The research — most of it from UC Berkeley — finds three things: land values go up the day you rezone, buildings arrive years later if they pencil at all, and when a building finally opens, rents next door move a little, usually down. Berkeley has two corridor votes coming in 2026. Here is what I'd do with them.
Housing here is a tangle of state preemption, regional quotas, twenty-year-old area plans, construction economics and a university that houses a third of its students. Nobody has it fully worked out. This is my preliminary approach — what I think is settled, what isn't, and what I'd do first. It changes as the plans reach Council and as people show me where I'm wrong.
Revised 7 September 2026. The August version argued for corridor housing partly on property-tax grounds. That argument is withdrawn. The position below starts from the neighborhoods District 1 already has.
The corridor decision this page is about has been made for San Pablo Avenue. The next corridor item is a public hearing on October 13 about where new buildings put their transformers.
The plan, its Design Standards Document, the General Plan amendments, the repeal of the West Berkeley Plan and the San Pablo Avenue Public Improvements Plan, and the first reading of the San Pablo Commercial District passed together, all ayes. Council changed four things from the dais: commercial-only buildings may reach 75 feet and five stories, where staff proposed 40 feet and three; a minimum of 100 homes per acre; one ground-floor rule retitled; and housing allowed in part of West Berkeley’s Mixed-Use Light Industrial district if a project is fully affordable or at least 35 percent family-sized units. A motion to cap housing at five stories failed 2–7. The second reading is Item 2 on October 13. Details on the San Pablo page →
That settles the order of adoption that Ask 01 was written around. What is left is the content: the draft standards in Appendix E had no shadow, wind or street-tree rule. Ask 01 now asks that those rules be added before applications arrive, because once an application is filed under state law, the standards in force that day are the ones that apply.
Received without discussion. Objective design standards in the middle housing districts sit on the list of projects that cannot start without budgeted money for consultants and environmental review; Council ranked them 21st. Rezoning Gilman from San Pablo Avenue to Interstate 80 for commercial uses is on the same unfunded list at rank 4. The Corridors Zoning Update is listed as active, and a local density bonus for the San Pablo plan area is expected to start this fiscal year. The policy team went from eight full-time planners in 2023–2026 to four, with 6.5 expected once recruitment is done. Every ask on this page that depends on staff writing standards depends on that number.
A first reading that would prohibit above-ground electrical transformers serving new residential, commercial and mixed-use projects on private property, as the Planning Commission recommended. An undergrounding item was pulled from the September 15 agenda at the Agenda & Rules Committee on August 31; this one comes from the City Manager as a public hearing.
Approved, with Councilmembers Humbert and Lunaparra added as co-sponsors. It prices the total fee burden on four prototypes: fourplexes and townhomes, a 10-unit building, an 8-story midrise and an 18-story high-rise. That is most of the cost side this page asks for. It does not count what gets built against what was permitted.
Item 17 asks Planning to reduce the level of discretion for vehicle repair and service in the Manufacturing Research and Development district in West Berkeley. Item 20, Councilmember Tregub’s commercial vacancy referral, would among other things require large new mixed-use developments to place transformers and other large utility equipment below grade.
Outcomes come from the City Clerk’s annotated agendas. Sources: the September 29 annotated agenda, the September 15 annotated agenda and the October 13 Council agenda, posted October 1.
I am for the neighborhoods District 1 already has. Where the state has set the floor — San Pablo, University, near BART — the Council's remaining job is to make sure what gets built fits the street it lands on, and the only lawful way left to do that is objective design standards in place before the applications arrive. Where the state has set no floor — Solano and College, and North Shattuck above the SB 79 line — I would vote against the added heights. And I am against pretending that a zoning map is a housing program.
My job for twenty-five years has been checking whether claimed results were real. Every one of the asks below is a verification step the City is currently skipping.
The design standards were adopted with the plan on September 29. The Public Review Draft's Appendix E had none of the three, and I have not confirmed that the adopted version added any. North Berkeley BART's standards already require one street tree per 25 feet of sidewalk; use them. Write graduated standards — a maximum share of a plaza newly shaded — not absolute bans, so they survive AB 2011's "reasonable and broadly applicable" test. Once an application is filed, it's over.
No state floor applies on Solano or College, and SB 79 reaches North Shattuck only at its southern end. On those blocks what the Council adopts is the whole outcome. By the plan's own density caps, the Opportunity Sites option puts a nine-story bonus building on Solano and ten stories on North Shattuck — on two- and three-story shopping streets. I'd vote no on the added heights, and yes to housing that fits the base standards already on the books.
The Terner Center publishes the method. Run it on a typical San Pablo and Solano parcel at the proposed height, with Berkeley's 20% inclusionary and 2026 costs. If it doesn't pencil, the rezoning raises land prices and produces nothing — what happened in Chicago. If it does, say so with numbers and the debate gets shorter.
The Rent Board's registry lets Berkeley run the UC Berkeley rent studies on its own blocks. An annual corridor look-back: permits, completions, occupancy, and registry rents within 250 meters of each finished building. Downtown (2012) and Southside (2023) are ready-made test cases the City has never measured.
The City's own commissioned study found West Berkeley lost 31% of its BIPOC residents and saw rents rise $1,814 a month from 2009 to 2019, and recommended steering upzoning away from West and South Berkeley. The finding is real. Where state law has already fixed the height, the protections have to do the work: one-for-one replacement, relocation, pre-application tenant notice and tax relief for displaced businesses should be binding.
Assessed-value and property-tax effect at 25%, 50% and 100% build-out over ten years, net of the cost of serving the new residents. The City has never published one for a rezoning. Every upzoning is sold partly as a budget fix; put the number on the table so the claim can be checked, and so nobody trades a neighborhood for revenue that never arrives.
Hearings spent arguing about SB 79 heights near BART are hearings not spent on the six things the Council can still shape. I'd vote against spending staff time on an SB 79 exemption ordinance unless staff can show a parcel-specific legal basis.
This is not opposition to housing on San Pablo or University — the state has settled that those corridors get taller, and the fight there is over the standards. It is not a promise that corridor housing will make Berkeley affordable. The lower-income share of the City's target — 5,270 units — is not going to come from upzoning; it comes from inclusionary units and subsidized construction, and the City has permitted 4% of it. Anyone telling you a zoning map solves that is selling something.
Three layers of government decide what gets built on a Berkeley corridor. The state sets floors the Council cannot go below. The region assigns the unit target. The City decides what's left — and what's left is shorter than the hearings suggest.
| State law — not negotiable locally | What it fixes on a Berkeley corridor |
|---|---|
| SB 79eff. July 1, 2026 | Minimum 95 / 75 / 65 ft at 160 / 120 / 100 units per acre, by distance from Ashby, Downtown and North Berkeley BART. Reaches North Shattuck from Downtown to Vine. Berkeley's 20% inclusionary still applies. |
| AB 893eff. Jan 1, 2026 | 65 ft / 80 units per acre by right on office, retail and parking parcels within ½ mile of UC Berkeley and Berkeley City College. |
| AB 2011eff. 2023; sunsets 2033 | Housing by right on commercial corridor parcels. Only objective standards adopted before an application is filed apply — which is why Ask 01 has a deadline. |
| SB 330 / Housing Accountability Act2019, extended to 2030 | A code-compliant project can be refused only on written objective health-and-safety findings. "Neighborhood character" is not a legal reason to say no. |
| Density Bonus LawGov. Code §65915 · AB 1287 | The base height is not the ceiling. A project with qualifying affordable units earns extra density — up to a 100% bonus — and can then have height and other standards waived to fit it. The waivers are uncapped. Two Berkeley approvals bracket the range: a three-story North Shattuck base became an 8-story building at 2109 Virginia St, and a 75-ft downtown base became a 23-story tower at 2029 University Ave. The often-quoted "+33 ft" is a different provision, for 100%-affordable projects near transit only. It cuts both ways: the bonus scales off base density and every waiver must be justified for that site. 2029 University does not mean 23 stories anywhere a 75-ft limit exists. Next section runs it corridor by corridor. |
| AB 2097eff. Jan 2023 | No parking minimums within ½ mile of major transit — most Berkeley corridors. |
| Housing Element / RHNA6th cycle 2023–31 | Berkeley must show zoned capacity for 8,934 units and hit its deadlines. The corridor rezonings are Program 27; miss a deadline and "builder's remedy" projects ignore local zoning entirely. |
| On the Council's desk now | Status |
|---|---|
| San Pablo Avenue Specific PlanD1's main corridor | Base mixed-use height 50 → 75 ft. Adopted by Council 9–0 on 29 Sep 2026; second reading of the zoning 13 Oct 2026. Appendix E is the objective design standards — with no shadow, wind or street-tree rule in the draft. |
| Corridors Zoning UpdateSolano · N. Shattuck · College | Planning Commission advanced the "Opportunity Sites" option 7–2 on May 6, 2026: 1,518 units of capacity, roughly 152 affordable. Not yet at Council. The three corridors are not in the same legal position. Downtown BART sits about ¼ mile from North Shattuck's southern end, so SB 79 already sets a floor there regardless of this vote. Solano (The Alameda to the city limits) and College/Elmwood (Dwight to Alcatraz) are roughly a mile from any BART station and outside the university radius — no state floor applies, and what the Council adopts is the whole outcome. Consultant team cost ≈ $600,000 (2023). |
| Objective design standardscitywide | Since SB 330 the only lawful place to regulate how a building looks. The 2021 citywide effort stalled on how to define a shadow and was never adopted; Planning Commission reopened it April 2026. |
| Two finished experimentsDowntown 2012 · Southside 2023 | The only Berkeley corridor plans old enough to evaluate — and neither has ever been measured against what it promised. See Ask 04. |
The City's workshop materials flag the parcels most likely to redevelop. As reported, they are: in the Elmwood, a 7-Eleven, the post office and a Wells Fargo parking lot; on Solano, a 76 gas station and the Wells Fargo, Mechanics Bank and Chase branches; on North Shattuck, a CVS, Bank of America and BMO. Read one way, that is reassuring: banks, a gas station, a pharmacy, parking lots. Read the other way, it is the point. A nine-story building on the bank lot changes the two-story street on either side of it — its light, its parking, its ground-floor rents — whether or not the independent shops are on the list. The City should publish the parcel list plainly so every merchant can check their own address, and the shadow and setback standards should be written for the neighbors of those sites as well as the sites themselves. Site list via Berkeley Scanner's report on the September 2025 community workshops; I have not yet checked it against the parcel-level opportunity-site inventory. If it's wrong, it gets corrected here.
Heights above the state floor on North Shattuck; everything on Solano and College, where no state floor applies at all; objective design standards; the inclusionary percentage and fees; tenant and small-business protections; and whether to seek an SB 79 alternative plan. Six items. Every hour spent arguing about SB 79 heights near BART is an hour not spent on the six.
"The density bonus can go higher than the height limit" is true and useless on its own. The question a resident actually has is: on Solano, North Shattuck or College, how tall does a bonus project get? That is answerable, because the bonus works off a number the plans state explicitly — maximum units per acre. Height follows from density, not the reverse. Floor area is units times unit size, divided by the floor plate a lot can hold. Calibrated against Berkeley's two most recent approvals the constants reproduce both buildings — 2029 University at 23.0 stories against 23 built, 2109 Virginia at 8.7 against 8. Run forwards:
| Corridor and zone | Base standard | Max density | +50% | +80% | +100% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| North Shattuck C-NS opportunity site | 68 ft / 6 stories | 140 du/ac | 8 st · 87 ft | 9 st · 105 ft | 10 st · 116 ft |
| North Shattuck C-NS elsewhere | 38 ft / 3 stories | 85 du/ac | 5 st · 53 ft | 6 st · 64 ft | 6 st · 71 ft |
| Solano C-SO opportunity site | 58 ft / 5 stories | 115 du/ac | 6 st · 72 ft | 8 st · 86 ft | 9 st · 96 ft |
| Solano C-SO elsewhere | 28 ft / 2 stories | 60 du/ac | 3 st · 37 ft | 4 st · 45 ft | 5 st · 50 ft |
| College C-E opportunity site | 48 ft / 4 stories | 85 du/ac | 5 st · 53 ft | 6 st · 64 ft | 6 st · 71 ft |
| College C-E elsewhere | 28 ft / 2 stories | 40 du/ac | 2 st · 25 ft | 3 st · 30 ft | 3 st · 33 ft |
Central case: 1,050 sq ft per unit, 65% coverage, 11.2 ft floor to floor. Push both to the unfavorable end and the 100% column becomes 13 stories on North Shattuck, 11 on Solano, 8 on College; push the other way and it drops about two. The spread is the answer: an envelope, not a number.
Once a bonus applies, the density cap binds. Arguing about 58 ft versus 68 ft while leaving 115 and 140 units per acre untouched is arguing about the wrong number.
Staff's own May 2026 figures put a 68-ft North Shattuck base at 12 stories with a full bonus, Solano at 10, College at 7–8. The City is printing a height limit it expects to waive.
Not in my arithmetic and not in the City's; both land in single digits to low teens. That figure comes from reading the 2029 University outcome as if it were a corridor-wide rule.
Sometimes, slowly, where demand is strong and parcels are underbuilt. Freemark's review of some 30 studies puts the short-run land-value jump at 3–23%, with construction following only where the capacity increase is large and the market strong. Portland averaged eight years from upzoning to completion; Chicago's transit upzoning produced higher prices and no extra units in five. Berkeley's own SB 9 experience: five unit applications in the first year, none approved.
Here the evidence has converged, and much of it is Bay Area work. Pennington (UC Berkeley) used San Francisco fires as a natural experiment: rents within 500 meters fell 1.2–2.3% and displacement risk fell 17%. Asquith, Mast and Reed found rents within two blocks of large new buildings fell 5–7% against trend across 11 cities. Zuk and Chapple found regional production reduces displacement, subsidized units about twice as much as market-rate.
The exception matters for District 1. Where existing rents sit far below the new building's, the amenity effect can win: a Minneapolis study found rents fell 3.2% near new buildings in high-income areas and rose 6.6% in low-income ones. The blocks west of San Pablo are Berkeley's version of that case — the argument for Ask 05.
UC Berkeley enrolled more than 46,000 students in fall 2025 and houses about 29% of its undergraduates; the rest are in the city's rental stock. Any claim about who moves in and out of Berkeley neighborhoods that ignores students isn't a claim about Berkeley. And the long arc predates this building cycle: Berkeley had more than 27,000 Black residents in 1970, roughly a quarter of the city; by 2020 the share was 8%, concentrated in the same blocks the City's own study flagged. A reason to get the protections right, not to pretend state law isn't there.
Neither camp is making things up. Each is right about part of it and quiet about the rest.
Supported: when buildings actually open, nearby rents move slightly down in most settings (Pennington; Asquith, Mast & Reed). Regional supply reduces displacement (Zuk & Chapple).
Not supported: that rezoning by itself lowers anything. Between adoption and ribbon-cutting — eight years in Portland — the only change is the land price.
Missing: a pro forma showing the proposed heights pencil in Berkeley at 20% inclusionary and 2026 rates. Without it, "more supply" is an assumption.
Supported: land values rise 3–23% on adoption (Freemark); low-rent blocks next to much pricier buildings can see rents rise (Damiano & Frenier); West and South Berkeley are those blocks (AEMP).
Not supported: that a Council "no" stops it. SB 79, AB 893 and AB 2011 apply regardless. The Council can shape standards and protections; it cannot veto the floor.
Missing: any evidence that a 5–7 story building on San Pablo raises rents in the R-zone behind it. Minneapolis is the closest analog and it cuts both ways.
Both sides cite studies. Neither has run the numbers on Berkeley's own corridors, with Berkeley's own Rent Board data, on the buildings Berkeley already approved. Closing that gap is cheap.
Councilmember Tregub, whose District 4 includes North Shattuck, won't support a Corridors recommendation without "robust protections and meaningful support" for small businesses, and could back upzoning limited to vacant sites or ones whose use can't easily be replaced. That is close to the Planning Commission's Opportunity Sites structure — and a test of Ask 02, since a vacant-sites-only rule narrows the list enough to make a pro forma for each parcel feasible.
Everything on this page is sourced to a public document or dataset. If you think I've read one of them wrong, tell me and I'll correct the page. A longer, position-free version of this research — with confidence ratings on every figure — is on Learn About Berkeley. The state and local laws behind all of this — what each one allows on a single lot, and what the city has published about the result — are set out on three sourced reference boards at Development permitting.