materials instituted by the Trump administration. Ishii said she and Councilmember Igor Tregub are working together on ways to fill vacant storefronts and encourage forward progress on stalled projects.

Faced with pressure from the state, jurisdictions across the Bay Area have had to take stronger steps toward increasing their housing stock, including partnering with BART, universities and nonprofits on housing projects.

While driven by a goal to bring more housing to an expensive city to live in, Ishii said preventing a slew of vacancies along College, Solano and North Shattuck avenues is also important to city officials who are willing and actively planning to meet local business owners.

“It has to be both and we need to have more housing, and we need to keep our local business here,” Ishii said. “It’s an exciting opportunity for us to have additional housing and support our small businesses. We’re going to continue to work together with our small businesses to make sure they feel supported.”

Save Berkeley Shops members are also eager to meet with decision makers, hopeful officials will do more listening than talking. The organization plans to host community meetings of its own to further educate the public and speak with fellow community members about the city’s project.

The ultimate goal, they said, is for the city to realize the necessity for a more substantial visioning plan with real strategies for protecting small business corridors and targeted strategies for developing affordable housing in their neighborhoods. It’s an outcome they say local businesses, their employees and customers want.

“I still hold out hope that the city of Berkeley will hear these voices and not think of us as a bunch of privileged people trying to keep housing out of our neighborhoods,” Salk said. “We hear loud and clear they want to see more housing come into these three districts. We’re not saying no. What we are saying is let’s develop a plan that takes into account the need to get more housing while we protect these commercial districts and businesses.”