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Segment 1

Calling to order the special meeting of the Berkeley City Council.
Today is Thursday, June 26, 2025.
Welcome everyone.
And clerk, we're going to start with the roll, please.
Okay.
Council member Kesarwani? Here.
Taplin? Present.
Bartlett? Is currently absent.
Tregub? Currently absent.
O'Keefe? Here.
Blackaby? Here.
Lunaparra? Here.
Humbert? Present.
And Mayor Ishii? Here.
Council member Tregub is present.
Okay, very good.
So tonight is a special meeting.
And so we only have one item on our agenda.
It is the zoning ordinance and general plan amendments related to middle housing.
Before we begin, I just want to walk through folks what it's going to look like, just so everyone has clear expectations.
We're going to have a presentation from staff.
And then some folks are going to present their supplementals.
And then we're going to take council questions only.
So just to get clarity.
And then we'll have public comment after that.
And then after public comment, we'll have our deliberations before we take our vote.
So just so folks know what to expect.
And just a reminder to folks, you know, I know that this is a very contentious topic and folks have a lot of strong feelings, but I ask that you keep to your time.
Everyone will have one minute to speak.
I am a stickler, so you'll hear me cut you off when your time is over.
You can take minutes from other people, up to four minutes total.
So just so you're clear, other people can give you their minutes, but you can only have up to four minutes.
And, you know, I ask that you be civil, even if you disagree with someone, no booing or shouting or any of that.
You're welcome to clap for folks or snap for folks if you'd like to, just to set some expectations around that as well.
So thank you all so much for being here.
We are going to start off whenever our staff is ready.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mayor.
I'm going to start us off here.
I appreciate you all taking this item up tonight.
The item before you tonight reflects several years of work by city staff, by the planning commission, by this council to bring forward a thoughtful update to our zoning ordinance and general plan, specifically to encourage the development of middle housing in Berkeley's low-density neighborhoods.
The goal from the start has been to create more housing opportunities for people who want the chance to live in this terrific community.
And we believe that the proposal before you tonight achieves that goal in a balanced way.
It removes barriers to building modest multi-family homes, while maintaining appropriate standards for development, safety, and neighborhood character.
There's been a lot of community process to get us to this night, and I want to acknowledge and appreciate the community for all the input we've received.
There's been public hearings, workshops, written comments, and all of those have been considered and taken into account and coming forward today with the recommendations that we have today.
And really what we're looking for the opportunity to increase housing equity in this wonderful city.
And so we all look forward to the council's discussion, and we have a terrific group of staff here at the table to do the presentation.
We have planning director Jordan Klein, we have principal planner Justin Horner, and we have land use manager Anne Hirsch.
And together they will take care of the presentation for you, and then we'll turn it back to you.
So I want to thank the staff at the table.
They've all worked incredibly hard on this, and I think you'll see that in this presentation.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And for the staff, just make sure when you're ready that you move the mic nice and close to your mouth because it can be hard to hear folks if you're too far away.
Thank you, Mayor Ishii, members of the City Council.
My name is Justin Horner.
I'm a principal planner with the Land Use Planning Division, and I'm very happy to be with you tonight.
Tonight, I will provide a short introduction to middle housing and background on the plan policy development process, and I'll briefly summarize the proposed middle housing zoning changes and the general plan amendments.
Just a quick review of what we mean when we talk about middle housing.
The middle in middle housing describes multi-family buildings that are larger than single-family homes, but not as large as typical podium or high-rise projects.
Many of these projects are part of the existing fabric of Berkeley, such as the building on the left, can be newer projects like the one in the middle, or can be mixtures of both, like the one on the right where additional housing is added to a lot that already has existing units.
So just a quick background on the middle housing effort.
Since 2017, the City Council has passed a number of referrals to direct staff to amend our planning codes to encourage multi-unit housing in our lower-density residential districts.
In 2021, the City Council also passed a resolution to eliminate exclusionary zoning.
In January of 2023, the City Council passed its housing element update, a state-mandated document which includes policies to provide and preserve housing.
The housing element update included a program, Program 29, specifically for the promotion of middle housing.
You may have noticed that middle housing is Program 29 in the housing element.
Indeed, the proposed middle housing zoning changes are just one program in a wide array of housing-related policies and programs adopted by the City Council as part of the housing element in 2023.
This slide, which I'm not going to go over every word of, of course, summarizes all of the goals of the housing element and the policies and programs that support each goal.
These goals include increasing affordable housing, preservation and improvement of existing housing, the prevention and remedying of homelessness, and the provision of special needs housing, the improvement of existing housing, affirmatively furthering fair housing, and mitigating government constraints on housing production.
The middle housing zoning changes are just a part of the City's overall approach to increasing housing availability, affordability, and quality.
Middle housing, with its goal of ending exclusionary zoning, is under Goal E, Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.
The changes also include simplified development standards and streamlined permit processes that are consistent with Goal F, to Mitigate Government Constraints on Housing Production.
This slide will provide a bit of background on the meetings of the City Council, the Planning Commission, and other city boards and commissions, plus the community outreach related to the middle housing zoning changes.
The slide starts with the 2017, 2019, and 2021 City Council referrals.
Most of the work related to the middle housing zoning changes was part of the housing element development and adoption process, which ran from 2021 to 2023, and included both the housing element itself and a full-blown environmental impact report for the housing element.
The City Council, represented by the orange blocks, held four workshops specifically on the housing element, which included discussion of middle housing.
The Planning Commission, represented in green blocks, also held four meetings to review residential standards and make recommendations to the City Council work sessions.
There were three community-wide workshops, represented here in blue, about the housing element, which included discussion of middle housing.
And there were a variety of community outreach events, shown in purple, including tabling at various community functions, an online housing survey, as well as West Berkeley and Downtown Berkeley middle housing walking tours.
After the adoption of the housing element, we began meeting with Council members to discuss specific zoning ordinance amendments related to middle housing.
There were two Planning Commission meetings held to both discuss the middle housing zoning changes and to hold a public hearing on the specific zoning ordinance amendments.
During this time, staff also met with other City Boards and Commissions, including the Commission on Aging and the Housing Advisory Commission, as well as discussions with the Berkeley Fire Department and the State-mandated Tribal Consultation.
Staff also conducted and attended meetings of a variety of community groups throughout this period.
And earlier this month, the Planning Commission held a public hearing on the proposed zoning map amendment included in tonight's item.
We do want to thank all of the Council members, Commissioners, community groups, and everyday Berkeleians who have engaged in this process over the past few years.
So now on to the zoning changes.
This slide summarizes the changes to the zoning ordinance that are part of the middle housing effort.
The changes include streamlining permit procedures for new housing, as well as changes to development standards related to density, height, lot coverage, open space requirements, setbacks and building separation, and demolition of single-family homes.
The City's lower density residential districts are shown on the map in the slide and include areas currently zoned R1, R1A, R2, R2A, and MUR.
The middle housing changes would not apply to parcels in the hillside overlay zone.
The first change is to merge the R1A and R2 zoning districts.
The City Council directed staff to consider merging when regulatory differences between two districts were negligible.
Within this package of changes, the R1A and R2 districts would be regulated similarly so they would be merged.
The current R1A districts are shown in the red outline in the map in the slide.
It should be noted that generally the middle housing changes make regulations more uniform and consistent across all of the residential districts.
The proposed changes include revisions to permit requirements for residential projects to make it easier and faster to approve new housing.
Currently, nearly all residential uses in Berkeley require a use permit and a public hearing before the Zoning Adjustments Board for approval.
The ZABS decision can then be appealed to the City Council.
The proposed changes would allow any code compliant residential project to be approved with a zoning certificate, which is approved by staff and cannot be appealed.
Similar to ADUs, neighbors of residential projects would receive notices within 10 days of a project submittal.
Hearings for residential projects would still be required in certain circumstances, such as if a structure of historic merit were involved or if the property contained a hazardous condition.
The proposed changes also include changes to requirements for residential additions and new bedrooms to make it easier and faster to add more living area to existing buildings.
The first change relates to residential additions.
Currently, an administrative use permit is required for a residential addition that exceeds a certain size, and additions are subject to height limits that are more restrictive than those for new main buildings.
The proposed ordinance includes changes that permit a residential addition with a zoning certificate as long as it complies with the development standards applicable to the main building.
The second change is a revision that would remove permit requirements for new bedrooms.
Currently, the zoning code requires additional permits to add new bedrooms to a lot, even if they are just being created within existing space.
The proposed ordinance includes revisions that remove separate permit requirements for new bedrooms.
The proposed middle housing standards permit more development on a parcel and permit residential projects with a zoning certificate, which would also apply to single-family homes.
The council directed staff to establish regulations to limit the size of a single-family home that can be approved with a zoning certificate if it is the only dwelling unit on a single lot to 2,500 square feet or 50 percent of the lot area, whichever is greater.
An applicant can apply for an administrative use permit to exceed these limits.
The city council asked us to study minimum and maximum density standards and to express them in units per acre.
Currently, there are no density regulations expressed this way in the code.
Instead, as shown in the slide, there are minimum lot sizes and a minimum lot area per unit in each of these zones.
So on a typical 5,000 square foot lot, then the maximum density would currently be one unit in the R1 zone, two units in the R1A and R2 zones, three units in the R2A zone, and four units in the MUR zone.
This does not include any ADUs that may be added under state and local regulations.
The proposed standards create minimum and maximum density as expressed in units per acre.
The table here shows the number of minimum and maximum units that would be permitted on a typical 5,000 square foot lot.
You'll notice that the maximum number of units has increased in all districts, and in the R2A and MUR districts, there will actually be a two-unit minimum requirement for any new development.
As is the case now, there could be ADUs in excess of the maximum number of units permitted by this density standard.
The proposed changes include permitting taller buildings by right.
Currently, in residential districts, the maximum average building height is 28 feet, which can be increased to 35 feet with an administrative use permit.
The proposed ordinance sets a single 35-foot maximum height standard, which would accommodate a three-story building.
So the standard would permit by right a building height that is currently already allowed in these zones, but just requires an additional permit.
However, the proposed regulations include a new standard, which would limit the maximum height to 22 feet in the rear 15 feet of a lot.
This standard was developed as a result of solar access analysis presented to the Planning Commission and the City Council.
With respect to lot coverage, or the percentage of a lot that can be built upon, currently the regulations are shown in the map in the slide and can vary based on the height of a proposed project.
The proposed standards would increase the maximum lot coverage to 60 percent in residential zones, regardless of a project's size.
Currently, usable open space standards vary slightly among the zoning districts and are based on the number of units in a proposed project.
The proposed standard would be the same for all districts and would be calculated based upon the total residential floor area of a proposed project, not the number of units.
It's worth noting that the required open space does not constitute all of the undeveloped area on a lot.
Setbacks and lot coverage standards, for example, would still apply.
And speaking of setbacks, the proposed standards include changes in setback requirements.
Currently, both the rear and front setbacks are a minimum of 20 feet in the R1, R1A, and R2 districts and 15 feet in the R2A district.
Side setbacks are currently 4 feet in all districts.
The proposed standards would include a reduction of minimum front and rear setbacks to 5 feet, with the caveat that the front and rear setbacks together would have to add up to at least 20 feet.
This is to provide flexibility with respect to the placement of buildings on a lot.
Side setback requirements would be unchanged.
The proposed standards also include a reduction in the building separation requirements, which is the required distance apart buildings that are on the same lot have to be.
The current standards are shown on the screen and vary by project height.
While staff had initially recommended doing away with building separation entirely, after consultation with the fire department, the proposal instead includes a 5-foot building separation requirement.
The proposed changes include a change related to the demolition of single-family homes.
In July of last year, the City Council adopted changes to the demolition ordinance, which permitted the demolition of single-family homes that are not tenant-occupied with an administrative use permit, if the demolition would result in more units.
The adopted housing element commits the City Council to considering permitting the demolition of single-family homes with a zoning certificate.
Therefore, the proposed ordinance includes permitting the demolition of single-family homes that are not tenant-occupied with a zoning certificate, if the demolition would result in a project that includes more units.
It should be noted that under the demolition ordinance, the demolition of any single-family home with a low-income household in it must be replaced with an affordable housing unit.
In addition, sitting tenants get moving expenses, a right of first refusal for the replacement unit, and an affordable rent in that replacement unit when they return.
In addition, demolition is not allowed if there has been a no-fault eviction at the property in the last five years, and any demolition of an historic resource or a structure located in an historic district must go before the Landmarks Preservation Commission.
Finally, on March 5th, the Planning Commission recommended an amendment to the zoning ordinance that allows conditions of approval to be attached to projects approvable with a zoning certificate.
Our standard conditions of approval apply to a range of topic areas, including those related to air and water quality during construction, construction noise, approved times of construction, project phasing, and construction-related parking and transportation issues.
They record affordable housing requirements, and they also include measures related to archaeological and paleontological resources.
Currently, conditions can only be placed on projects that require a discretionary use permit, which has been fine as all residential projects currently require a discretionary permit.
But since middle housing would allow residential projects ministerially with a zoning certificate, the zoning code needs to be amended to include the authority to apply conditions to ministerial projects.
The middle housing zoning changes also require conforming amendments to the general plan.
These amendments include technical edits, such as the removal of mentions of the R1A zoning district, as well as revisions to the descriptions of the general plan land use classifications to reflect the proposed zoning changes.
There are other amendments that include changes to language regarding neighborhood preservation in the introduction, removal of language calling for the preservation of existing zoning and residential districts, since middle housing is a change in existing zoning, and removal of language calling for public hearings for all residential projects, as middle housing will allow housing ministerially with a zoning certificate.
I'd also take a little bit of time to note the state density bonus.
The state density bonus allows projects to include more total units if they include a certain number of affordable units.
Projects are also able to waive certain development standards, such as height, to create that larger project.
In general, affordable units are expensive, so the state density bonus tends to only work at larger scales.
For example, the smallest state density bonus project Berkeley has ever approved was 11 units, and that project was never built.
That being said, the state density bonus can be used.
So I'll briefly provide an example of how density bonus could work.
In the table in the slide, you will see density bonus examples for three types of projects.
A five-unit project, a six-unit project, and a seven-unit project.
If such a project provides 20 percent of its total units as low-income affordable housing, in this case between one and two units, then they may be able to add an extra two or three units.
State density bonus can be very generous at larger scales, but the percentages when applied to these smaller projects do not result in a significantly larger number of units.
Utilization of the state density bonus may allow proposed projects to exceed the proposed development standards.
It should be noted, however, that there are significant changes in construction methods and construction costs between three-story buildings and buildings that are four or more stories tall.
For example, a one to three-story building can utilize the California residential building code, while any building at four or more stories must use the regular building code.
It's been estimated that this difference results in a 10 percent increase in construction costs per square foot.
Additionally, any building that includes access to five or more stories, which could include four stories and an accessible roof, is required to provide an elevator.
Also, California building codes generally only permit wood frame construction for buildings that are four stories or lower.
We'd also note that some recent studies have shown that many larger middle housing projects are not currently financially feasible.
For example, a report was prepared for the City Council's discussion on the affordable housing fee in February this year, which noted that only for sale three to four unit middle housing projects are currently financially feasible.
UC Berkeley's Turner Center also did a recent study of the feasibility of middle housing projects and found that in a generalized East Bay housing market, only for sale duplex projects are currently financially feasible.
These are some of the reasons why we'd expect the projects that are consistent with the proposed zoning standards are the most likely middle housing project types, and that larger projects with required affordable housing are less likely.
Thank you very much, and I'll now turn it over to Planning Director Jordan Klein.
Thank you, Justin, and good evening, Mayor and Council Members.
I just want to close our presentation by letting you know that, that's right, I feel really grateful for the opportunity to work on this legislation.
I think it's really important, not because I think it's going to have a huge impact in terms of the number of units, because, spoiler alert, it probably won't, but it's an important part of following through on our commitment to the state and to the community to affirmatively further fair housing in Berkeley, and I think that's particularly important given Berkeley's historic role in the development of single-family exclusionary zoning.
And even if it only results in a few dozen units per year, it's really, it's hard to quantify the impact that has for those families who would get the opportunity to live in Berkeley who wouldn't otherwise have that opportunity.
I am really grateful to the City Council for your progressive and forward-thinking leadership on this issue.
I also want to acknowledge former Mayor Jesse Arreguin, who worked really hard on this, and certainly former Council Member Lori Joste, who really championed this work for many years.
I want to appreciate, despite the hissing, I want to appreciate the hundreds and perhaps thousands of community members who've engaged with us over the years that we've been working on this.
With very, with few exceptions, people have really engaged with civility and respect, even when they disagree with each other, and I appreciate that.
I expect that tonight, because that's what Berkeley is about.
It's about acting and behaving with civility and respect and integrity.
And finally, I just want to recognize, I also want to recognize staff.
Justin has done amazing work on this project.
I also want to recognize former Principal Planner Grace Wu, Sharon Gong, Samantha Updegrave.
Many, many staff members have worked on this over the years, and I'm really proud of the work that we're presenting to you tonight.
So that concludes staff presentation.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
I really appreciate the presentation, and now there are some supplementals that have been submitted, so I'm going to ask that the authors of those supplementals present them, starting with Council Member Traga.
Thank you, and I want to just note at the jump that this is why we have brown-out circles.
So we have been working separately to submit supplementals, and following my submittal and Council Member Kesawane's submittal, I noticed that there is a lot of commonality between our submittals, so perhaps there may be an opportunity to meet in the middle, so to speak.
That said, I will briefly go through my recommendation.
I will also say at the jump that the intent of my supplemental is not to prejudge whatever density standard we may end up voting on tonight.
It is simply to do some continued evaluation and exploration of other best practices.
So it says that not later than November 30th, 2026, which is roughly 11 months from the time that this would go into effect, if approved as in the staff proposal, there would be a report that would be submitted to us to evaluate the effectiveness of these amendments with respect to the various goals in the item, such as around is it actually affirmatively furthering fair housing, and is it doing it in a manner that also aligns with others of Berkeley's goals.
So to that end, the item would evaluate the effectiveness of implementing the ordinance against that of other jurisdictions in which middle housing ordinance have been implemented.
A really good case in point is the city of Sacramento.
It would be interesting to see which approach they use and if it is leading to more or less of the intended outcome.
As well as to, and you know, I'll say the final part of this report was informed by the many stakeholder engagement opportunities that my office has had, including hosting a public forum in district four last October, as well as one that we hosted virtually on Monday, attended by almost a hundred community members.
And there are, we have heard questions about will this unduly impact things like privacy or permeable space or, you know, backyard open space.
And so this would be an opportunity to see if it would be feasible to develop objective standards that conserve.

Segment 2

As a check on that and could balance our housing production goals with the other goals in our general plan.
Happy to answer any questions.
Thank you very much, council member.
Council member Kesarwani? Thank you very much, Madam Mayor.
I first want to thank our staff, Planning Director Klein, Mr.
Horner, Ms.
Hirsch, and all of the other staff members that you named, Director Klein.
As you noted, this has been a multi-year effort that was initiated in 2019 by then council member Lori Droste, and so I do want to thank and recognize her for her vision to initiate this before it was trending.
So I think we have also, I want to note that we have had more than 40 public convenings related to this proposal, and I say convenings because some of it was tabling at farmers markets, there was a walking tour of existing middle housing, there have been community meetings, webinars, and so many different things.
So I just want to recognize the intensive community engagement that has brought us to this evening.
So I, and I also want to start by saying in 2021, the Berkeley City Council unanimously voted to abolish single-family zoning, and this ordinance is making good on that promise.
It wasn't just the commitment in a resolution, there is an ordinance here to effectuate that effort to abolish single-family zoning.
So that's why we're here tonight, to make good on that promise.
So if if folks are following along, I have my, the supplemental report that I've submitted in conjunction with the Mayor, Council Member Lunapata, and Council Member Bartlett, I want to thank them for their support of this.
So I just want to quickly go through the six recommendations, and then I know we're going to hear from the public, and I'm eager to do that.
So first, our first recommendation is to equalize the dwelling units per acre across all residential zones to which the middle housing ordinance applies, as was mentioned in the presentation, R1, R2, R2A, and MUR.
And this excludes, of course, the hillside overlay zone, where we are awaiting the fire safety and evacuation study.
Right now, as proposed by staff, the R1 zone has a density standard of 40 dwelling units per acre, scaling up to 60 dwelling units per acre for R2A and MUR.
And, you know, it is our belief that if we equalize this, we can promote equity and fair access to housing across Berkeley.
We don't really believe that the arbitrary lines of R1, R2, R2A, and MUR should distinguish, should be distinguishing factors when it comes to how much density you can see on a particular parcel in a particular neighborhood.
This will ensure that every neighborhood contributes equally to providing housing opportunities.
And, you know, from our perspective, we are concerned about concentrating greater development capacity in historically redlined neighborhoods.
So that is why we we'd like the council to explore equalizing the dwelling units per acre.
Moving on to recommendation number two.
So then there's the question, well, at what level should this density standard be be placed? And so we are recommending 90 dwelling units per acre.
What this would do, I know it's hard to think about acres when you have a typical 5,000 square foot parcel, this would enable more smaller units if desired.
And the reason why we're interested in this flexibility is because we know that when you have smaller units like 750 to 900 square feet, they are more affordable for our middle class workers.
So that is what we're proposing here.
And we want to acknowledge that the ordinance includes well-designed form standards such as height limits that are the same as what is currently allowed.
35 feet is currently allowed in the R1 zone.
We have setbacks.
We have open space requirements.
But when we think about the maximum dwelling units per acre, we just want to give property owners the flexibility to use their parcel as they see fit and not to have this constraint if they want to add, for example, just one more smaller, more affordable unit.
And I'm going to stop there because my colleague, Council Member Cecilia Lunapara, has a short presentation that will walk us through this concept in greater detail.
But let me just touch on the final four recommendations quickly.
So I know I want to recognize Council Member Traegub asking for objective design standards.
One thing that we feel comfortable doing right now to encourage a diversity of roof design options, we have the maximum eave height of 35 feet.
The ordinance says a maximum height of 35 feet.
We want to give a little flexibility.
If somebody wants to have a pitched roof or a gabled roof, which you see in our community, we want to allow three more feet just for roof height.
So that's what recommendation three is about.
It's not about allowing a fourth floor.
We're still keeping three stories.
But we want to allow some diversity of roof designs because when I'm walking around town, I think that that diversity is what makes our neighborhoods look beautiful.
On number four, so and again, I think Council Member Traegub, you brought up the issue of, you know, reduced yard space potentially if you have middle housing.
So we want to be as efficient as we can with the use of space and we have these rooftops that are providing direct access to sunlight and fresh air.
So we want to make it possible if somebody wants to to have rooftop access.
So that's what recommendation four is about.
The way we want to effectuate this is by adding five additional feet beyond the 35 feet to enable rooftop access.
You might be wondering, well, how does five more feet get you rooftop access? The idea here is that if somebody wants to do three stories, it's about 10 stories per floor.
So they'll go up to 31 feet on a flat roof and then they will probably need nine feet to do a rooftop access door.
And we believe that this would enable universal access to people of all ages and abilities.
If we can allow this rooftop door access or an elevator if somebody so chooses, this would enable rooftop access for recreational uses such as growing fruits and vegetables, maintenance of utilities such as a heat pump or water heater, and solar panel access.
Finally, recommendation five, we are referring to the City Manager to conduct an equity impact analysis two years after implementation of the Middle Housing Ordinance.
This analysis should assess how the reforms are working citywide and whether they are advancing inclusive outcomes.
With particular attention to any disparate impact on marginalized communities in South and West Berkeley, a data-driven impact study will allow the City to evaluate real-world outcomes, fine-tune future efforts, and uphold our commitment to equitable housing and neighborhood stability.
And I want to acknowledge Council Member Tragoop is also asking for that.
So hopefully we can meet in the middle there.
Okay, finally, number six, I know Council Member Tragoop has asked for this as well.
So we want to refer to the City Manager the development of objective design standards for all of the zones R1, R2, R2A, and MUR.
Again, you know, we do not intend for this to lead to substandard designs.
We are confident that planning professionals, architects will design beautiful buildings and we do want to explore whether there's anything further that we can do to be more certain that that happens.
So that is what we are looking at with recommendation number six.
So let me with that turn it over to Council Member Lunapata.
Let me just share my screen.
Okay, I want to talk through the 90 dwelling units per acre and why we got to that number because it can feel a little arbitrary.
And I want to start out with a quote from a letter sent to Council written by local Berkeley neighbors, architects, and planners.
They point out that like many other cities have done, our Council can regulate the maximum form through setbacks and height requirements as we have done and allow property owners to design the interiors to be flexible and meet their own needs.
This allows for more creative uses including multi-generational housing, co-housing, tenancy in common, community land trust models, and co-housing options.
This is the framework under which we wrote our supplemental and landed on 90 dwelling units per acre as the best option for our missing middle changes.
So let's look over the form-based code again really quickly.
One second, sorry, I'm trying to figure out my notes.
Yeah, I know it's not working.
One moment, so sorry.
Sorry, I just had a technical technical difficulty.
I'm going to pull up the presentation and share screen.
Okay, let me do.
Where's the presentation? Great, thank you.
Thanks for your patience everyone.
While you're waiting, I'm going to ask folks to turn off their cell phones because I know we heard some phones earlier.
So I'm going to use this opportunity to to remind folks to turn off the sound on their phones.
Thank you.
Okay, I'm going to go ahead and close the session.
Okay, okay, just go on then.
Don't worry, it's okay.
You'll be fine.
I'm just going to a special meeting soon.
Okay.
Clerk, can you promote Council Member Keserwani? Okay, she's in.
Thank you.
Okay, I'm going to close the meeting and just a moment.
Thanks, everybody.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Next slide, please.
Yeah, thank you.
Okay, sorry about that.
Thank you everyone.
Next slide, please.
Okay, so this is a presentation that we're going to be presenting with the existing built environment.
For the sake of the rest of the presentation, we will focus on the height limit, which is 35 feet or approximately three stories, which is the existing height limit for R1 and the lot coverage at approximately 60%.
Next slide, please.
Next slide, please.
Sorry.
Next slide, please.
Okay, so the height limit for R1 is 3,000 square foot lot, which is the approximate average size lot.
We get to 7,650 square feet.
This is admittedly an estimate and each parcel is going to be different, but we spoke with architects and planners to come up with a helpful model.
If anyone has more questions about our map here, I'm happy to come back to the slide to answer them.
This chart shows the maximum dwelling units per acre.
Assuming a 5,000 square foot lot as it is the approximate average size of lots in the proposed rezoning areas, a 40 dwelling unit per acre maximum would yield 4 to 5 units.
50 dwelling units per acre would yield 5 to 6 units.
7 dwelling units per acre would yield 70 and 90 would yield 10.
Here is where the number that we used.
If the maximum dwelling unit per acre is used, that means that 40 dwelling units per acre lots would yield 4 to 5, 1,700 square foot units, significantly larger than the average home size in the city.
Even a building in the 60 dwelling units per acre zone would yield about 6 to 7 units at 1,176 square feet each, still a pretty large space and so on.
We did not use a density standard for maximums, but if we did, it suggested we use a density standard of 90 dwelling units per acre, and they argue it provides a clear, predictable framework for designers, builders, and property owners.
It still allows flexibility in housing types from stacked flats to townhomes and courtyard clusters while remaining modest in scale.
We argue that if more smaller dwelling units per acre are used than the average home size in the city, that means that the average home size is approximately 7,650 square foot figure, and assuming the property owner seeks to use the entire building envelope, we can approximate the size of homes in square feet.
In conversations with local architects, we have learned that smaller sized homes in the 750 to 900 square foot range promote affordability and flexibility.
Finally, without changing the form-based code, the building would look the same in the neighborhood because regardless of dwelling unit per acre maximums, the building envelope remains entirely consistent.
If this building has a maximum density of four units, we would end up with 1,700 square foot homes, which there's nothing wrong with and they would still be able to do.
Our thesis is that if we can provide the flexibility for smaller family friendly and more affordable units, we can provide the flexibility for smaller family friendly and more affordable units.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay, so we've just done our presentations and I'm going to give us time for questions first from council members.
So time for questions.
I see that Council Member Katsurwani has his hand raised.
Yes, thank you, Madam Mayor and hello, everyone.
I have three questions, one for staff, one for Council Member Katsurwani and one for both.
My question for staff is, well, it's a request slash question.
Could you elaborate on how the staff recommendation fulfills the objectives of Program 29 and advances the objectives of the housing element and specifically the housing element? As one of the co-sponsors and co-collaborators of the 2021 referral, what makes the staff recommendation deficient to meet the goals stated above and what or what makes 90 units per acre necessary across all applicable load and sea zones, which the presentations did speak to, but I'm asking for those to be reiterated.
And can you address how your proposal aligns with the recommendation of the Council of San Pablo Park, which is the only R1 zone in my district as a hub of African American homeownership? And for both, how would your recommendation incentivize the construction of a mix of housing typologies to accommodate the needs of families that grow and change over time? I feel like it would be, yeah, since folks can just repeat the question as they're answering it, and then perhaps if we need clarification, Council Member Taplin, we might ask you to ask that question.
So I think we're going to start with staff.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Justin Horner, Planning Department staff.
Just in response to the Council Member's question about Program 29 and the proposed middle housing zoning standards, Program 29 in the housing element is entitled middle housing and has three elements to it.
One is the revision of our affordable housing fee to accommodate middle housing zoning, which the Council did in February of this year.
It also required the City Council to consider zoning changes to permit multi-unit development in historically single-family districts, which the staff proposal before you tonight is doing.
And it also includes a provision that you consider the demolition of single-family homes that are not tenant-occupied with a zoning certificate.
So those are the three sort of bullets that are in Program 29.
And Program 29 is related to affirmatively furthering fair housing because it is pursuant to City Council referrals from 2019 and 2021 specifically about addressing and ending exclusionary zoning.
Thank you.
Council Member Taplin, I think your remaining questions were addressed to me.
Tell me if I have it wrong, but I think the first question was something about why the staff proposal for dwelling units per acre was deficient.
Is that correct? Okay.
So first, I just want to commend our staff because they took Council direction in developing what's before us.
And that was developed under a prior Council a year ago.
And I was a co-author of that direction.
And I'm here trying to advance equity even more.
So I do want to say that we felt we were putting forward the most ambitious proposal last July.
So we come back here now to promote greater equity.
And what I can tell you is that there's a state requirement for the housing element to affirmatively further fair housing.
It's a little bit of a mouthful.
What does it mean? It actually means that we have an obligation to try to place more homes in higher resource neighborhoods because the data tells us that when a low-income child has the opportunity to live in a higher resource neighborhood away from the freeway with cleaner air, with less crime, less exposure to random gun violence, their life outcomes are better.
Their children are more likely to graduate from college and earn a higher income.
So this is about advancing opportunity for people who have historically not had the opportunity to live in a higher resource neighborhood away from the freeway.
So if we are going to affirmatively further fair housing, I do not see why the R1 zone, the historically higher resource single-family zone, should have a lower dwelling units per acre than R2A, MUR, and R2.
So that is my argument, and the neighborhood around there being historically R1, and how that has been an area where we have seen African-American homeownership.
I am so happy about that, and what we are trying to do here with middle housing and a companion piece of legislation that I put forward earlier this year around subdivision and another piece of legislation I put forward this year about condoizing backyard cottages, we are trying to actually create more starter home opportunities for middle class workers, for people of color, for people who have historically not had an opportunity to own a home and build multi-generational wealth.
That is actually at the root of what I believe we are striving for with this entire ordinance and also with this supplemental.
My hope is that we would see more of those starter homes, and there is a beautiful example of one in my district on Hearst Avenue.
You have two smaller condos on one parcel.
They are 875 square feet.
Again, they are less than 1,000 square feet.
Two bedrooms, 1.5 baths.
That is a great size for a young family, and by the way, it is sold for less than a million dollars.
The median single family home in Berkeley today sells for $7 million.
That is an entirely different price point that all of a sudden, two teachers can afford that.
A Berkeley police officer starting their career can think about potentially owning that condo one day.
I want to see more African Americans come back to Berkeley and be able to own a home.
In 1970, we had a black population of 24%.
That population has been displaced.
We are now at 7%.
The only area in our city that has had a growing black population is in our downtown.
Guess what? Our downtown has created homes.
We have created apartments there.
I am for the people.
I am for communities of color.
We are not trying to marginalize any community.
We are trying to bring our people back.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I did have one third question for both proposal or for Councillor Kastorwani and for staff.
How would your recommendation incentivize the construction of a mix of housing typologies within the same neighborhood to accommodate the needs of the community? Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
The proposed middle housing zoning changes do include provisions that make it easier and faster to improve new development.
We have also included provisions that make the creation of residential spaces easier.
We have specifically added after comments regarding trying to make it easier to expand and reconfigure existing space for the very purpose of different types of household configurations that may happen over the life of the building.
Building on that answer, I already mentioned the subdivision companion that would encourage the ability to have the smaller cottages, ownership, bungalow courts potentially, but also just the development standards.
People have flexibility.
You don't have to maximize the building envelope.
With having a higher dwelling units per acre, a higher maximum, people can subdivide within the structure.
Maybe you started off with a four-plex.
To use that example, the 1,700-square-foot four-plexes, but then as your family grows and changes, maybe you want to subdivide one of those units.
By increasing the dwelling units per acre, we're trying to make sure that that's possible because if somebody has already maxed out their maximum dwelling units per acre and they want to subdivide, I believe that they would be able to do so.
We just want to encourage flexibility.
We believe that our recommendations are striving to do that.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
It's very helpful.
Thank you.
I believe that Council Member Trager has some questions.
This is for staff.
I did notice in the staff report at various times it mentioned exemptions or added protections in the event that a tenant lives on the property.
In the ordinance and as you've described the proposal and actually for the demolition ordinance that we approved, I wanted you to confirm that when you are referring to currently units currently occupied by sitting tenants, you're actually referring to that as well as any unit that has had a no-fault eviction in five years.
Maybe this is a good place for you to actually talk about the tenant protections that were approved one year and three days ago, I believe, last year's City Council by force meeting.
Thank you, Council Member Tregew.
I want to make the point, Justin may have mentioned this already, but if so, I want to reiterate that Council, I think, was very deliberate about holding off on these middle housing zoning amendments until after you had the opportunity to update the provisions of Chapter 23-326 of the Zoning Ordinance Demolition and Dwelling Unit Zoning Ordinance.
What we did is we codified many of the protections that are guaranteed under state law.
SB 330 introduced a number of new tenant protections in 2018.
We codified those locally, and in a number of cases, we went further and adopted stronger tenant protections.
More relocation benefits.
In the specific case that you named, I believe a building that has been subject to a no-fault eviction is treated differently than a building with sitting tenants because if there's been a no-fault eviction during the preceding five years, then the unit would not be eligible for demolition under any circumstances.
That's an important distinction.
Yeah.
I mentioned that there are sitting tenants would have the right of first refusal for a replacement unit at the same level of rent if the unit qualified as a protected unit, so it was subject to any kind of price control, rent control, or an affordable unit, or if the most recent household occupying the unit is a low-income household, then the replacement unit has to be subject to price restriction, so it has to be a BMR, a low-income unit.
And that's in addition.

Segment 3

And so that's part of the affordability protections guaranteed by the demolition ordinance.
I could keep going, but I'll stop there unless you have more questions.
Also, can you remind me, would that be additive to anything that might qualify the building for density bonus? So let's say they, hypothetically, I don't actually think this would happen given the current economics of middle housing, but hypothetically, let's say the owner wants to build one BMR unit on site plus, so what would be the impact? Could they count that one unit? Yeah, they can.
There is case law that requires municipalities to count affordable units created as replacement units towards satisfying requirements related to the density bonus and also related to local inclusionary requirements.
Yeah.
Are those all your questions, Councilmember? Yes, thank you, Madam Mayor.
Okay, Councilmember Humbert.
Yes, excuse me.
Thank you, Madam Mayor.
Yeah, I just have one question, sort of a general question, and that it's the case that some of the world's preeminent climate scientists have urged Berkeley to pass this, and two of those climate scientists live here in Berkeley and were co-authors of the IPCC-UN report a couple years ago, but I want to address good faith concerns about solar access.
Can you discuss how you considered solar access issues in connection with the missing middle housing net ordinance? I thank you very much for the question, Justin Horner, Planning Department staff.
The issue of solar access has been considered and discussed as part of the policy discussions, even when we were just talking about residential, what we call residential objective standards before we even got to missing middle.
The 35-foot height limit itself, as well as the 22-foot height limit in the rear 15 feet of a lot, were recommended by staff in no small part due to community concerns about solar access impediments, overall bulk, and other impacts that could result from larger buildings.
As a part of our research and policy development, staff had commissioned a solar access study and presented this information to the city council at its September 20, 2022 work session, which is quite some time ago.
On average, the study found that the increase in shadow area for the difference between the existing 28-foot base height limit and the proposed 35-foot height limit to be less than 10 percent averaged over the course of the study time frame.
Now, of course, the shadow study is a modeled scenario, and there could be individual specific cases where the solar access impacts are greater.
However, the model didn't assume that there were no existing trees, foliage, or other existing obstructions as well, so there may have been a balance in that modeling.
And you should note that although the residential zones proposed to be amended currently include a base height of 28, the zoning in these districts already allows heights of up to 35 feet permitted with an administrative use permit.
I mean, currently in analyzing those administrative use permits, there are no specific findings regarding solar access required to approve those AUPs, and when requested, those AUPs are routinely approved and very rarely appealed.
So, you know, in the course of this, both the planning commission and the city council received numerous public comments, I was witness to them, on this very issue at a number of meetings and public hearings, but ultimately directed staff to prepare the development standards that are before you tonight.
I mean, there's nothing in the proposed standards that limit the ability of neighbors to enter into private agreements over solar access or solar easements or other civil mechanisms.
Thank you, Mr.
Horner.
Appreciate that answer.
Thank you.
I think Council Member Traichab, you have a question you forgot? Yeah, I was in the middle of my last question and forgot that I have one more.
I'm just going to keep using this pun forever.
This is for Council Member Kesawane and company item.
In your item, I just wanted to confirm it doesn't contemplate changing the step back or other changes to the building envelope itself from what the staff proposal had? No, absolutely not, and I think Council Member Lunapata showed that well visually, that the same, what we're talking about is the same building, the same building envelope, and considering how many units do we want to allow inside.
That's it.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Council Member Bartlett? Thank you, and thank you, staff, for your wonderful work here.
Absolutely, and of course, my colleagues, wonderful, wonderful as well, Council Member Traichab and Council Member Kesawane, which I'm proud to be a co-author here with you on this one, really proud of this moment, but I have a question for the staff regarding the initial recommendation by the team, which again, thank you for your thoroughness, and two questions.
I'll start with one.
So much has been said about SB9, and it's kind of corollary to what we're proposing tonight.
What is SB9, and then I want to discuss the impact of SB9 so far.
Thank you, Council Member Justin Horner, Planning Department staff.
SB9 is a state law which permits a parcel located in a single family only zone to be subdivided into two parcels, and then on each of those parcels, you can put two dwelling units.
Currently, SB9 can be used in the R1 district here in Berkeley, which is our only single family district.
We have no other single family districts, and so it needs to technically, you know, officially be one to be SB9 eligible.
Under the zoning changes, the only remaining single family zone in the city will be the R1H zone, which is the portion of R1 that's located in the hillside overlay.
The R1 zone outside of the hillside overlay will now be a multi-unit zone, and so therefore will not be eligible for SB9.
I'll just add to that.
We've not seen many SB9 projects since the legislation was introduced, and we've seen that.
We're not alone.
Berkeley's not alone in that.
The legislation, I think, hasn't had as much impact as it hoped or intended.
It's complicated.
There are various strings attached.
I think it's difficult for some even experienced architects and design professionals to understand and use.
Part of what we're trying to do here is develop a local program that has a little bit more flexibility than SB9, and so it'll be easier to use and take advantage of.
And then ADUs, the accessory dwelling units, as the one who convened the ADU working group, the task force back in 2017, charting its success, its movement, rather.
So speak to us briefly on the ADU legislation and the number of ADUs that you've seen.
Sure, yeah.
So the legislative reform movement to facilitate ADU production really got into gear within the last five or ten years, and it's had a big impact.
Roughly 20% of the new housing units in Berkeley have been, over the last five years, have been ADUs.
And that's also true statewide.
That same ratio, interestingly enough.
So that's about 100 ADUs a year.
And the state legislature has continued to tinker with the law.
We'll actually be coming back to you next month with an update to our local ordinance to bring it into better alignment with recent updates to state law.
And depending on the number of homes, existing homes or permitted homes, the number of ADUs that you can build varies.
And it varies by whether it's an attached ADU, an ADU that's attached to the main building, a detached ADU, or a junior accessory dwelling unit.
And that's a smaller unit that's made up of space in the interior of an existing building.
So about 100 a year? Yeah, citywide, we've seen about 100 a year.
And I mean, I said up front, if the middle housing legislation produces that many units, I think that would be a great success.
I think for a variety of reasons, it's harder to build a middle housing project than it is to build an ADU.
It's more complicated.
It takes more financial investment.
It takes more space.
There are fewer developers who know how to do it.
So for a variety of reasons, I question whether we'll get as many units out of middle housing as we've gotten out of ADUs.
But I think it's an important complementary program.
And one last question.
This regards the program as presented by the team.
I'm just curious if there's a larger sort of high-level reasoning for the maintenance of the highly disparate zones.
And because to a layperson such as myself, they resemble the existing status quo that we fought so hard to overturn for all these years.
Council Member Bartlett, I don't have a great answer for you on this one, frankly.
I think when we started this project, we considered development standards for the districts that were akin to the existing development standards, which I think you've just aptly pointed out that's kind of somewhat defeating of the purpose, which is try to undo those historic discrepancies.
But I think when we started out on this, we were thinking of more along the lines of maintaining that consistency.
And as we've gone on through this process, we've gotten more feedback from the Planning Commission and from this Council to move towards the direction of consistency across the zones.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And I appreciate, again, this is a very complex matter, many layers to this onion.
Thank you.
And, Director, I believe that also that part of the reason why you were looking that way was because of previous Council direction.
That's right.
Okay.
Thank you.
We have questions from Council Member Bockbee.
Thanks.
Thank you to staff for the very thorough and detailed and very informative presentation.
And thanks to my colleagues for presenting supplementals in a very clear and cogent way.
Makes it really easy for us to kind of understand the issues.
I just have one question for Council Member Cassarwani and team.
And if you wouldn't mind bringing up the slide on the chart that had the 90 dwelling units per acre, the different numbers.
Yeah, perfect.
My main question here is just getting kind of arms around the different numbers of units at different DUAs.
I have a feeling that this might be a topic of conversation as the evening goes forward.
This is the number of dwelling units in the main development.
This then, there would be additional ADUs as well on top of this.
Could you help us understand what this might look like with the ADUs as well at a 90 DUA level? Sure.
So, ADU law is evolving.
And I think the best way to answer your question is to talk about a theoretical parcel that could fit all of those units.
Because I think most wouldn't.
But just so you can understand the concept.
With new state law, I believe it's 80-20-11, 12-11.
A parcel that is a multi-unit parcel gets an accessory dwelling unit for each unit.
And so, up to eight.
So, if you had the space and the financial resources and the desire and the ability, yes, and the space, technically, yeah, if you had, let's just go with the 90-10 units, that state law suggests you could have eight ADUs.
But I want to caution that, you know, because I've been discussing this with Director Klein, that part of the way you access those, let's say, you know, the max eight accessory dwelling units is these 10 have to have a certificate of occupancy.
So, it doesn't all happen at once.
And so, I think that's a distinction that, so, it's not, the idea of like an 18-unit apartment building, that is not possible, if that makes sense.
Because you'd have to do it sequentially, and you'd have to have the space, and again, the financial resources and everything.
So, when we were thinking about this dwelling units per acre standard, I am aware of that law.
But we did not think about those being sort of automatic add-ons, because of the difficulty in using it.
Yeah, so, there's the sequencing, but then also just the cumulative, the space, in terms of what you could actually accommodate.
Right.
So, you wouldn't expect eight, but you might expect a handful, two, three, four.
I mean, and I know the law is changing, but again, I'm just trying to visualize.
Yes, and you know, because it's helpful, you know, in thinking about these very complex topics, to sort of think about, you know, what's hypothetically possible.
And then, we come back to reality, right? A hundred accessory dwelling units across our entire city.
And remember, that does include the hillside overlay zone.
So, you know, what we actually see, and what's theoretically possible, are very different.
But yes, I think you, I hope I've answered your question.
Just trying to understand, make sure this, what it does and doesn't include.
So, there'd be some number of ADUs, probably not a large number, but some number on top of that.
Yes, what we're talking about here, just, it never includes the accessory dwelling units that are just thought of as accessory.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And keep in mind, like you were saying, there's a limit to how much space is even on a lot.
So, if you've built something that takes up all the space that's allowed, you can't build any more ADUs anyway, right? There's no space for them.
So, just to reinforce that.
Council Member O'Keefe.
Yeah, I just have a follow-up question to Council Member Blackabee's.
Would it be possible to build something with, let's say, 10 units and then create ADUs from, like by subdividing some of the units? Is that a scenario that would happen? Yes.
And I don't want to start getting to specific numbers, but there is a cap on the total amount of internal square footage that you're allowed to use in order to subdivide and create new units.
Can I ask what that cap is? Just, I think it's 25 percent in the state code.
Okay, yeah.
The only reason I'm asking, and I appreciate Council Member Blackabee for bringing this up, is I did the same math that was up there, but I had two more in my denominator, because I was assuming two ADUs, and I actually hadn't thought about the more expanded rates.
So, that is, I think it is possible, and I'm not trying to make a point or anything.
I just, I had different numbers, and I think that's why.
So, I'm not sure I agree that it's not possible, but that's for discussion later.
So, thank you.
Thank you.
I think Council Member Taplin has another question.
Thank you.
This is very quick.
I was wondering whether 90 units per acre was ever presented during any of the six years of public engagement or any of the public hearings of the Planning Commission, whether that density maximum was considered.
Yeah, I can speak to that, Council Member Taplin.
The staff discussed a variety of numbers with the Planning Commission for the maximum dwelling units per acre.
Ultimately, Planning Commission recommended to City Council no cap on density, and so that was the recommendation that Planning Commission considered and ultimately advanced to City Council in February of 2024.
But since then, when Council requested that we further engage the public, was 90 units per acre presented at any of the subsequent meetings that took place during the interim? We did not have the opportunity to present that number, no.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Council Member Trachub, did you have another question? Yeah, thank you so much, Council Member Castrovani, for reminding me about SB 1211.
I was still in my head thinking that two was the max.
So, I had a few questions just related to that.
One for staff.
I know this bill appears to have been enacted last year, so we've only had six months to go by, but how many applications have you seen that go above two ADUs? None yet.
None yet.
Okay.
And then, can you remind me, in terms of lot coverage standards, is it like non-corner lots in most residential districts? Is it 40% is the max? And how does that work in relation to ADUs? Well, ADUs don't count towards lot coverage maximums.
Okay.
Yeah, the existing lot coverage standards range from 35, generally from 35 to 45%, although 100% is permitted in the MUR, and proposed would be increasing to 60% in the R districts and maintaining 100% in MUR.
Okay, so 60% lot coverage under the staff proposal in most resi districts, except for Hills, probably.
So, 40% open space, but that could be utilized by ADUs.
Okay.
And then, my last question is, if you could refresh my memory, ADUs accepted, what is the minimum square footage of a unit? What is that standard, and is that changing under this? Well, I guess you have the dwelling unit standard, but is there a minimum unit size? Not under the zoning controls.
There are some requirements under the building code for minimum habitable space, and generally, I believe 150 square feet of minimum habitable space under the building code is the number.
I feel like in some circumstances, there is a 400 square foot minimum.
I'm sorry, I'm revealing my lack of direct familiarity with the building code on this, but yeah, it's generally the range.
Okay, so am I.
Thank you so much.
Okay, I have a few questions as well.
I know that the setbacks can be confusing for folks, because when you say five feet, it's not five feet total, so could you just go back to the slide about setbacks and explain that again? I think folks would benefit from that.
Okay.
Justin Horner, Planning Department staff.
Just on the left side, you'll see the current setback regulations.
These are minimum setbacks in the R1, R1A, and R2 districts.
There's a minimum of a 20 foot rear setback and a 20 foot front yard setback.
In the R2A district, there's a 15 foot rear setback and a 15 foot front yard setback requirement.
There's a side setback of four feet.
Under the proposed setbacks on the right hand part of the slide, I do apologize.
It is a little hard to see.
The minimum required setback in the rear is five feet, and the minimum required setback in the front is five feet, with the additional requirement that both the rear and the front setbacks together must add up to at least 20 feet.
So this would allow you to shift the building on the lot, but still maintain at least a 20 foot total setback between the rear and the front.
The side setbacks would not be changed.
So for example, it could be like five feet in the front, but then it would have to be 15 feet in the rear.
That is correct.
Okay, thank you for clarifying that.
I know that we've gotten a lot of emails, and there was some concern about this middle housing being described as affordable.
So I'm wondering if you could speak to the affordable piece, and also just generally, what are we doing to support affordable housing in our city? Thank you for the question, Justin Horner, Planning Department staff.
As I mentioned in the presentation, the middle housing program is one of a wide array of programs that are included in the housing element that address housing affordability, housing quality, and housing availability.
The middle housing program is not directly intended to create restricted affordable housing.
There are no new affordability requirements contained in the middle housing zoning changes and anything in the middle housing.
Folks, please, please stop speaking.
Folks, I think that he was clear about what he said, is that there are many different types of housing that we're trying to build right now.
This is one type, and we're still also, he's answering the question.
Folks, he's answering the question about affordability.
Please don't speak.
Let our staff finish their questions, answering the questions.
Thank you.
There are also nothing in the middle housing zoning changes that remove existing affordable housing requirements from these projects.
So, for example, a middle housing zoning project that is greater than 5,000 square feet would be required to either have on-site affordable units or contribute to the affordable housing fund.
In addition, of course, any middle housing project that would happen to utilize the state density bonus would also include additional affordable units.
Yeah, I just want to also add to that a point that I think Council Member Kesawane got to earlier is that I think part of the thinking here is that in some districts now where you can only build a single family home, that might be somebody who's demolishing a home and building a new home might max that out and build a 3,000 square foot home, and that would go for $2.5 million.
What we're doing is we're making it legal to do something else and instead build perhaps four townhomes that might sell would be smaller and might fetch a million dollars each.
Still very expensive.
I want to acknowledge that, right? But less than the median sell price of a single family home in Berkeley, which is $1.7 million.
A lot more accessible to people.
Folks, please let him finish speaking.
Don't interrupt him.
I want to note there's no subsidy available to produce moderate income housing.
Housing available to people earning 80 to 120 percent of median income.
There's no subsidy available for that, and we see when I look at the numbers year after year of the number of units, moderate income units that are produced, it's usually single digits or zero, and I think that there is an opportunity to create housing through this program that's more accessible to moderate income households, and I think that's important.
Thank you.
Folks, please come on.
You know better.
We've got kids in the audience.
Let's show them how we can be respectful and not speak over others.
Okay, so then there were also some questions that we've gotten about infrastructure and not enough parking.
I'm wondering if you can address those questions and concerns as well.
Thank you very much, Justin Horner, Planning Department staff.
As part of the adoption of the housing element in January of 2023, council also certified an environmental impact report that analyzed the middle housing zoning standards as well as a number of other developments, including the BART stations and a number of other opportunity sites.
The EIR analyzed about 19,000 units over the course of the eight-year planning period, so within the environmental impact report are all the normal things you would expect when you think about an environmental impact report, biological resources, air quality, water quality, but also in an EIR you're required to analyze utility and public services, stormwater and wastewater capacity, waste management capacity, police and fire response capacity, and in the evaluation included in the EIR, it was determined that the city does have sufficient capacity for not only just the middle housing program but for the broader development projection that was included in the environmental impact report.
Thank you.
Thanks for answering that.
Are there other questions from my council colleagues? Okay, we've been sitting for an hour and a half, so I just want to check in and see if we want to just take a very quick 10-minute stretch.
I think that might be good before we jump into public comment.
I think we should do that.
Okay, we're going to do that.
Okay, so I encourage everyone, it's still bright out, so you know, take a stretch, you know, make a little circle around the block, use the bathroom, get some water, you know, take care of your needs, and we'll be back in 10 minutes.
Thank you.
Recording stopped.
Oh, sorry, and if you have children with you, I'm going to let you go first when we come back, so just don't leave yet.
Well, you know, we're going to be soon.
If you have children and you need to go home, we're going to let you go first.
Okay, hello.
Hi, folks.
I love seeing you all chat with each other, but we're going to get started soon.
Please make your way back to your seats.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Come on, folks.
Recording in progress.
It's time for public comment.
If you're standing in the aisle, please have a seat or make your way to the line.
Either way.
All right, folks.

Segment 4

I need you to quiet down.
All right, we're resorting to this.
All right.
Very good.
All right, that usually works.
Here we go.
So we're gonna get we're back in session now.
Folks, I need you to quiet down, please, folks in the back.
Folks, please tell your neighbors.
Thank you.
All right.
Very good.
Thank you so much, everyone.
Thanks for your patience.
We are back.
Now I said it right before break, I was saying that if you have a small child and you need to leave early, I'm gonna ask that you I'm gonna ask that you go ahead and come up to the front so you can speak and go home.
Folks, please, please quiet down.
Come on.
Quiet down, please, folks.
Thank you.
If you have a small child, please come up to the front so you can go home.
Small and young.
All right, folks, please quiet down.
We're gonna start taking public comment, but not until it's quiet.
I will wait.
Okay, thank you.
All right.
Well, our first public commenter, please come up.
And again, a reminder, everybody has one minute to speak.
You can give your minute to somebody else, but they can't get more than four minutes.
When your time is done, the bell will ring.
I will tell you to please step back.
All right.
Very good.
Thank you very much.
Go ahead.
Hi, my name is Sonia Trouse, and I currently live in Hi, my name is Sonia Trouse, and I currently live in Oakland, but July 16th, I'm moving to the 2200 block of Browning Street.
Very exciting.
And we're moving into what's actually a triplex.
It started out as a single family house, and now it's a duplex.
The first floor is 1600 square foot, three bedroom.
Good enough for my five person family.
And then there's a unit above the garage.
So this is the missing middle.
You guys are legalizing.
Thank God it was already legal in this 2200 block of Browning so I can move in.
And I'm really excited that I'm moving to a city that's about to legalize it in more places.
And I want to say that we're talking about real people here, you know, real families.
My husband grew up in Berkeley, my seven year old is going to be able to bike to my in-laws house.
We'll be able to bike to the pool.
I mean, it's a beautiful community, and we're really excited to join it.
Thank you for making enough housing.
Thank you.
Hi, I'm Chris Ballinger.
I've lived in Berkeley for 15 years.
For many of those years, I lived in a tiny 500 square foot apartment.
That building would have been illegal to build under today's code was originally built, supposedly in the 1800s.
It was divided up.
It was originally four units, there was like horse stables underneath.
And it was divided up over the years into 14 units, sort of like in North Berkeley near like cheese board.
And yeah, because I lived in this really cheap unit.
Eventually, I was able to buy a home and settle down here, hopefully for good, as long as we can keep affording it.
But yeah, it's like, please build more housing.
I support this proposal and the Keserwani amendment.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Hi, my name is Megan Waksbras.
I first moved to Berkeley in 2007.
I bought a home here in 2019.
I support the proposal.
As folks have mentioned, we need more housing of all levels of affordability for more people.
I love our town.
I want more people to live here to be a sanctuary city, we need to make room for more people for both climate and immigration reasons.
And I want to point out that many of the people speaking in favor of this are likely to be those of us with children because we want our children to be able to live here in the future.
And thank you for this proposal.
And I will.
Yeah, I'm in support.
Thank you.
Hello, my name is Lee.
This is Theo.
I just wanted to a voice my support for the whole process.
I know you guys have been working on this for six years.
Very, very complicated.
Thanks to the city staff as well for all the hard work you put into this.
And I want to share a quick story.
We have some friends who live a couple blocks from here, young family, one of them is a one of them is a first responder, they have a young child.
They are unfortunately they cannot afford to live in the city.
And so they're seriously having to consider leaving.
And it makes us really sad.
And I hope that we can sort of prevent that from happening, at least for future families by addressing affordability at all levels of the of the spectrum.
So thanks, everyone.
Thank you.
Hello, my name is Nathan is I am a single family homeowner near Totland.
We're Totland aficionados.
You met my wife earlier.
This is Rosie.
We're a family of four.
Sorry about the noises from two of us this evening.
We want more young families to live here with access to good schools and public services and public transport.
And part of how we do that is having having the density and the ability to efficiently provide those public services.
And I think it's essential for us as a region as well, that Berkeley carries its fair share, same as other communities in the state.
You know, I'm glad that Berkeley is taking his responsibilities seriously on like, Atherton or Hillsborough.
And I think it's also necessary.
It's a necessitates us throughout the city taking on that responsibility across historical zoning zones as they are.
My neighborhood where I live, I live in Russia's district is already a mix of physical family homes and apartments.
And we like most of our neighbors.
And we'd like more of them.
Thank you.
Okay.
Any other any other families with young children? Okay, go ahead.
Come on up.
And you don't have to wait for me to tell you to come up.
You can just come up after.
Yeah, go ahead.
Whenever you're ready.
And feel free to move the mic.
So it suits your needs.
I give my minute to her.
That's great.
Give me one second.
Hi, good evening, Mary she council members and neighbors.
My name is Kavya and I'm a proud Cal grad.
I'm speaking strong support of middle, sorry, middle housing ordinance.
We all love our neighborhoods, the trees, the rhythm, the blocks and the sense of familiarity.
What's so powerful about this ordinance is that it preserves those qualities while making space for more people to share in them.
We talked about missing middle in two ways and both are urgent.
First is ordinance directly fills the gap in building type.
The duplexes and the cottage courts that exist in Berkeley's most beloved areas are banned in many parts of the city.
These are radical, they're quiet, they're beautiful, they're human scale homes.
This ordinance introduces a scale that's far gentler than what we're seeing in high rise corridors.
Second, indirectly, but just as importantly addresses the missing middle income level.
This is folks making between 80 and 120% AMI units and for context, this is between 125 to 190 K for family of four.
This is our teachers, nurses, firefighters, and the people that make our city run.
There is no subsidy for these income levels.
And so when we create capital A affordable housing, we aren't creating housing for these people.
We achieve this by allowing diverse housing types, for example, through the allowance of smaller unit sizes.
As council member Lenapar thoughtfully explained, if we want Berkeley to be more than a postcard, we need to create space for the people to keep it alive.
And here's the reality.
Berkeley is required to plan for nearly 9000 homes by 2031.
People want to live in Berkeley, and under RINA they will.
The question is how? This ordinance offers a path that is thoughtful and distributed through our roots and values.
I want to acknowledge all the work that's brought us here over the past six years.
And these standards are tailored for Berkeley.
They aren't a generic and they're from a template.
This ordinance avoids the false choice between towers or ADUs, which are kind of a bandaid in housing policy.
This is a smart option.
And I appreciate your comment.
Thank you.
Hi there.
My name is Brady.
I'm a Berkeley resident.
I'm definitely in favor of this.
This is my first council meeting I've come to and it's been very, very fun.
Someone gave me the sign.
I care about the sign.
I care about this.
I think that this is really, really useful.
My girlfriend and I would love to stay in the Bay Area.
We would love to stay in Berkeley.
And we don't have a path to do that right now.
I am a chemical engineer.
I work at a biotech company and my girlfriend is a financial analyst.
And we cannot afford a house here.
So I can't imagine how hard it would be for someone who doesn't work in very technical fields like we do.
So yeah, I support this.
I think that the the 90 units on one acre, I think that totally makes sense.
We currently live in a two bedroom that's about 700 square feet.
It's a beautiful place to live.
It's in like a six plex.
So I'm in favor of that.
I'm in favor of this ordinance.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hello, Clifford, Fred 1973.
Citizens pass the neighborhood preservation ordinance 2025.
You're about to speak in the mic.
Oh, sorry.
1973.
Berkeley citizens pass the neighborhood preservation ordinance.
Now, 52 years later, your police to the past the neighborhood destruction ordinance, I'm afraid to say 1986.
Mayor Lonnie Hancock said look for win win solutions.
2025 developers when neighborhoods lose May 3, New York Times 40% of greenhouse gases are from construction.
1990 Professor Fran wheeler to Cal said, the most important thing a city can do is to preserve its sense of place.
You're changing Berkeley so fast, you're not going to recognize it in a few years.
15,000 units have been approved have been built or in the pipeline.
Berkeley is becoming the most densely populated city in California.
Our streets are at gridlock.
We can't take any more development.
Fire Department can't thank you people's lives.
Thank you.
Terrible plan.
Excuse me.
Thank you.
Thanks for your public comment.
My name is Wanda.
I live in district one.
And I I'm outraged by the phony talk of our being an exclusionary neighborhood.
And it's that this would this is exclusionary zoning.
When I first lived in the neighborhood, we had many black neighbors, ladies and they were well healed people.
They were not the desperate types you're talking about.
There are a lot of black people who have a lot of resources and they were living they were had businesses on San Pablo Avenue.
And that is you're using that to divide us because the property that is being salivated on is that which the people who were able to buy houses for really low prices.
And that's what these young bees resent.
They can't stand it that somebody could buy something for that low.
And they're they think I've talked to these and they actually think that they're going to get a lower price by building affordable housing, which is not.
None of it is affordable.
Thank you.
Thanks for your comment.
I have two extra minutes.
I saved my minute to show and I saved my minute.
And I'm Cheryl Darula, former council member of the city of Berkeley District two.
It's interesting.
It's interesting that now you drop the missing part, missing middle.
Why did you do that? Because that was a facade.
There's nothing missing.
This is totally ridiculous.
It's just outrageous how y'all can sit there and believe the lies.
The community believes the lies that this is going to bring back missing middle or middle income people because it's not.
It's going to be all he even said they even said the house went for less than a million.
$1 million.
Like who can afford that? Nobody's going to be able to afford that.
So this is all a fake facade.
And now you've dropped the whole bullshit about how you're going to get rid of the redlining when you're going to increase the redlining will continue predatory practices will continue.
People are going to be displaced.
And what's going to be left a white Berkeley or Berkeley a billionaires.
You're going to gentrify the FEC K out of it, which has already been happening because a lot of these buildings aren't even full and they don't stay.
You're not looking for families to stay here and be part of Berkeley's community for a lifetime.
They're going to come and they're going to leave.
Can you guys pay attention and like look at me or like pretend that you're listening.
It's really annoying that you just sit there and don't even react or or act like you care.
You have a whole room full of people.
I don't know what they're going to say.
But you need to pay attention and listen and try to listen and actually do what they want you to do.
Because it seems like a lot of people in this room aren't happy about your fake bullshit missing middle.
You had to drop that missing because nothing's missing.
You're going to create people to be missing.
That's true.
They're going to disappear out of Berkeley because they won't be able to afford it.
And you won't want them here as you already are acting like you don't already.
So I am with these setbacks and the lot size 60 percent.
You're going to be cutting down trees and not to mention the the fire danger of all this density and you're not increasing the fire department those capabilities or anything like that.
So thanks for your public comment.
Your time's up.
Thank you.
Megane Mossad I'm the chair of the Berkeley tenant union although I'm speaking on my own capacity tonight.
This problem with this concept is there's.
OK thank you.
I got an extra minute.
There's no affordability in your plan.
There's no section 8 support in your plan.
There's no guarantee of rent control in your plan.
Although many of these lots have houses on them that are over 100 years old.
They're actually going to go for market rate reset at the point that they're being built.
You guys took away the small sites monies that we voted for.
So that would have helped with the affordability.
But now that's gone.
I don't believe council member Kessler wanted that African-Americans are all going to run back to a million dollar homes without affordability protection rent control protection and any of the above.
Please stop using these talking points to enable the destruction of our community.
Please refer to please refer to the research that is already being done in Berkeley.
The anti eviction mapping project reports shows that the more market rate development there is the more gentrification there is the more pushing out of our community members there is.
I know you don't want to make eye contact with me.
Council member Kessler wanted but these are the truths.
These is I stand for this community and I am here to speak on behalf of people who can't.
You are not protecting the community.
You are destroying it and it's a giveaway to development.
It's a giveaway to the developers and to the real estate.
You are owned and operated by real estate agents.
Folks folks just a reminder when you're you're speaking during public comment please address the body as a whole and not individual members.
Go ahead.
Hello body council.
I my name is Sam.
I was born and raised and radicalized in Berkeley.
I'll debates 23 to 0 0 2 2003.
So I've lived here a very long time.
And the city is changing.
And when people say that we have passed a neighborhood preservation ordinance now this is a neighborhood destruction ordinance.
When people say that things are changing.
I checked my phone and it turns out so is the world.
The world is changing a lot.
And I'm really scared that if we don't change with the world then we're going to leave my generation behind and that we're going to leave other communities behind.
And so if we aren't doing the right thing then we're going to leave and that we're going to leave other communities behind.
And so if we aren't changing our communities we aren't changing our housing if we aren't meeting new needs and changing needs if we aren't making room for families then yes this this city will be preserved and preserved in a way that I would not be very happy with.
So good luck and have fun.
Thank you.
Thank you for your comment.
Just make sure you move the mic down.
There you go.
Hi my name is Veronique Fookson and I sat in your seat many many years ago.
And I know how difficult it is to make these kinds of decisions.
I support the information that's been put out by the Build a Better Berkeley.
We are divided on this issue and you are in a position to bring us together.
And there is no reason why you cannot take some more time.
It's not.
This is.
Please.
This is urgent in some ways and I understand it if people are looking for housing.
But there's no affordability provided for in what you are doing.
It's going to change the city drastically.
I do not believe that it's going to make it a better place in a more comfortable place.
The open space that is being required.
I don't want to even call it open space.
Think about what we talk about.
You talk about climate change.
Think about your time is up.
Thank you for your public comment.
Think about all of those things.
And I'm sorry.
Is someone giving you a minute.
OK.
Thank you.
You have another minute.
Your time.
You do not need to do it tonight.
You also need to respect the entire community and have this information sent to everybody.
Property owners especially in the city.
People don't know what you're voting on.
It's not even in the notice for tonight.
The notice tonight is about our one A to our two.
And then it says zoning amendments.
Well zoning amendments is a very short term for everything that you've been discussing tonight with your own additions to what the staff has provided you.
There's no reason to force this down people's throats when you can bring people together.
We can work together if they have an opportunity.
Your time is not it's not.
Please be respectful of everyone's time for a lot of folks who want to speak tonight.
And thank you.
Thank you.
Good evening Mary.
She council members and neighbors.
I'm Sam Greenberg.
I serve on the board of stewards for East Bay for everyone.
I'm speaking today in support of adopting this ordinance alongside council member because they're wanting supplemental.
I'm speaking today as someone who went to Cal and decided to stay in Berkeley like many folks in this room and on the dais.
And I'm speaking as someone who wants to raise a family in Berkeley.
And this used to be possible but it simply does not look like it would be financially possible on government or nonprofit salaries or as we heard earlier on a financial analyst and stem salary.
Right now this ordinance would only make projects feasible if their units are larger than many one one and a half million dollar Berkeley bungalows.
I cannot afford that.
I will not be able to afford that.
This was because of a last minute change made at the last council meeting where this item was discussed.
A last minute amendment and one that can be changed today by voting for council member Keserwani supplemental.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hi my name's Veronica.
I'm a resident of District 8, a mother of a three year old and a climate scientist.
And I support the missing middle housing housing ordinance.
We just heard some talk of change.
You know what's changing very very fast is our climate.
And Councilman Humbert mentioned this already.
But if our city really truly cares about being part of the solution to climate change then we have to build denser more walkable cities.
OK.
And in addition to that I do want to voice my support for Keserwani's additional recommendation today in particular equalizing density standards across all zones.
This is a citywide problem and every neighborhood including historically exclusionary ones like my own neighborhood need to be part of the solution.
And if we have different densities across neighborhoods we're going to continue to bake in inequalities just as they are now.
And finally increase the maximum allowed density to 90 dwelling units per acre.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hey there.
My name's Kyle.
Just wanted to.
Hello hello.
My name is Kyle.
This is my first city council meeting.
I'm excited to be here.
And I've been here with my spouse in Berkeley for eight years now.
We just had our second kid which is a lot of work.
We've been saving about 30 to 50 percent of our income for the past 15 years or so and we still can't really afford a home.
But one million dollars that's so we can just barely afford that.
And we want to we want to build a community here.
Us and hundreds of others my peers my co-workers my friends.
We all talk about a dream of building a community here in Berkeley and we can't quite with current zoning rules and we have hope and dream that we could with this.
And so I'm really grateful to you guys to the staff for putting this together and I thought I'd show up and say the words that some of my friends who are taking care of their kids can't.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Folks I I know you know what there's some folks in the front row that have been talking.
There's some folks in the middle.
Please just if you want to have a conversation take it outside.
I want to make sure we can hear from all of the speakers.
Thank you.
Are you ready.
Sorry.
Virginia Warheight 24 18 Sacramento Street and someone named Lauren and Merrill have given me two more minutes.
I'm sorry but they need to be here.
So I just want to say OK there's Merrill.
Who's the other person.
OK.
Thank you.
OK.
And I I beg your pardon but I must say thank you to Council Member Humbert and those scientists who are thinking about this.
This is exactly our concern.
This is the actual cast shadow of a 35 foot building which the city did not seem to need to show.
But when we heard about this we knew we had to know what the impact was because we had converted our house to 100 percent solar got rid of all of our gas did everything we were supposed to do.
And this would be this would be very very harmful.
And as I've worked on this the last several weeks I have gotten this distinct impression that rooftop solar is just being sacrificed.
And I've given you all handouts of information that I feel I ask you to please look at.
And and I would like to meet with with Council Member Humbert after the meeting and carry on this conversation.
This house would be in the shadow of this wall for eight and a half months out of every year during which time there would be no direct sun on the windows and the shade on the roof would be so severe that there would be no point in having it.
The man who designed and installed our system said if he had known that this sort of thing would happen there would have been no point in installing it.
So it's very harmful.
And this can happen randomly anywhere with the 35 foot wall not being required to even look next door to see what's going on.
So I beg you to see that you do not sacrifice rooftop solar.
It's not necessary.
It is not necessary to just throw it away so that we can have more housing.
There are ways to do this but but it's been ignored.
And you know I'm just wondering if the person in charge of the city's rooftop solar program has even been asked about this because I think it would be very destructive.
Why would anyone build one more solar panel in this city if the city can't even guarantee them the right to the sun.
So this needs very serious attention.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Folks in the front row please come on.
Thank you.
So my name's Leif White.
I've lived here since 1982 and this is my first city council meeting so shame on me.
First I want to thank you all for your service.
I wouldn't want the job.
So there's been a lot of theory been kicked around.
Something similar just happened next door.
So property was built in the mid 80s.
It was built in the mid 80s.
It was a three story building with a thousand foot square house in the back and a triplex up front with units from 600 to 800 square feet sold for 1.6.
A architect bought it and made them condominiums in the front built in 80 you in the middle and sold every one of them for over a million dollars.
So it did not bring affordable housing.
$1,500 is still a $5,500 house payment.
That's not middle income housing on any level.
And that's a real world scenario.
Thank you for your service again.
Thank you.
Folks just like keep coming as soon as someone's done just like come back up because even the transition time will take time.
I want to make sure I can hear from as many folks as possible.
Go ahead.
OK.
Looking at the bigger picture developers are in business to make money, not housing.
So buy low, sell high.
Older, more affordable housing is bought up, torn down, and up goes pricey new luxury housing for the very affluent folks who don't live here yet.
This is happening now without all the sweeteners in this measure.
Right now, just getting by tenants and low income homeowners are out on the street, out of town, or out of state.
This will only make it worse.
And despite claims, general public engagement on this thing has been damn near invisible.
Thank you.
Oh, those two people are giving me their time.
Thank you.
I'm going to move the mic up so it's easier.
Yeah, true.
There you go.
Good evening.
My name is Risha Boma and I'm a student at UC Berkeley.
I strongly support the zoning reform under consideration tonight.
However, I urge the.

Segment 5

Council to change the proposed maximum density limits for at least the R2 and R2A zones.
Capping density at 60 units per acre is too restrictive.
Raising the cap to 80 or 90, like council members have spoken about, per acre would allow more mid-sized homes like around like 900 or 1,000 square feet.
That can serve working families and not just students like me who already had access to high-density towers near campus.
Berkeley is a unique city, home to institutions like Moe's Books, and located in the heart of the East Bay.
Residents deserve a city they can afford.
Zoning reform will allow economic forces to provide abundant housing and make the city more affordable.
Scarcity is a policy choice, and Berkeley has indulged in it for far too long.
To secure long-term prosperity, we must be able to build more of what we need.
We need an abundance of housing.
So that was part of like my comment.
I'm going to be a bit more on-promptu now.
In regards to like the sort of, I guess it's more of a rebuttal for some of the more unsavory public comments.
This is a good reform.
Making it easier to build housing will allow other residents to come in.
It will increase tax revenues.
It will make it easier for the city to provide public services that I also care about and want to strengthen, such as like the police, the fire department, etc, etc.
Those things are important, and I sympathize with all the residents here who are going to speak about that.
In regards to like climate change, that is incredibly important, and this zoning reform will make us a more climate-friendly city.
Folks, please don't interrupt him.
Go ahead, continue your comment.
By largely increasing energy efficiency and making it easier, and making it easier in the future for people to build more green energy, this reform will ..
Please, folks, come on.
Be respectful.
This reform will act as a sort of leapfrog to like other larger reforms regarding building and the ability to build things in the city, and hopefully will spread to like the other parts of the day.
In regards to shadow stuff, I'm not too sure that's really important to like residents like me who are students and also like older residents like millennials and whatnot.
It seems like the incumbent homeowners here really care about their net utility and at the expense of everyone else, which is terrible.
I don't think that's good.
I think the zoning reform will allow other people, younger families, to move in here and create families, and also provide to the city.
When families move in, they provide tax revenue, which is like really good.
And so yeah, that's my comment.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Let's be respectful to the speakers.
Okay, whoever, you know, whoever is speaking, doesn't matter what they're saying, we want to make sure we can hear them out.
Good evening, Mayor Ishii, members of the council, and the city staff.
My name is Deborah Matthews.
I'm the co-founder of South Berkeley Now, a co-housing developer on the recently completed Black Panther building located in West Oakland, providing housing for extremely low-income formerly incarcerated at a hundred percent.
I am happy to be here and take this opportunity to speak to you again around the middle housing ordinance.
When I spoke to you back in 2024, I requested that this council take a step back and delay its decision on the middle housing ordinance, taking a deeper dive, making sure that we included participation for low-income fixed property owners, small property owners, and people of color owners.
Berkeley could achieve this through public partnerships for down payment assistance programs, grants, forgivable loans, and but it must be done through city policy.
Thank you so much.
I have two more minutes.
I have two more minutes.
Okay, I'm sorry.
Okay, there we go.
I was like, okay, I didn't see them before, so thank you.
Go ahead.
Two more minutes.
As a real estate broker here in this community, I have often been vilified for my positions on housing, but we need to understand that less than 2% representation for African Americans in the real estate industry in the state of California currently only currently exists.
Our need is great.
So to vilify me and say that I am for a profit margin is a damn lie.
I go on public record tonight with 40 years of experience in the housing sector.
As an expert real estate broker and housing developer, I served 18 years on the Zonings Commission and chair for two terms.
The work that we completed in the past 30 to 40 years has led us to the activism and the housing that we see today.
I am proud to be an OG advocate for affordable and mixed housing.
I stand here tonight in support of the Supplemental Middle Housing Ordinance that was brought forward by Councilmember Keselwani, Ben Bartlett, and Lunapara.
Thank you so much for the work that you've done.
Your diligence has paid off.
Thank you for the pivot, for taking more time to make accurate decision.
I look forward to what we can do in Berkeley.
We must walk our talk for an equitable Berkeley.
Thank you.
Thank you, Deborah.
If someone's giving you a minute, just like let me know ahead of time so we can have the clock be accurate.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I'm going to ask for a minute, but someone has to see if they agree with me.
So Berkeley needs more middle income and family housing, and I would be delighted to support the 10 projects per year that staff expect.
But this ordinance has no limit, and the totally unlimited number of projects is totally incompatible with the lack of open space and review and recourse that it contains.
It's not consistent with itself.
And is it progressive? There's no requirement for even a single affordable unit.
And the way to get more affordable in this is sort of a Hail Mary pass to developers and hoping they'll build enough of these projects, and I don't think it's progressive to eliminate any form of recourse or local control for that.
And is it environmental? No.
Lots that are built out to the allowable footprint with the 60%, the 280Us, and the paved driveway will not have any room for mature trees except the protected live oak.
So they can't build that much.
You could be looking at a skyline of nothing but boxes and impermeable.
Thank you.
I'm sorry.
Okay, someone at the end.
An impermeable concrete city that's prone to flooding and enhanced heat island effect.
And it's not fiscally responsible in the sense that under Prop 13, these projects won't create the tax base to cover the increased services they require unless properties are first sold to developers.
So I don't think it's progressive, sustainable, or smart, and I urge you to make a coherent bill that limits the number of allowable units with the kind of build anything big scale that you want.
Thank you.
Yes, good evening.
I am Stephen Alpert.
I'm a resident of the Zone 1 portion of District 5, and I want to reiterate that my understanding of this proposed middle housing ordinance, there's no review, no hearing, and no appeals for a homeowner who suddenly finds that you can build a three-story glass block next to my 1912 Craftsman, and I have no input in that.
That is utterly outrageous, and that needs to be amended.
I also note that this is certainly not an affordable housing plan.
20% is a pipe dream, as you say, that these will actually be implemented.
And lastly, I note that the City of Berkeley Plan and Zone Mission Statement of 2023 says that we should protect Berkeley's unique neighborhoods, and this proposal destroys them.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hello, my name is Celeste Marks, and I'm Steve Alpert's wife, and here for the first time in person.
We were pretty shocked when we found out about the proposed middle housing, specifically, that it's way too streamlined process, not thoughtful at all.
As Steve said, no review, no hearing, no appeals, not an affordable housing plan.
And again, only 20% of the housing is designated low-income, so take your time and do better, because this is a pipe dream.
Thank you for your comment.
Hi, my name is Peggy Riddell, resident of District 1, and here we go again, a last-minute supplemental with significant changes.
If this plan had been so well considered, why are we getting this now, only at the last minute? And why is the analysis about the solar, are we depending on analysis of two days out of the whole year, talking about, I believe it was the equinox days, and the rest of it is ignored? I think this damage to solar collection is much more significant.
The City Council tries to sell itself as so green and equitable, but you know, you really need to change your motto.
You really only love concrete and future techie workers.
We, your constituents, are tired of being lied to, talked over, talked down to, and shut out of any meaningful dialogue.
Thank you for your public comment.
My name is Joel Meyerson, District 1.
Many, if not all, of the City Council members have already come out in favor of this proposal.
So my question is, to all of you, is there anything that you could learn that would make you change your mind about the way you will vote on the coming proposal? Because if the answer is no, this entire public meeting is just a waste of time.
And this is, and what we have here is sort of a counterfeit or false democracy.
Anyway, the Mayor and the City Council members should address this question in their public comment period.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hello, my name is Jason Martins, and I'm here to speak in support of middle housing.
I own a single-family home nestled between two apartment buildings, and I'm grateful for all of my neighbors that they have a place to live.
One is a three-story building, and it did not stop me from installing rooftop solar.
I still get solar energy from my roof.
I'm also glad the neighbors are here, and I know them.
Having denser housing in our neighborhoods does not make them worse.
It enriches them with new community members who I would not otherwise have a place to live.
I want to thank Council Members Keshawani, Bartlett, Lirapara, and Mayor Ishii for their leadership with the proposed changes to equalize the density across all the zones.
Without this change, we would not undo the racist origins of our zoning code.
I'm proud to be part of a community that is willing to reckon with our past and make a more equitable future.
Thank you.
Good evening.
My name is Leah Martins.
I'm grateful to stand here as a Berkeley homeowner, a parent of three kids who have been going through Berkeley schools.
I'm also the pastor of a local faith community, Haven Berkeley Faith Community.
And I'm here to advocate on behalf of the ordinance.
The issue of housing availability directly impacts our capacity to actually cultivate the kind of diverse, multicultural community that we claim in Berkeley to actually value.
And if that is indeed our value, I think we need our leadership, all of you, to embody a commitment to a bold kind of changes that are needed in order to make that possible.
To make housing, including homeownership, feasible for folks all across the economic spectrum.
In my tradition, we're called to take care of one another.
We're called to welcome strangers, honor them as neighbors.
And so I urge this council to pass the legislation so that everyone here can welcome and honor all who would like to make a home here and contribute to the vitality of this amazing city.
Thank you.
Good evening.
Good evening.
My name is Yes Duffy.
I'm a proud district one homeowner, architect, community organizer, and former chair of our zoning board.
I'm here to speak about maximizing equity.
Many families, including my own siblings that grew up here, have been displaced from the city that raised them.
Exclusionary zoning and other anti-growth policies have shut out our teachers, our artists, our young people, and multigenerational families for far too long.
So let's talk equity.
First, apply middle housing equitably across all residential zones.
I think that's wonderful and important and essential.
Second, the supplemental for 90 dwelling units per acre is totally adequate.
Let us design homes that fit within the setbacks and the height limits, but allow internal flexibility for multigenerational families, co-housing, land trust, and other innovative solutions.
It's been six years, 40 public events.
We got to do this right.
And let's do this tonight.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Good evening, Madam Mayor and council members, Reverend Sophia DeWitt, chief program officer at East Bay Housing Organizations.
I'm here tonight to speak in favor of the middle housing proposal and to thank and appreciate all the city staff and the council members who have worked so hard on this proposal over the last six years.
This middle housing proposal was a promise that the city made to the state in its current housing element.
So a ordinance does need to be passed.
And this has been worked on, as has been said, for six years.
I support the refinements in the Keserwani proposal, especially equalizing the density across all zones to be equitable and to deal with Berkeley's history of exclusionary housing.
First in the state with single family exclusionary housing.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Good evening and thanks for having this tonight and hopefully we'll get a vote tonight.
This is a long time coming.
I've been doing affordable housing and small infill development since the 1990s.
At the land trust, we tried to do this infill density.
It was very hard because I couldn't add the units at the Northern California Land Trust.
We had a great example of the Addison co-op, basically two rows of small 400 square foot units on a courtyard.
We couldn't do that.
We couldn't build that new.
But now with this proposal, we'll be able to.
We'll be able to do more housing that's affordable.
And so the missing middle is what's missing is we can't do it right now.
Now we need to do it and definitely needs to be across all districts equally.
And I think the 90 makes sense.
As you've explained how it works, totally makes sense.
And totally.
Thank you.
Thanks so much.
Honorable Mayor and city council members, Paul and I here at District 5.
This isn't ordinances about race.
It's about increasing land value.
The city of Vancouver has allowed to build more new housing compared to its population than any other city in North America.
And it was known to be infill housing, not suburban sprawl.
According to the doctrine, removing all obstacles to grow and add more infill housing results in the price coming, right? It doesn't.
Vancouver should be the most affordable city in North America, but it's not.
It's one of the most expensive.
And so what we need to recognize here that this zoning of the land is a huge giveaway to property owners.
It can double or triple the land value of the land.
And the city needs to recoup some of that increased wealth by taxing it.
And that's not that part.
You know, we are giving away land.
We are.
It says affordable housing.
Really? Who is going to be affordable for a million dollars is affordable.
Eight hundred thousand dollars is affordable.
It's not good.
Thank you.
Thanks for your comment.
Good evening, Mayor and members of the council.
My name is Nathan Landau.
I live down the street in district one.
We talk a lot about preserving things in Berkeley, and we feel we're pretty good at preserving things.
And I think we've been excellent at preserving buildings.
But what we haven't been able to preserve is a multi-class, cross-class character, the wide range of people that lived in Berkeley when I moved here decades ago.
And as people have testified, they have to move out or they're on the verge of moving out.
I don't know where my child would live.
So I support the missing middle ordinance.
I support Keserwani et al.'s amendment.
We need a variety of units.
It's not new to Berkeley.
You could see these kind of buildings all over the street in my neighborhood.
And I think we need to do this.
Eight years is long enough.
Hi, Council.
Finn here.
I grew up in the Bay.
I speak as a Berkeley resident, taxpayer, ADU renter, and registered voter who has spent much of the past decade living, studying, and working in Berkeley.
Restrictive zoning is a primary cause of the housing and affordability crises that plague our community.
The crushing impacts of these crises are felt every day, especially by young people, renters, and the working class.
Berkeley stands out for its walking, biking, and transit infrastructure, all of which make it a place where infohousing allows people to depend less on private automobiles.
Building in Berkeley thus empowers us to fight against climate change, which is the defining challenge of our time.
This common sense zoning revision with the 90 dwelling unit breaker allowance is a vital step towards building urgently needed housing for future generations of Berkeley residents.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hi, my name is Paul Bickmore.
I'm never going to be able to afford a $1 million home.
That's just, you know, no matter how hard I work, that's how it is.
But you know what? The way, the best way you can do what you can do to help renters like me and help us is give us options.
Get some housing built.
A $1 million, one extra $1 million home means one other rich guy that I don't have to compete with, especially when I am going to be starting to raise kids.
So give us options.
Quit pushing us out.
In my opinion, you know, it's great that we have this 90 dwelling unit per acre limit, but we shouldn't really even have that.
We should be going further than this and looking at loosening up the front and rear setbacks and the lot coverages as well and give us some options.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And just, folks, one more thing I want to make sure I'm clear about.
If you gave your minute up already, that means you can't speak.
So giving up your minute means you can't speak anymore, because I think there's someone in line that gave up their time.
So go ahead.
Thank you.
So I want to talk to especially young people here who exclaim in support of the ordinance saying more housing means more affordable housing because supply means prices go down.
Right? Well, the reality in my neighborhood tells it.
The reality in my neighborhood tells a different story.
Just look at the house that's now for sale on Cedar, a modest $730,000 tiny cottage was demolished and replaced with two 1900 square foot units, each selling for 1.7 to 1.9 million.
That's not affordable housing.
Councilmember Casarwani, that's luxury replacement.
And this pattern is repeating, and we have countless examples of that in Ocean View, and I have emailed you about that.
Who's benefiting from a 600 square foot, tiny cottage being demolished and is jumping for joy being offered now to almost $2 million houses.
It's not low income teachers.
It's not nurses, and it's not us first time homebuyers like the city council is telling us.
So middle housing ordinances may mainly aimed at streamlining the process for developers.
This is very clear, not creating diverse communities, not providing a fair chance for everyone and what developers do.
They buy the lowest end.
It's the smallest houses that we want and renovate and expand to the max.
So now we will be competing with more of them because they are more going to be more motivated.
So do your research.
This isn't affordability.
It's not.
Hi, my name is Anuja, and I'm part of a contingent who live on 10th Street, District 1.
Unfortunately, our district councilwoman is not in the room right now.
But as someone eloquently put it, there seems to be a lot of division in this room on this subject, which to me speaks to the need for coming together and bridging, which is not happening.
And I would urge you to think of mediation and another process that brings people together about this important need for, thank you for affordable, accessible housing as well as dealing with the other concerns.
I live on 10th Street.
There are two houses that were sold for less than five hundred thousand dollars.
These little houses, the folks died.
Two developers bought them.
They've cut down trees.
They've been disrespectful to neighbors, and they're building massive houses that are going to sell for over one point five million dollars on these lots.
And so this is not about affordability or accessibility.
And I'm sorry, folks.
It's not about bringing you into our neighborhood so you could afford it.
It's about getting a profit.
Thanks for your time.
Motive.
Thanks.
I don't need to build a better Berkeley people that want to give a minute to me.
So I'm sorry, I can't see who that was.
I just.
OK.
Thank you.
OK, two minutes.
Thank you.
Hi, my name is Moni.
I'm also in District One.
Monisha Gangopadhyay, I'm a single mother.
And let me be clear, this is not about single family versus multifamily housing.
It's not about being anti-housing.
There are plenty of opportunities to build multiunit housing in Berkeley right now without this ordinance.
We in West Berkeley see what's happening.
When we let that go, middle housing, middle housing ordinance proponents think that increasing supply or lower demand.
Sorry, lower prices, econ 101.
Right.
I took that class.
Increasing supply increases competition, lowers prices.
Right.
Except this is Berkeley and the demand is not limited.
This is a city in the Bay Area.
Demand for housing isn't local, it's global.
And we have some of the highest salary paying employers.
In America.
Right.
So when we loosen restrictions, when we loosen regulations on housing, we're rolling out the red carpet for investors.
We're rolling out the red carpet for the whitest, wealthiest people to come and move into our neighborhoods.
And that's what we're seeing.
My neighborhood had way more people of color before these multiunit housing projects were developed.
And I'm glad that they were developed.
I welcome them.
We have one that's an entire block on San Pablo, one that's behind one of my neighbors across the street.
I am glad that they increased housing.
But you know what I haven't seen? I haven't seen people of color, more people of color.
I haven't seen more middle income people like me.
I haven't seen more single single parents like me.
So let's not be fooled, OK, by this idea that increasing supply suddenly reduces prices.
That's not what this is.
And we've seen that discrepancy talked about.
This isn't about affordability.
This is about affordability.
This isn't for people of color.
This is what what what is it for? Be clear about your message because you weren't clear.
I also want to speak to this concept that like middle middle housing, the middle housing ordinance rights the wrongs of the past.
Right.
We had restrictive housing policies in the 1930s that kept African-Americans out of our city.
Or actually consolidated them in my neighborhood in West Berkeley.
Right.
So the idea is, oh, if we loosen the housing restrictions, we'll right that wrong.
Right.
That's that that's the idea.
That's what you're trying to sell us.
I'm a policymaker in California, and I know that what worked 100 years ago isn't necessarily going to work today.
Nine.
Twenty twenty five in Berkeley does not look like the 1930s.
Thank you.
Thanks for your comment.
Yeah.
OK, go ahead.
It doesn't look like the 1930s.
Right.
Developers aren't building for middle income people.
There aren't built.
There is no redlining in West Berkeley anymore.
Right.
They aren't building for people of color because of redlining.
They're building for the wealthiest people who can afford them.
They're trying to make a profit.
That's what they do.
Right.
So.
So this doesn't not right.
The wrongs of the 1930s, like so many people have said, this is not econ 101.
We have to have better analysis than what you have purported today.
You guys are not wet behind the ears.
You're either wet behind the ears or you're pulling the wool over our eyes.
And it's not that neither is great.
And I hate to be obnoxious like this, but this is extremely stressful.
Somebody on the planning commission said that this is going to be 50 years from now.
But we're seeing what's happening in West Berkeley now.
Our neighborhoods are getting wider, wealthier.
I'm glad that there's increased housing.
But can you please make room for people of color? Can you please implement regulations? Thank you.
Housing and thanks for your public housing is an essential.
You've had you've had.
Yeah, you've had your time.
Go ahead.
I have two extra minutes from these two people here.
My name is Eva.
I've lived in a very diverse West Berkeley.
I've lived in a very diverse West Berkeley neighborhood for the last 48 years.
This ordinance would be a gift to developers to think otherwise is simply wishful thinking.
It would not increase Berkeley's diversity.
It would not solve the housing crisis for low income residents.
It would prevent ordinary Berkeley families from purchasing a home because deep pocket developers would easily outbid them, knowing that they.

Segment 6

We can build up to nine units or maybe even more, reaping huge rental profits for decades to come.
And why would those units be any more affordable than the hundreds and hundreds of units that you have allowed to be built in recent years? This ordinance is pushed by an unholy alliance between developers and housing density advocates, many of whom are students, not all, who are here today and gone tomorrow, and completely disregards the interests of long-term Berkeley residents whose quality of life would be drastically diminished and deteriorate.
I know this from experience.
My home is bordered on one side by a single-family home and its garden, and on the other side by a two-story, six-unit apartment building from the 60s.
Its high walls block my light.
I look out onto concrete.
I have to deal with the traffic and noise of six families within a few feet of my bedroom.
The differences in their impact on my life are huge.
I object to being barricaded in between two major developments within four feet of my property.
It feels like a taking of my property.
To add insult to injury, this would give no opportunity for neighbors to negotiate or limit developments that will so greatly impact our homes.
How can you make such major changes and not allow us to have a voice in that development, to just have it be an administrative process? It feels absolutely outrageous.
You know, we're living in this Trump time where our rights are taken away left and right, but it feels like it's happening right here in this city by this city council.
State law already allows for two residences on each lot, plus Berkeley allows the additional two or three ADUs.
Let this city grow incrementally rather than a radical upzoning, creating an unhealthy, paved-over environment which will eliminate much-needed cooling green space.
Where is green Berkeley? Don't shove this ordinance down our throats, please.
You are sitting in these chairs as our representatives, and as a long-term resident, I expect some respect for my living situation.
Thank you.
Thank you for your comment.
Good evening.
My name is Dechen Tsuring, and as a former city employee, I see familiar faces, so I express my opinion here with deep respect for individuals who I've worked with and this council.
But my respect is incrementally falling in size after listening to some of the presentation today as well, because I'm really concerned.
I live in West Berkeley.
You talk about equity.
I was wondering, as soon as I saw this plan, why it has to be in the neighborhoods where there's already diversity, because that was one of the reasons.
And shoving this plan into our neighborhoods, where then our neighborhoods are now losing diversity instead of increasing in diversity, because the only people who can afford the new housing will be people who can afford one-bedroom apartments for $2,600.
So let's think about it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hello.
My name is Jacob Dadman.
I've lived in Berkeley for seven years, and I was once one of the students who was supposed to be here one day and gone next, but I'm still here.
And I know that many of us are watching around the country in horror as many places are becoming much more hostile to queer people, trans people in the rents, and we're wondering what we can do.
And one of the most actionable things that we can do right now is make sanctuaries like Berkeley more affordable and accessible to people who are fleeing persecution both at home and abroad, who can come here and raise families here and make homes here.
It's true that this policy alone will not solve the housing crisis.
I doubt anything could.
But homes built now are better than homes that are never built because they're not financially feasible because of the strings we put on them.
The dwelling unit supplemental proposed gets us closer to a Berkeley where anyone can come and find a good home, and I urge you to pass it.
Thank you.
Hello.
My name is Gabriel, and I'm a resident of District 8.
I'm also a former public school educator who left the field because I couldn't afford to live here on a teacher's salary.
I support the missing middle housing ordinance, but ask the council to accept the amendments on density limits, or better yet, remove density limits altogether, as staff recommended.
As staff mentioned, arbitrarily low density limits will not change the size of housing added.
It will only continue to encourage larger units from being built instead of multiple, more affordable units on the same footprint.
This type of missing middle housing is not radical, by the way.
It used to be legal before racially motivated down zoning in the 70s made it illegal across much of Berkeley.
While this is a good first step, it's not nearly enough to solve our housing crisis.
Many other cities across the nation are doing the same.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hi, good evening.
I would like to respectfully express my disappointment that it has taken us this long to get to this evening.
This process has been going on for years.
I've come to a lot of meetings about it, and given the urgency of the situation, I really feel that the council could have and should have acted sooner to take this basic step to address our housing crisis.
I'd also like to respectfully express my disappointment that so many of my neighbors here, so many of my fellow community members, want to exclude young people like me from our great city.
This is going to be a place that welcomes new people, welcomes young people, welcomes young families, and it's just really depressing to hear how many people in this room tonight don't care to do that.
That said, I also want to express my optimism that we're finally passing this thing, that we're finally here.
I want to express my appreciation to the council for doing that, and I want to urge you all, in the strongest possible terms, to pass the Kesarwani Amendment that will increase the density limits on these homes that are going to get built to make them cost-feasible so that we build new homes in reality, not just on paper.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Sorry, for the woman that's in the white, you already gave up your minute.
I'm going to save my time.
Yeah, but you gave up your time, though.
So he's giving me something.
I understand.
It's just the process has been that when you give up your minute, you give up your time.
You already gave up your time, though.
I'm really sorry.
I said that earlier in the hopes that you would know, but I'm sorry.
I'm going to just repeat myself.
I understand what you're saying.
We need to keep moving forward, and I'm sorry.
That's just the policy of our chamber's been, and I want to continue that.
I set that expectation early.
So go ahead.
Please finish with your time.
Thank you.
My name is Isaac Warshower.
I'm an architectural designer.
I'm an architectural designer and a resident of District 8.
I'm here to argue in favor of an endangered animal, and that is the average maximum height.
I think that's a useful tool in the current zoning code, and it accomplishes a lot of the things that the amendments in the Keserwani Supplemental are trying to achieve, which is allowing for varied roof forms, allowing for roof protrusions for roof deck access.
And all those things could be achieved very elegantly and with a maximum of design flexibility for architects with an average maximum height.
Now, that average maximum height could be higher than what staff proposed at 28 feet.
It could be positioned at perhaps 32 feet, 31 feet, and the maximum could be increased to something more like 38 feet, and maybe that's a sweet spot.
It would allow all these things to be accomplished without, as I fear an EVE-focused proposal would start to dictate roof forms and not allow things like little turrets.
Thank you.
Thanks for your time.
My name is Daniel Bordstrom.
I've been here for about, lived at Berkeley for about 15 years.
I tried to cede my time to another person, but since it's impossible, I'll speak for myself.
I feel that this project is being forced upon us.
I'll say why.
Berkeley has how many people? Over 100,000, I believe, is the population.
And here in this room tonight, you see about 100, maybe 100, maybe a bit more.
That's a very small proportion.
And something of this importance, where are, where is everybody? I'd say they have not heard about it.
People have not heard about it.
People have not heard about it.
They don't know about this.
I happen to have heard about it because a friend, well, the person who I was going to cede my time to happened to tell me about it.
Otherwise, I would not have known about this.
Thank you.
So we have about 20-something people left there, so what I want to do is I'm going to wait until we finish the people in person, and then we'll take another break, and then we'll come back and do online comments.
So just so folks know.
Go ahead.
Good evening, City Council.
My name is Alfred Chu.
I'm an architect.
I'm here to speak in favor as well as for the supplemental, and here's why.
So at 40 to 50 units per acre, what you'll get is either a couple of large houses or a couple of large townhouses, so four bedrooms, 2,000 square feet, expensive.
At 90 units per acre, you'll get more of those two-bedroom apartments, and that's the type of starter home that people early in their life are more likely to live in.
So full support, including the supplemental.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I'm Zachary Russ, D1 resident, I just want to say that probably this is the most proud I've been of Berkeley's leadership in general as well as the staff in terms of putting together this proposal and also the amendment, both of which I support.
I currently live renting a 700-square-foot unit, the sort of thing that would be made easier to build by this amendment, and it's suitable for me.
It's suitable for me with roommates.
It's suitable for families who live in other units in my building.
So it's a wonderful solution.
And I think it's also worth noting that as we choose whether to push people out of our best cities to live in, because Berkeley has probably the best weather for human beings to live in, we're also, like no joke, and San Francisco if you don't like sunlight, but like if we push people out, we are making it harder to reach our climate goals because climate requires AC or not.
Thank you.
Thanks.
I have one minute from one person, another minute from another person.
If I can get a third person.
Sorry, I saw the first person.
Where's the second person? Carol's in the front.
You can't see.
Oh, Carol, over here.
Thank you, Carol.
Thank you.
So that's three minutes, right? Thank you so much.
Good evening, Mayor and Council.
Nice to see everyone.
My name is Moni Law.
I speak as a resident of Berkeley, of Ego Triggers District.
Thank you, Councilmember.
And I am also a Cal alum, USF Law School alum, and an attorney licensed in the state of Washington.
I stand before you to strongly discourage you from passing anything along the lines of the missing middle because it's missing the point.
Ironically, it states that you're looking at areas that have been redlined.
Those are the areas that are actually still diverse to some extent to the little that there is.
That is West Berkeley and South Berkeley.
I sent to you all a film, a short film that's entitled Front Porch Stories, Black People Displaced from Berkeley.
I encourage you to watch the 12-minute film.
What you see there is black, brown, indigenous, and AAPI people were displaced to South Berkeley during redlining.
What you will see now are the few black people that are left, some Japanese-American families that were there and interned and forced out while black people looked after their homes, and Latinos.
Now this is an area that you will now add your additional density to provide additional housing.
And will it be affordable is the question and the answer is no.
Why? Chapter 23, my legal side, I have to speak legalese.
Chapter 23, counselors, attorneys on the dais, it talks about inclusionary housing kicks in only when there's 5,000 square feet that are being built is my understanding, and it's 20%, which under the, as we know, inclusionary, is not just 20% built necessarily.
Often it's under the Housing Affordability Fund, which they put the money in, who ought to pay for something to be built somewhere some other time.
So we're not getting an increase of housing.
We're not getting affordability, and we're not getting diversity.
You're considering a major change to zoning that will increase density, displacement, and cost.
There are 100 single-family homes that are currently under rent control.
Many of those houses before Costa Hawkins, they are still rent-controlled.
They contain tenants who are black, brown, and AAPI tenants.
South Berkeley and West Berkeley is more diverse because of, ironically, redlining.
We have not met our goals, and we need to have development standards, design standards, and community benefits ordinance for developers, which we do not have.
We need to have more local hire.
We need to have sunshine, and we need to have open space.
We need to have culture and community, which will be in jeopardy with regard to this particular proposal that needs more work.
Finally, remember, reminder, WINA standards.
Remember those regional housing standards? We met zero.
We met zero of our low-income numbers.
So what we should be doing in all of our energy should be focused to affordable housing and retaining diversity, which is true equity.
Thank you.
Thank you.
It's a privilege to follow Moni.
Yes, I think there's an elephant in the room about this town that hasn't really been.
Everybody notices it, but nobody's really talking about it.
And that is that we've built up a downtown and a south campus that has for lease signs everywhere.
And the for lease signs are spreading beyond the downtown and beyond the south campus.
And you endorsed height building increases, and the area has become sterile.
The shops are gone.
Even Mo's bookstore is barely hanging on.
The fabric of our town, which was always treasured by everybody, is at question.
Now, as Moni said and as other people have tried to say who live in the west of Berkeley, the south of Berkeley, we are sacrificing a town.
Sorry, your time is up.
Thank you very much.
Thanks for your comment.
Thank you.
Hi, my name is Elizabeth Faber, and I am a resident of Berkeley, and I was born here roughly over 30 years ago.
So I have seen the occasional insert word here.
I am going to be speaking in favor of the proposal as well as the amendment.
I will not speak over to what is going on in West Berkeley, but I will speak as to what's going on in the rest of Berkeley, because I can tell you that this has gone on for far too long.
I have spent my entire life dedicated to this city in one way or another.
I now work at the university that I then attended as a student.
I'm also trans, and a lot of things kind of combine in this.
My friends that are transgender cannot escape the states that are threatening to literally kill them because they cannot find a place to move.
Minneapolis built housing.
We didn't.
When I was young, we had roughly the same amount of housing stock as we had now up until very recently, and when I moved back here, I had to live in an illegal dwelling with sewage and rats because there was nowhere to live.
We need to build housing.
We should have done it literally decades ago.
Thank you.
Thank you.
My name is David.
I was born in Berkeley, and I am an apartment dweller.
I want to talk about apartment dwellers.
In my building, my upstairs neighbor is retired from the Berkeley PD.
Across from her lives a contractor.
There's also an IT guy, a bartender, a shop owner, and two teachers who live with their 18-month-old daughter.
We're of different races, different ages, different backgrounds, but what do we have in common? None of us can afford to buy a house in Berkeley.
I believe every one of my neighbors, these apartment dwellers, should be able to find an apartment if they wish in any neighborhood in Berkeley, which means that builders should be able to build apartments in any neighborhood in Berkeley.
We need to increase the density limits, and we need to do it equally in every neighborhood.
Anything less is the perpetuation of exclusionary zoning, and it's time to end it.
Not halfway, not three quarters.
End it.
Thank you.
Hi, my name is Dietmar Lorenz.
I'm an architect.
I've been here for 25 years.
I'm all fine with density increase, double it, plus ADUs, but how far can we take it without pouring the baby out with the bathwater? That's my concern, and the main concern is bulk.
I'm not concerned about density.
I'm concerned about what's proposed now, and it was told you were at it for six years, right? But in six years, you have not come up with an honest representation of what this will look like.
You can fill up the entire lot with only four feet going all around, including the ADUs in the back, which can go up to four feet.
In the front, it's five feet.
You can extrude it to 35 feet.
It's completely sealing the neighborhood, and it's really becoming tenement 2.0 with miserable living conditions for the people that will live there that I thought were passed for 100 years now when these tenements were basically abandoned.
And so, you know, I think I hear the frustration.
Thank you.
Somebody is grabbing me.
You're going to cede your minute? Okay, go ahead.
I hear the frustration of the YIMBY folks.
You know, I completely understand your frustration with that, but my concern is what I hear here is what is the truly missing middle, and it's not more apartments sprouting off left and right.
There's an abundant supply being provided on the avenues and the TODs, and, you know, maybe there can be a finer grain analysis where apartments, buildings can be integrated, but not a shotgun approach because what's really missing is duplex, triplex, quad plus ADUs where people can pull their resources and start getting into ownership, multi-generational living, small co-housing.
But what's being proposed now opens the doors for speculations and basically larger developers coming in and taking this all away from you.
This is really the dream, you know, what will end up.
The people that want to start a family and live in Berkeley, they still won't find it because then it gets crowded out by these large apartment buildings in the residential neighborhoods.
And where do they end up? Fremont, Pinot, Concord, Commuter.
Thank you.
That's not the goal.
Time's up.
Thank you.
Good evening.
Janice Ching, District 3.
I am the mother of three.
I raised my family here in Berkeley.
I chose it because it was a family-friendly place.
Tonight you are saying a lot about how you want increased housing of all affordability levels for all different types of households.
Yet two nights ago, Councilmembers Keserwani, Taplin, Blackaby, Bartlett, and Humbert voted to take away $2.5 million that the voters voted for for low-income housing against the wishes of 75% of the voters who voted for that.
I appreciate that the Mayor and the other Councilmembers came up with another plan, but you still voted to take that money away.
And yet tonight you tell us how you want to increase our affordability.
This ordinance is going to commodify our land, as a lot of people have said.
We've already seen that happening.
It's going to make it difficult for home— I'm sorry.
I had a minute from Chris.
Okay.
I saw you waving earlier.
I'm sorry.
It's going to make it difficult for homebuyers to compete with developers who want to build different types of housing.
And also it's going to put pressure on people to sell and leave.
I saw it in my own neighborhood.
My black neighbor had to sell her house because her mother died and her brother wanted to take the money.
And so she and her family had to move out of their house because their share of the property wasn't going to buy another house.
I also want to say that I hear the supplemental, and it really scares me, that I hear the minimum size of a unit is going to be 150 square feet.
We need housing for all types.
That is what I heard.
And, you know, even if it's 400 square feet, you can't have a family in something that small.
I am for middle-class housing.
We have the ADU ordinance that can provide that.
It's already provided a lot of units.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hi.
I'm Jeanne Clinton.
I live in District 3.
This proposal reflects a lot of hard work.
And I just want to say that the crowd tonight, I don't think it's all about low density versus high density.
I think people are concerned about the quality of our neighborhoods, not just now but what they will become in the future.
I strongly advise a little more refinement to ensure that our important housing objectives are met for affordability, equitability, and I mean economic equitability, and retaining attractive residential neighborhoods.
So, first, please focus primarily on lot coverage and maximum building square feet, not on the number of units.
It's really about bulk.
It's not about how many units and what sizes they are.
Secondly, ensure a maximum 35 foot height applies even if a redeveloped property qualifies for an affordable housing density bonus and ADUs.
The combined building coverage on the lot should be less than 9,000 square feet.
Thank you.
I believe I have one minute.
Got it.
Two minutes.
Hello, my name is Elijah Ravitz-Campbell, and I first want to thank the staff and the council members and the mayor for all the hard work over many years that has gone into this.
I have been a Berkeley resident for 12 years.
I'm in District 4.
I live in an apartment that is legal because of our zoning, but wouldn't much of Berkeley be illegal right now? It's a three-story, pretty dense building.
I really benefit from zoning that allows that to exist.
It allows me to live in a cheap unit that wouldn't otherwise be available, and I really want that to be available to many more people.
I think there's often an idea that new residents of Berkeley who move into these units are worthless.
I am a resident of Berkeley because I was able to move into one of those units.
I want that for new people.
So I strongly encourage the passage of this and the additional 90 unit per acre.
I also wanted to quickly address some of the thoughts that people have expressed about the insufficiency of this.
A lot of people have said, you know, this lot was broken up and new houses were built and they didn't sell for cheap.
They didn't solve the housing crisis or like this measure will not solve the housing crisis.
And that's all obviously true.
The fact that a single step forward is insufficient to reach our destination is not a justification for not taking that step.
Berkeley needs to do everything that we can.
The cities around us need to do everything that they can.
The state needs to do what it can and the country needs to do what it can.
All that needs to go right.
We're in a severe crisis.
It's going to take a lot of work and many years to fix it.
That doesn't absolve us of trying to fix it now.
We still have to do what we can to make it better.
One last thing I wanted to note is that almost every single young person who came up here was in support of this.
I think that speaks to the reality that this is necessary for the future of our city.
So I hope that everyone can come together and help us improve this place that we all love.
Thank you.
I'll save more time for Judy.
Thank you.
Oh, okay.
Three, four minutes total.
Thank you.
My name is Judy Hunt.
I live in District 1 in Ocean View.
Ocean View in District 1 has been well represented tonight, but I'd like to share some very practical things that I would like to bring to your attention.
First off, I've heard a lot about people of color and African Americans, so I wanted to share briefly.
My family came here in 1952.
They brought property in Ocean View.
My family did not rent here in Berkeley.
My family has never lived in low-income housing in Berkeley.
So I wanted to destroy that myth that all African Americans in Berkeley tend to be low-income renters.
That's number one, and that needs to be stated publicly because of the imagery.
Second, I'd like to share some very practical things.
Those of us who own property, and I am a small property owner, those of us who own property in West Berkeley.
West Berkeley, I'm very proud to say, has been well represented tonight.
So I'd like to share, first of all, that when we receive information from the Planning Department, it should be clear, it should be accurate.
The drawings that we received recently were not complete.
It was clearly noted that it was supposed to be a map, but there were no streets, no representative of citywide planning for middle housing across the city in every district.
Any pictures, maps, and graphics need to be clear and accurately depict the eventual planning concepts.
The planning process needs to be comprehensive and integration of various aspects of future planning to minimize confusion, unnecessary pushback, misunderstandings, and prolonged debate.
For example, in planning future housing, one must plan for necessary infrastructure, not just streets and sidewalks, but aging sewer pipes that are aging 100-year-old clay sewer pipes across the city.
Housing density clearly impacts sewer lines.
When a main clay sewer line breaks, sewage spreads, thus the city faces a major public health problem.
Another infrastructure issue is traffic signals along major city arteries.
Timing of streetlight city signals is another critical part of planning.
The best example of this is the streetlight pedestrian crossing at the Adeline-Ashby Corridor is too short for anyone to cross, and the street and the traffic moves too fast.

Segment 7

Today we are going to talk about the intersection that is too fast, well beyond the 25 to 30 miles per hour speed limit.
That intersection is a death trap for children and adults, especially those with walkers, canes, and wheelchairs.
To say that middle housing is more feasible for the flatlands, and I've heard that repeatedly from staff, is really the same old game by a different name.
Changing zoning and discussing RI versus R2 and NUR, whatever it is, is planning segregation by design.
Housing in districts 1, 2, and 3, primarily housing in areas traditionally steered to people of color, will inevitably become the designated, quote, middle housing districts.
To say that middle housing cannot be built in the hills, due to fire and emergency evacuations, is to actually codify.
Thank you.
Thanks for your comments.
Your time is up.
Thank you.
All right.
Thank you.
Good evening, Council.
I'm a District 3 homeowner, and I'm very happy to see you.
I'm very grateful for the hard work you've put into this proposal.
Also, I just have to say what the last speaker said about Adeline.
That street is a death trap.
I know I spoke with the mayor recently about this.
I really hope the City Council prioritizes street safety as soon as it can.
This is a major issue, separate issue.
I'm here to thank you for your leadership on this proposal.
I also want to point out something.
As we know from the CI manual on simple sabotage, calling for more process, more meetings, and more time to consider an important decision is a time-tested strategy for blocking progressive change.
But I also heard a lot of people opposed to this, who expressed their fears, while also making statements that suggest they don't understand the proposal, its benefits, or why it's necessary.
After the City passes this proposal tonight, I think you actually owe it to the people who are afraid of more homes, and who don't seem to understand this proposal, to offer them the opportunity to learn more and to assuage their fears.
I am also afraid of possible outcomes.
My fears are about what the Trump administration proposes to do on Housing Project 2025.
Thanks very much.
Thank you.
Hi.
I strongly support this ordinance and the Kesarwani Supplemental.
I'm going to speak a little more from the heart than usual.
We've heard a lot about division tonight.
The divide is obviously generational.
Someone called us resentful because people bought their houses for $50,000.
It's half right.
I'm resentful that folks bought homes for $50,000 and sell them for $2 million.
So we're hearing that it's okay for some people to live in a $2 million house that they bought for a song, but we are the divisive ones for trying to get a starter home down to half that.
Folks have the audacity to say that we are motivated by developer profits.
We are motivated by love for our city and our friends and our families and our communities.
I am extremely lucky.
I get to be a homeowner here, but I look at my niece and nephew.
Where are they going to live? Where are my daughters supposed to live? Certainly not in the $2 million homes that people are living in today.
So I've heard a lot of times tonight that my friends, my family, my community either don't exist or don't matter.
We are not low income.
We are not seniors.
So to hell with us, right? Thank you for doing what you can.
Thank you.
Hi, I'm Dave White and I live in District 1.
When I moved to Berkeley, I was the same age as a lot of those people.
I had a question.
I'm trying to figure out all night.
This is a really important issue.
And nobody from the big developers seem to show up in line to speak to the council.
So if you can try to come up with a hypothesis of why that might be.
I also have a little trouble because the pictures and the words don't seem to match.
You gave us three pictures of multi housing.
Two of them didn't have any foliage in them at all.
The other one had some trees would barely keep a squirrel alive.
The picture of the frame that had either four units or 10 units had a bushy tree next to it.
That's not right.
Have another 12 by whatever, four feet away.
That's what people are worried about.
The council member who was zooming tonight said, oh, I think there's only going to be about 20 of these a year.
That's not why all these people are here.
Thank you.
Thanks so much for your comment.
Thank you.
Thank you to the council for the opportunity to speak.
My name is Tucker Holston.
I'm a PhD student at Cal and I live in a garage.
I am thankful for the insulation that my landlord has bestowed upon me.
But the fact that such a situation is the only way that a student can obtain rent as low as a thousand dollars per month near campus speaks to the severity of the housing shortage.
There seems to be this broad misunderstanding that the laws of supply and demand do not apply to housing.
This is not true.
Take Austin, for example, where housing construction is deregulated, population is booming and rents are falling.
Of course, many of the units that will be built in Berkeley in the next five years will sell for around a million dollars.
Unfortunately, there is no way to build market rate housing for much less than with a severe housing shortage and the regulations on housing that remain without heavy subsidies.
I would appreciate if someone could outline a different plan to otherwise build thousands of affordable units in Berkeley in the next five years, since housing regulations also prohibit the city and state from effectively building public housing, which is now almost always more expensive to build in California per unit than market rate.
This measure doesn't go nearly far enough.
Berkeley doesn't need hundreds of units.
It needs many thousands.
However, I greatly appreciate the efforts of this council and staff and crafting it as it sends an important message to other cities that Berkeley, the progressive city that it is, is actually moving in the right direction on this issue.
It is painful that it has taken this long, but if you pass this measure, it will instill some hope in future residents of Berkeley that they might actually be able to give their children a better life than theirs and that we will actually address the climate in this city and be part of a progressive movement that actually cares about the things it purports to.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I'm Ronald.
I'm a housemate of Tucker's.
He actually forgot to include that there's two garages, one living room and one closet that's converted to bedrooms.
And yeah, these are really the only options that are affordable for PhD students like us who make only slightly above minimum wage.
And yeah, that's the reality of our situation.
I did undergrad here starting in 2016, so I've lived through like nearly 10 years of these types of conditions.
And yeah, I'm no expert in econ, but I think this increase in supply will almost certainly lead to a decrease in prices.
Sure, there's always going to be like crappy landlords who will take advantage of students and keep the prices high.
But I'm glad this is finally change that's happening that will try to help this situation.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hi, my name is Andrew Talbot.
I'm a homeowner in D1 and about a thousand square feet, people are asking.
And I just want to say I appreciate all the work.
It's been six years of work put into this, and this is awesome to see.
I really want to support Council Member Kashiwani, my council members, supplemental as well.
And I do think if there is negotiation on the cap and the limits, I think it makes sense to make sure just that it is equitable to cross the entire city.
It's everyone's shared.
You know, for me, I do think that this is not this mostly can be used like in probate situations.
I feel like, you know, so I feel like as a homeowner, this is going to happen over my dead body one way or the other.
But I don't know what.
Honestly, I don't know.
Honestly, I don't even know what zoning I'm in.
R1, R2, R2D2, something like that.
I do know that what this is doing is really simplifying a lot of that.
And for as a single, just a homeowner, it makes a lot easier for me in that situation where maybe I'm grieving and I'm taking possession of this home to know like, oh, I can put three units here, four units.
Like, it's really complicated in Berkeley.
And this really makes a lot easier.
So I really appreciate staff for that.
Thank you.
Good evening, council.
My name is Tasha Zabaptiste.
As someone said earlier, Alpha Bates 2001, proud resident of Berkeley here.
My parents spoke earlier tonight opposing this measure, but I'd like to refute their claims.
As a fellow young person, I think that Berkeley should be available to more people and that as someone with lived experience as someone of the younger generation, that's not the case.
Many people here claim that new housing is only occupied by the richest and whitest, that allowing new housing doesn't benefit working people.
That's not true.
Most of Berkeley was built up when racial covenants were still legal and widely used.
Many people here likely have homes with outdated covenants attached to deeds.
In the post-war era, white people kick-started the multigenerational wealth of homeownership.
I think a quick survey of this room shows that history.
Now California and the U.S.
in general are becoming more pluralistic.
Places that have been..
Someone over here is giving you time.
Thank you.
All right.
Two people have given you a hint.
Thank you.
Places that have been built in our building..
And now California and the U.S.
in general are becoming more pluralistic.
Places that have been built in our building now are seeing inflows of minorities and working people.
Someone mentioned Austin as an example.
Texas' success in drawing working-class people isn't because they pass more bonds or have stricter inclusionary housing ordinances.
Las Vegas has quickly become one of the most diverse cities in the country.
They didn't do it by overcoming greed.
They did it by growing.
Frozen in amber, existing housing is outfitted by those with enough money.
The future is majority-minority.
It's walkable.
It's inclusive.
Let's welcome and grow to meet these needs.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay.
Folks who are speaking in line, please, if you want to have a conversation, that's fine.
Just take it outside.
Okay.
Go ahead.
Hi.
Thank you.
The California legislative analyst office report found that housing is affordable and livable for its citizens, one that even has the capacity to welcome new citizens.
To get there, we need to build more housing.
These zoning codes make that possible.
They'll also be much more effective without a crippling density cap, or at least with a higher one of 90.
I appreciate a couple of previous commenters' concerns about lower-income people being priced out of Berkeley with this change in ordinance.
But what's repeatedly found, as is what by the state, is that building housing prevents this displacement, not causes it.
I would love to live in a Berkeley that can house its residents, and I ask this council to pass the ordinance with a supplement to that.
I would love to live in a Berkeley that can house its residents, and I ask this council to pass the ordinance with a supplemental, including the 90 units per acre, in order to make sure more housing really gets built.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Someone is volunteering a minute for me.
Sorry, who is? Okay, thank you.
Hello, mayor and council.
My name is Brandon Young.
I am the vice chair of the Zoning Adjustments Board, but speaking on behalf of myself this evening.
I think a lot of us have been thinking a lot about democracy recently, and I think that this is an example for us to reflect upon.
What does democratic process look like? Well, this ordinance is six years in the making.
We've gone through at least three election cycles here locally.
The council I'm looking at now is different than the council that last heard this item, which I'm very pleased to say.
We've had a supermajority of the council endorsed by East Bay for everyone.
We've had council members who have run on how many permits they've approved on the ZAB.
I mean, I'm very happy with where we are now.
What we do know now with research, Alexander Hahn, University of North Carolina, is that meetings like this are not representative of the community at large.
We should listen to the will of the voters who have repeatedly, election after election, have voted for officials to be in favor of undoing our slow-growth, no-growth past.
Many of you are probably thinking about what are the risks and rewards of different avenues that are possible tonight.
Well, no matter what happens, I think on one side, people are not going to be happy.
But on the other side, the real risk we run is passing an ordinance that changes our code and name only.
As staff have pointed out, and as multiple studies, Emily Bureau for San Francisco, Turner Center, have pointed out, the costs of construction in the East Bay are incredibly high.
Our ordinance should take that into account.
We run the real risk of passing a missing middle ordinance, such as what San Francisco did, legalizing four units per lot, where nothing will be proposed.
So I encourage you tonight to run the risk of going too far.
Pass either across the board the density limits in the mayor's amazing supplemental, or no density limits, like what the city of Sacramento has done.
I'll conclude on this quote from Tim Walz.
You don't run for office to accumulate and preserve your political capital.
You run for office and then expend it.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Hello.
What up, council? My name is Rebecca.
I live in District 4.
I am one of those former Cal students who decided to stick around because I love it so much here.
And I'm here to support the middle housing ordinance for all of the wonderful reasons so many people have shared already.
But I especially urge you to approve the 90 units per acre supplemental.
It's taken us so long for us to get here, as Brandon just mentioned.
So we should make sure to get it right so we don't have to do it again.
Thank you so much to staff who have put in so much work over the years, including what you've noted earlier, that you don't actually expect a massive immediate transformation.
But our severe housing and climate crises demand a massive and immediate transformation as much as possible.
Let's get our biggest bang for our long awaited buck.
Please support the 90 unit supplemental.
Thank you so much for all of your hard work, staff and council.
Thank you.
Hi, I'm Donna Dedamar, and I'm part of Build a Better Berkeley.
And you've got our petition.
I'm here to deliver the signatures that have come in since we sent the petition in.
The question, I've been talking to people in line, as Mary, she's been telling me.
What I'm discovering is that the polarization is over things that are just flat out wrong.
People my age think we're trying to, younger people are trying to push us out, get us out of our houses so that they can have our houses.
The people that are, the last person I was talking to, say that we're trying to keep people out of the city.
I'm thrilled that people found the kind of housing they wanted.
Earlier, a speaker said, I want to point out that that housing, even what council member Kusarwani showed as being great in her district, came under the current zoning.
So thank you very much for that submission.
Sorry.
Thank you.
Well said.
Hi, my name is Jeff, and I live in District 5.
I want to go on the record as saying that I don't want Donna's house.
Literally, this entire thing is about whether Donna can keep me from building a duplex.
And that's really what we're talking about.
And the reason that I'm here to support the supplemental item to raise the limit to 90 or to just get rid of it, which I think is the better option, is that there are practical effects of doubling down on the R1, R2, R2A split in this town.
One of those effects is if your children go to King Middle School and you'd like to move, there is a real lack of supply of places to move.
And that's because King Middle School is owned almost entirely for R1 and R2.
And if you kind of think about the effect of that, having this tiered zoning really just doubles down on segregation.
And why would we do that? So I totally support the supplemental.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Sorry.
Hi.
Hi.
My name is Sarah Bell.
I'm a District 1 resident.
And I'm here to ask you to pass the ordinance along with the supplemental from the mayor and council members Lunapara, Bartlett, and Kesarwani.
The last time middle housing came to council, it actually ended with this quote from the former mayor, Jesse Aragine.
I'm comfortable with this coming back, and we can consider whether to adjust the maximum density at that time.
Whenever it comes back in the next couple of months after the tribal consultation, we can consider this and any other aspects of what would be appropriate density standards at that time.
Well, now is that time.
Let's follow Planning Commission's recommendations and remove the density caps or at least increase them to 90 dorm units per acre as in the supplemental.
I would also like to agree with a lot of comments that came before me.
This ordinance will not solve our housing crisis.
Of course it won't, especially if we don't make these projects feasible to build.
I also finally want to agree with another prior comment.
Scarcity is a choice.
Let's choose wisely.
Thank you.
Thanks for your comment.
I think we have one more person left in person.
But, Mark, are there folks who are online that are raising their hands? If you are online and you would like to give public comment, could you please raise your hand so I can get a sense of how many folks are online? But as I promised, we will take a break, trying to have us be balanced and do self-care.
So, go ahead.
Thank you.
Hello, Council.
My name is Jeff Vincent.
I live in D2.
I am a homeowner, and I have lived there for 20 years.
I also sit on the Planning Commission as Councilmember Taplin's appointee.
But, of course, I'm speaking in my own capacity here.
I fully support this proposal 100%.
It is extremely reasonable.
Extremely reasonable.
It thoughtfully follows the guidance from the Council, the previous Council, yourselves.
Staff has done a tremendous job in taking that feedback time and again and modifying this.
It also follows the guidance over four different meetings over multiple years from the Planning Commission.
Those are public meetings.
None of that is in secret.
We dove into all the details on this many times.
As you know, the Planning Commission… I support it.
Okay.
Can I get a seat? Yeah, you've got someone in the back that's giving you a minute.
Thank you.
As you know, Planning Commission actually recommended something a little more aggressive or permissive in terms of building on this, and some of that has been walked back based on feedback from you all.
That's how this works in this city, and I think that was thoughtfully done.
I haven't thought through what's all in the supplemental yet, so I don't have an opinion on that, but I think what you have before you is extremely reasonable, and I would really encourage you to support it and move us forward on this.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay, so we have finished the in-person public comment, and online there are… 740… No, just kidding.
Oh, stop, Clark! City Clerk has some jokes! There's 25 raised hands.
Thank you.
All right, 25 raised hands.
So we're going to take a 15-minute break.
Everyone stand up, take a stretch, get some air, drink some water, go to the bathroom.
We'll be back in 15 minutes.
Recording stopped.
Hello.
Okay.
Hi, everyone.
It is 10.02.
Let's have a seat, and we're going to take the online public comment.
Thank you so much.
Hello.
We are back in session.
We have at least 25 hands raised for public comment.
Has that changed at all? It's 24 now.
24 hands.
Okay.
All right.
Let's get going on that.
Thank you.
So for folks that are online, you have a minute to speak.
I know sometimes it can be hard to see the clock, so I will let you know once your minute is run down if you can't see it.
And go ahead for the first person.
Okay.
The first speaker is Piper.
Piper, you should be able to unmute.
Can you hear me? Yes.
Awesome.
Thank you.
Good evening, Mayor and Council Members.
I live in District 1.
I'm a little bit concerned about this proposal.
Not that I don't.
I'm in favor of increasing housing, but I don't see a lot of environmental review of the impacts of building oversituated residential districts.
Have they been addressed? I don't see a lot of information about that.
We deal with quite a bit of runoff in our area.
If we had less permeable areas, it's going to be significant.
We also are going to end up dealing with sea rise at some point.
What is the impact of heat generation with all this open space being built over? And do we have the infrastructure for water, sewer areas without underground utilities? This feels like a handout to developers, really, especially with their extensive increases that you have given them.
Thank you.
Your time is up.
Can I just say one more thing? Please reinstate.
I'm really sorry, but we've got a lot more folks still left.
Council Member Taplin, did you have something to say or was that for later? Okay.
Okay, next speaker.
I'm not sure.
Does that mean later? Sorry, that was for later.
Okay, okay.
Thank you.
Next speaker is Allie Saeperman.
Good evening.
My name is Allie Saeperman, and I'm speaking on behalf of the Housing Action Coalition.
The missing housing ordinance is a step in the right direction, and I'm really grateful it's moving forward.
But it's not enough to say we support missing middle housing.
We have to make sure that it's actually possible to build.
That's why I'm asking you to adopt two key amendments.
First, raise or remove the cap on dwelling units per acre.
Form-based standards already govern the size and scale of buildings.
Arbitrary density caps just make it harder to create the homes that we say we want.
Second, apply the ordinance consistently across all low-fire-risk neighborhoods.
If we want to undo the harms of exclusionary zoning, we can't keep stricter limits in wealthier, historically exclusive areas than in historically red-line ones.
That's not equity.
That's not fair housing.
This is our chance to do something bold, to legalize homes that are missing from our communities, to make space for families, for neighbors, and a more inclusive Berkeley.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Next is Patricia Reedy.
Hi.
My name is Mary Issel.
Patricia Reedy is my wife, and I guess I'm on her account right now.
I graduated from Berkeley High School in 1978, and I'm fortunate enough to be a 23-year homeowner in District 5.
I fully support middle housing.
I, myself, was a first responder for many years, and I have a grown son living in Berlin, Germany, who fears he can't afford to come back and live or potentially buy in Berkeley.
I'm asking, though, tonight not to adopt the Kasarawi Supplemental.
Excuse me if I didn't crease that rhyme.
I'm increasingly frustrated and, frankly, offended by being accused of supporting inequity in Calden-Nimby by asserting the fact that we live here in an area called the Keith Slide and 5,000 feet from the Hayward Fault and a high-fired hazard area.
Berkeley Fire and Berkeley PD have presented data demonstrating that their ability to respond to everyday emergencies, most less a major catastrophe, is compromised with more density.
It's not a matter of equity.
It's a matter of mindset.
Thank you very much for your public comment.
Next is Ryan O'Connell.
Hi, I strongly support the Missing Middle Housing Ordinance and San Pastor Warning Supplemental.
My name is Ryan, and I work with homeowners in Berkeley on ADU projects.
Many of your neighborhoods already benefit from homes of many diverse shapes and sizes, and this ordinance will allow even more neighborhoods to flourish.
It's great to see such a thoughtful missing middle housing policy in the city.
It addresses many of the concerns raised by residents at the numerous public meetings since the policy was proposed years ago.
Please vote yes so that I can share the policy with my wife and my ongoing quest to convince her we can afford to move to Berkeley and get car-free, or maybe one-car household.
That's all.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Next is Madeline Roberts-Rich.
Howdy, City Council and Planning.
It's me again.
Surprise, surprise, I am not a NIMBY at all, despite my pretty regular objections to the granting of what I view as a legal granting of the categorical exemption to CEQA for the United Artists Theater.
But generally, I'm very supportive of housing.
California has a major housing deficit.
Construction costs are a big part of that, but there's very little you can do to control that.
Land use is the area that you can't control, so I'm in full support of this effort.
We need more missing middle homes here.
I encourage you, though, to get more familiar with the tools you have at the City's disposal to work with developers to be able to get more social and community benefits from those developers in exchange for them to be able to build on increasingly dense lots.
That's exactly why I'm trying to, that I've expressed discomfort with what happened at the United Artists Theater, because no extractions were made from the developer who was gaining a lot.
Thank you.
Thanks for your public comment.
Okay, next is Nina Ichikawa.
Hi, can you hear me? Yes.
Hi, I'm Nina Ichikawa.
I'm a third-generation Cal grad and now District 1 homeowner.
My family has been in the East Bay since 1897, except for the period when we were incarcerated by the federal government in American concentration camps.
I strongly support this proposal and supplemental, and I urge you to pass it tonight.
Please don't get lost in the weeds or semantics of this core idea to allow various types of sustainable housing in our beautiful neighborhoods.
Not everyone wants to or can live in a single-family home.
So, by just sticking to one type of housing, we're limiting what Berkeley has to offer to all the talented people who come through the area for school or employment.
We are urging them to keep moving and take their energy, tax dollars, and children elsewhere.
Delay is a tool of exclusionary zoning and denies our city a range of housing options.
Studios for singles and couples just getting started, one bedrooms for seniors and small families, and larger apartments that families can rent or own to live in for a lifetime.
Building density around transit and everywhere is socially just, convivial, safe, and enjoyable.
Thank you.
Thank you, Nina.
Next is Christopher Kohler.
Good evening.
I'm a resident in D3.
I spent 10 years in professional property management of residential properties, apartments, and otherwise, including what was designated as affordable housing, which is now market rate.
Others have been articulate about it, and the fact is that more units does not mean affordable.
Not at all, necessarily.
And this plan seems to be missing anything that will guarantee that at all.
What this really comes down to is how many people are willing to rent or purchase and how much are they willing to pay.
And what we found was that there's no shortage at all of very affluent tech workers who have homes they reside in elsewhere who are perfectly willing to spend an awful lot of money to rent and or purchase.

Segment 8

Units here in the Bay Area to be closer during their work during the work week, and that will be a big factor in how much those units cost to purchase or rent.
So until this actually includes an affordable element, it might not.
Your time is up.
Thank you for your comments.
Okay, next is Scott.
Scott, you should be able to.
Hello.
Yes.
Am I here? Yes.
Oh, yes.
Yeah.
Vote no on this.
There's no affordability, no review, no appeals.
The largest landowner in Berkeley is the University of California.
There's approximately 46,000 students.
They have approximately 12,000 beds.
That leaves 34,000 beds that are not being provided for people, students.
Those students go and take up housing in the rest of Berkeley.
If you want more housing, talk to the University of California.
I don't think this is a good plan.
And you might study what they've done in Berlin for the city buying over 100,000 units.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Next is Jordan Grimes.
Good evening, Council, Honorable Mayor.
My name is Jordan Grimes, and I'm the State and Regional Resilience Manager with Greenbelt Alliance.
We're an environmental nonprofit working throughout the Bay Area on climate resilience and sustainable land use policies since 1958.
We are in strong support of this proposal, particularly the supplemental from Keserwani and Lunapara, the denser the better, truly.
When we don't build housing in our existing communities, the demand for it does not just vanish into the ether.
It manifests itself as sprawl.
The fastest growing communities in this state are in the Central Valley and Inland Empire, in Victorville and Lathrop and Stockton.
Our natural and working lands are disappearing, and it's due to decades of terrible land use policy that restricts new infill in our cities and towns.
To protect our environment and climate, we absolutely must change how and where we build, from sprawl and high-fire areas to climate-safe places like Berkeley, where people can walk and bike and take public transit.
Thank you so much for your time this evening.
Thank you.
Next is Vanessa Marrero.
Hi, and good evening.
My name is Dr.
Vanessa Marrero.
I'm an Indigenous, Taina, public education, rent control advocate, nonprofit leader, single mom of three children, one with disability and one who is transgendered.
I live in District 2, formerly District 4.
I'm a rent board commissioner, and I have some questions for you.
How are you going to ensure that single mothers like me are not going to be displaced as a result of tonight's housing ordinance? How are you going to ensure that rent control exists for the future of young people and families? How are you going to ensure that this proposal does not further exclude black, brown, working-class, low-income people who are disabled and seniors? To me, it feels that proposals are more and more displacing our people, which does not ensure equity, diversity, or an inclusive city.
So let's make things happen today.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay, and then there was...next is Catherine.
Catherine, you should be able to unmute.
Okay.
Hi, my name is Catherine Ramage, and I'm opposed to the housing ordinance.
My concerns are about the lack of safeguards and consideration given to current property owners who invested in property in low-density areas because they were low-density areas, and it doesn't seem equitable to me to give preference to other groups and not current property owners, not considering solar.
And the research shows that the benefits of green space are very necessary for residents, and this proposal will reduce green space and increase concrete and heat and other people.
Thanks for your public comment.
Next is Cleo.
Cleo, you should be able to unmute.
Hi, before we start my time, would it be possible for somebody to give me their minute? Yes, if they're online right now.
They are.
What's their name? Maya, M-A-Y-A.
Does Maya have her hand raised? Oh, Maya Coney? Yes.
Okay, thank you.
Thank you.
Hi, I'm Cleo, and I want to address the question of equity tonight.
First of all, the hills won't be densified, so fine, they're a fire zone, but those who invented redlining and exclusionary zoning get to keep their greedy cakes, so maybe don't pat yourselves on the back and say that these changes fix inequity.
Two, you're using non-white folks and Black residents in particular and telling us that we need to pass this because it would somehow redress the city's historic wrongs against them.
But have you asked them what they actually want? I'm from District 1, and Black families in this district and around San Pablo Park had the opportunity to finally be not poor, but middle class, and that meant to finally, finally, finally own their own home with space that they could control, including green space, fresh air, light, the sound of birds.
That was building wealth and making a step towards catching up.
So make no mistake, the current changes that are happening in the neighborhoods that still have those folks are going to be taking chunks away from them and their descendants in order to give more to those mostly not Black folks who wish to live in Berkeley but currently can't afford it.
You want to build more, that's fine, but please stop using the word equity to describe giving more opportunities in a mixed-race, mixed-income neighborhood to a white couple in biotech and finance who can afford a $1 million home, but not a $1.6 million one.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay, next is Daryl Owens.
Hello.
Obviously, I want you to vote for the supplemental, but I just want to say that I currently live in a three-story, 10-unit tiki-taki.
That's illegal to build, but it is a very lovely neighborhood.
North Berkeley is a lovely neighborhood.
And in my apartment building, the two-bedroom units house families, and the one-bedroom units house seniors, single parents, young couples.
Recently, we got a Section 8 mother whose kid's going to King.
And then you walk one block north, and even though the neighborhood's just as pretty as before, because it's all single-family zoned, none of those folks can live there.
So I'm really looking forward, if I want to stay in Berkeley, my family coming here from the South since World War II, and most of them leaving because they can't find affordable housing options.
I'm really looking forward to living a block north, and I think that this proposal will bring us towards that.
So long as the density is done beautifully and nicely, which I think is what people really care about, whether housing's beautiful, not how many people live in it or anything like density limits.
Thanks for your comment.
Next is Mike Dunham.
Good evening, Council.
Thanks so much for all the work you've done on this over the last few years.
I'm a homeowner in District 8.
I'm a father of a two-and-a-half-year-old son, and I really do worry about how he could live in Berkeley in about 20 years when he's an adult.
And I worry that if you don't take bold action now, where nothing's going to happen for eight years, we'll be back wondering what we should be doing differently.
Please do the strong thing now.
Please vote for the either no density limit or the 90 dwelling units per acre.
We need to take bold action now.
We don't have time to wait.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Next is Tony.
Amy Baldwin is donating a minute to my speech.
She's on.
So she's okay.
Thank you, Amy.
So I do think that there is a generational divide.
I am 82 years old and I do own a property on 10th Street in Berkeley.
I would give my house to any young person if I could be their age again.
They simply do not understand what it means to get old.
So when I bought my house, it was run down.
I worked at night for three years and I built a unit and I actually was a landlady for 30 years on and off.
So right now, I would like to pass on my house to some young people, maybe who have an elderly parent to live downstairs.
But honestly, because of all this stuff, I don't know what to do anymore.
So I'm kind of, you know, swimming out there.
I would like to say that you have to understand your contradictions.
You've been saying, oh, we've done this for six years and then you pile on completely new standards at the last minute.
And I just can't wrap my mind about it.
I was dealing with an electrical circuit thing today and I just couldn't, you know, pay attention to all this stuff.
I do think you should consolidate the R1A and the R2 tonight, but put off the rest of this and do some data collection on lot size.
See if the density bonus can actually be used in your districts and try to figure out your goals.
Is it rental or ownership? Because if it's one or the other, what you do really matters and it changes.
You are going to shift the capitalization in our neighborhoods from homeowner equity, which is funding the ADU boom to corporate capital.
And that is going to have an effect on Berkeley.
Thank you very much and good luck with your vote.
Thank you.
Next is Debbie Sanderson.
Hi there.
Um, in general, I wanted to support the proposal, especially the making the densities even across all the districts and making no density standards or the higher one.
I think everyone has done a remarkable job and it's hard to remember that this is, these are just zoning changes.
It's not including all of the other things we would like to improve in the city of Berkeley.
It's one step forward and, um, as we go along, we will find other things to do to make it even better.
But please don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good because this is a very good proposal.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Next is, uh, Ross Burnet.
Hey, everyone.
It is a pleasure to be with you all remotely.
I am on a work trip because, uh, work is crazy stressful right now, but this is extremely important as everyone in this room knows.
And I had a nice long list of talking points I wanted to make, but so many people have already made them better than I possibly could.
And I'm starting to get pretty tired.
So maybe I'll say a couple things that haven't been said yet.
I'm sure everyone in this room agrees with Al Gore when he said there's an inconvenient truth 20, I think about 20 years ago about climate change.
This is very inconvenient because our lives are so much richer by the burning of fossil fuels.
Every single one of us, we can't help it.
That's the world we live in, but it is destroying the planet.
The same is true for single family housing.
It's super, super nice, but it creates car dependency, which is one of the biggest climate emergencies of our time.
I encourage y'all to support Ms.
Emiddle with the Couser's warning amendment.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Next is Erin Dean.
Hold on.
Okay, Erin Dean.
Good evening, council.
I support council member Tregub's supplemental, and I want to thank him for engaging with the community.
So, yes, we need to focus on housing and climate reducing GHGs, but the other side of this coin is global biodiversity and the extinction crisis, and scientists are telling us that cities have a critical role to play.
It's in the cities, and we're not thinking about nature in our city and the impact this upzoning will have on it.
The 40% open space is misleading.
ADUs can be built on it, driveways and patios too, so essentially the entire parcel can be paved over, and that's bad.
The EIR for the housing element is totally inadequate.
You all should know when they evaluate biological resources, they evaluate only the impact on a very limited, short list of threatened species.
So, if something happens that kills 100,000 birds that are not actually listed, no one cares.
The middle housing doesn't adequately address increased urban heat, loss of permeability, which will result in flooding, loss of mature trees that destroyed the homes to million creatures.
I'm sorry, your time's up.
Thank you for your comment.
Next is Betsy Morris, Gray Panthers.
I thought I unmuted.
There we go.
I'm speaking for myself tonight.
I'm a resident of District 2 and lived in West Berkeley and the Flatlands for going on 30 years now.
I was fortunate in that I have lived my adult life in shared housing and then limited equity cooperatives and limited equity cohousing.
I am not clear that this proposal, which I am in favor of the missing middle housing, having more flexibility, being able to build multi-unit buildings in the residential neighborhoods, but I guess I was gasping at the idea of 90 units per acre.
I would like to have some metrics and guardrails to know how will we know we are succeeding? Are we actually seeing a lowering of rents? Is there an actual greater expansion of home purchase prices? Thank you, Betsy.
I'm sorry, your time's up.
Thank you for the comment.
Next is Kelly Hammergren.
I would feel a lot better about what you are going to do tonight if there was a way to keep the open space at 40% including the ADUs and not the ADUs as intruding into that 40%.
If we could hold that 40%, it would leave space for children to play, trees and nature.
Please consider how setbacks may be used to preserve open space.
And I strongly encourage you to pass Council Member Trigub's supplemental to evaluate how well these changes met your goals.
My worry is that when ADUs are added, lots will become covered with hardscape buildings and pavements, increasing water runoff, loss of trees, heat island impact and loss of biodiversity.
Please take a look at setbacks and how we can preserve that 40%.
Thank you.
Thank you, Kelly.
Mark, could you just give me an update on how many folks are left? We have 12 hands raised still.
Okay, thank you.
Kelly, let's see, Andrea.
Hi, my name is Andrea Horbinski.
I live in the Hills.
I want to strongly urge the Council to support this measure and the two supplementals that will expand density to the whole city and raise or eliminate the density caps.
A lot of people have said what I'm going to say, so I'll just say a couple of things I haven't heard, which is in the face of a $20 million structural deficit, we need new neighbors not only for equity purposes, but also to grow the tax base and to bring in more tax revenues from more people living in Berkeley.
I also think this city should be a living city, but there are a lot of people who want to keep it as a necropolis for current homeowners, people who bought in the 60s and 70s.
Is it a tomb or is it a living community? A living community is what we want, so please support the middle zoning.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay, next is Simone.
Hi, City Council and Mayor.
My name is Simone and I am a homeowner in Berkeley.
And for all of the reasons that have been discussed tonight, I do not support this at all.
And I'm not going to detail all of them because the speakers have done an excellent job, but concerns are definitely affordability and the environmental impact.
And I was born and raised in West Berkeley and I've grown up here and the only way I could stay here was because of rent control.
And I have adult kids who can't afford to live here or who are living in shared housing.
And so I am very, very concerned about affordability.
And I do think there are ways to create affordable housing, but this is not it.
And lastly, I'm really concerned about the publicity for this meeting.
I'm on Stewart and Fulton in Ben Bartlett's district.
We have a neighborhood email list and nobody knew about this meeting.
Nobody knew this was happening.
And I really feel that- Thank you for your public comment.
Next speaker is John Vino-Powell.
Hi, Council.
Thank you very much for taking the time to do this all this evening.
An earlier speaker asserted that he was unable to build a duplex.
And I just wanted to correct that in point of fact, California SB9 that was passed in 2021 gives any resident homeowner the right to build a duplex or two units on a lot generally with ministerial approval, which means that the city has nothing to say about it.
You just get to build anything that suits fit.
So if anybody's out there and thinks they can't build a duplex, you are mistaken.
You are able to build a duplex.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Next is Christina.
Hello.
Hello.
My name is Christina.
I currently live in Council Member Keshwari's district.
I've lived in Berkeley for 10 years.
I've been renting and subletting apartments since moving here.
I make too much money to qualify for any of the local home buyer programs I've seen in the past, and I cannot afford a $1.7 million bungalow.
As a single person and public employee, this proposal gives me some hope that one day someone like me will be able to afford to purchase a home in Berkeley.
I can also tell you this, my brother Ben Bartlett is dedicated to ending displacement and expanding opportunity for all.
Thank you.
Thanks, Christina.
Uh, next is Henry's iPhone.
Hi, Council Members.
This is Henry Simons.
I'm a West Berkeley resident.
I'm here to support the missing middle ordinance and to say plainly, we should have done this 10 years ago, back when interest rates were at historic lows and home prices were already sky high.
We had a real opportunity to expand our housing stock, especially for working families.
Instead, we delayed and we debated, and while we did, families left.
They didn't vanish.
They moved to Vallejo or Tracy or out of state entirely.
They're commuting to jobs in Berkeley or raising kids in places where they never intended to live.
They're in school districts with fewer resources and further from the communities they'd like to live in.
That's the price of delay, and it's being paid by hundreds of families who wanted to stay but had nowhere to go.
This ordinance is modest and long overdue.
It won't fix the housing crisis overnight, but it begins to undo some of the damage caused by inaction.
And when the next morally clear but contentious issue comes before this council, I hope you'll respond with more courage and more urgency.
Thank you.
Next is Ivan.
Ivan, you should be able to unmute.
Hi, Ryan Meckle is gonna give me a minute of his time.
He should be raising his hand right now.
Yes, I see him.
You have two minutes.
Sounds good.
Hello, council.
Hello, mayor.
Thanks all for staying up so late with us, us crazy people trying to talk to you at 10.30 PM on a Thursday.
My name is Ivan.
I'm a Berkeley PhD student.
Yeah, I just wanted to come on here and express my support for this proposal and also the amendments.
I feel like there should not be any density limits, as many people have mentioned.
I really love living in Berkeley.
I've lived all over California, and probably it's my favorite city to live in.
And I would love it if more people could move here, could have more neighbors.
I live in district one in an apartment building with six units.
And I think it's really awesome that I can have some neighbors who are students, some neighbors who are families.
I love to see all the young kids going to school in the mornings.
I think it's really cool to have all these different types of people in one area.
And so I think this proposal definitely will create more of this kind of neighborhood in Berkeley, which is really great.
You know, somebody earlier this evening mentioned, I think he was the second to last in-person comment.
He said that these meetings are not necessarily democratic.
And I honestly agree because, I mean, who is going to come on here at 10.35 PM on a Thursday to talk to you about this stuff? Just the craziest people who are like super into politics.
So I think you were elected for a reason.
Go with your best judgment.
You've done obviously a ton of research on this yourselves.
Go with your best judgment with what you think is best.
You know, we can voice our opinion, but ultimately the people of Berkeley did elect you.
So yeah, go with what you think is right.
The fact that this took six years to pass is kind of crazy.
So yeah, just do what you gotta do.
Thank you so much.
Next is Warren Wells.
Warren, you should be able to unmute.
Hi, council.
My name is Warren Wells.
My wife and I, along with our two young children, live in a district-free triplex that could not be built to stay in phased zoning.
I work for a non-profit.
She's a midwife and we pay a huge share of our rent and have no hope of buying in a city that we hope to raise our children in.
Unless Berkeley takes bold action to allow more apartments like ours to be built, I don't think we'll be able to do that.
We will eventually be priced out of our walkable, bikeable neighborhood.
Please pass the middle housing plan with the Casa Juane supplemental.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Next is Miley.
Miley, you should be allowed to unmute.
Good evening, council.
Thank you for your time and dedication of this project.
I'm a young person who was priced out of Berkeley, a city that I love.
Please pass the supplemental as proposed by council member Casa Juane so I might get to come back one day.
Now I'm going to list things that took less time to conclude than the five years of opportunities for public engagement on middle housing.
U.S.
involvement in World War II, all of World War I, construction of the Bay Bridge, construction of the Eiffel Tower, the Civil War, the release of the first four Harry Potter books, Biden's presidential term, construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, the dot-com bubble, the writing of the U.S.
Constitution, and the process for the Wright brothers to invent, build, and fly the first airplane.
Thank you for your time.
Thank you.
Next speaker is Robert Williams.
Hey, everyone.
My name is Robbie.
I grew up in Berkeley and I'm speaking in support of this measure and the density limit increases to allow for smaller units.
California's population has doubled since 1970 and those people need to live somewhere.
So because of Berkeley's low density zoning, they've been forced to live in distant suburbs where they often have to drive 40 miles each way to go to work.
So let's let more people live closer into the center of the Bay Area and so we can continue improving our transit, walkability, and bikeability.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Next is Frances.
Hi, can you hear me? Yes.
Okay, my name is Frances.
I live in, I'm a homeowner in District 3.
I think the goal of the ordinance is admirable.
I do have questions and concerns in which extend beyond that.
If we're having more residents, I don't see anything.
When I look at the high-rise apartment buildings that have been built, I don't see increased services.
I don't see increased local businesses.
I see a lot of for lease signs.
I see businesses closing.
So I would hope that that would be something the council would consider.
Maybe not now.
I would hope over the six years that would have been a thought.
So that's my concern.
I don't quite see the infrastructure being developed at the same time to support all the increased occupation.
So that's my comment.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Two more, two more raised hands.
Next is Theo.
Hello, good evening council.
My name is Theo Gordon.
I live in District 8.
Asking you to support missing middle and adopt the supplemental one.
I know that you're going to consider a lot of questions about process, but I want to point out there's no more important process than democratic reductions.
The last time this came up, council added these density limits intending to revisit it.
And in that, in the time since then, we've had an election that hinged on the question of how much housing Berkeley wants to build.
And the people of Berkeley had the option to vote for anti-housing candidates.
And they said, no, they rejected those candidates and instead elected you and even more pro-housing council than we had previously.
They elected you to pass an aggressive ordinance.
Neighborhood character isn't about the walls we build.
It's about the characters who can live in the neighborhood.
You represent the voters.
There's no more process than that.
Please live up to your campaign promises and pass the supplemental.
Pass an aggressive housing plan that doesn't just say that we're going to legalize missing middle, but allows missing middle housing that can actually pencil out and get built, be built.
People can't live in plans.
They can live in houses that are actually built.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And then this is the last raised hand that we have Jenny or it says Jenny's iPad.
Okay, go ahead.
Jenny or Jenny's iPad.
You should be able to unmute.
Okay, we did have one actual, one more hand that was raised.
Shiv.
Hi, respected council and mayor.
My name is Shiv Dogger.
I'm a Berkeley student and I'm part of the Cal Berkeley Democrats.
And I believe that access to affordable housing is an issue that we cannot afford to ignore.
And it is a critical need for both Berkeley residents and students.
We've heard from a variety of community members about why this is a need.
And quite frankly, they stated it much better than I ever could.
But I just wanted to say that equalizing density across most residential neighborhoods promotes equity, justice, and accessibility values, which we know the council shares and which we voted for you to do.
So I urge the council to please support the proposed amendments to the missing middle ordinance.
Thank you so much and have a good day.
Okay.
One last try for Jenny or Jenny's iPad should be able to unmute.
No.
Okay.
That is all.
Okay.
Thank you all.
Yeah.
Thank you all so much for your public comments.
I so appreciate it.
I know that council member Taplin has his hand raised.
We are moving on to our deliberations.
So council member Taplin.
Thank you very much Madam Mayor.

Segment 9

Council members Kesarwani and Tregub, the other co-sponsors, and the members of the public, and especially to Director Klein and his staff.
Real quick, my re-election did not hinge on this ordinance.
It hinged on paving and parks, but also my ability to communicate with each neighborhood in my district.
Speaking of which, this ordinance will change every neighborhood in my district.
I have MUR, I have R1, I have R1A, and I have R2.
And these are not wealthy, racially exclusive neighborhoods.
These are formally redline neighborhoods, and these are not high resource neighborhoods.
And people have real lived experience of the adverse impacts of housing discrimination and predatory real estate.
But also the perhaps unintentional adverse impacts of the neighborhood preservation ordinance, which did not save anyone from displacement or gentrification.
That being said, I do think it's fair to keep what I want to see at the table.
I came into this meeting fully prepared to support the staff recommendation, given that that's what I've been engaging my constituents on for these past several years.
The supplementals came in yesterday.
I barely had time to digest them.
I think it's unreasonable to think that everyone interested would have the adequate time to digest the nuances of each proposal.
But I have been moved by a number of comments from people who, like me, are young, are trying to build, raise, keep families here who, like me, are living in studios.
And I do support equalizing across the residential zones to which this ordinance would apply.
Given the late stage of this process, I would not be able to vote for 90 units per acre, considering it's the first time most people have heard of this.
I would be able to support 60 or 70 units per acre.
I think that is an appropriate middle ground that will get us closer to our goals.
And I do thank everyone for their comments tonight.
And I know that there has been a lot of contention and that there are a lot of divides, but I think the solution to these divides are creating neighborhoods where people are living side by side and not by preventing people from creating these kinds of neighborhoods.
Thank you.
Thank you, Council Member.
Council Member Humbert? Thank you, Madam Mayor.
I've got a slightly longer statement than Council Member Taplin.
I have to begin by profusely thanking our Planning Department staff who've been working on this proposal in some form or fashion for longer than it took the Civil War to be completed.
I specifically want to thank Planning Director Jordan Klein, Principal Planner Justin Horner, Land Use Planning Manager Ann Hirsch.
And I know there's so many other individuals I could recognize.
Thank you for all your hard work and dedication to bring this forward.
I'm just so impressed with your ability to tackle these incredibly complicated questions.
I know that both local and state laws create a complex process and lay down some procedural landmines for trying to undertake major efforts like this.
And I know that's part of the delay.
And I appreciate all the work that you've done to help us navigate through those and all the bumps and twists in the road.
I want to thank my colleagues for their support of this effort and my former colleagues and constructive input over the years that it's been in process.
And perhaps most of all, and I'm so glad she's here, I want to profoundly thank my predecessor, Council Member Lori Droste, who kicked this off, this historic process over six years ago.
None of this would be happening without her trailblazing vision, her determination and her hard work.
And Berkeley now stands to begin undoing decades of exclusionary policies in large part because of her.
This is an incredible legacy.
I'm just privileged to be here, successor, and we are a debt of gratitude.
Now, moving on to substance.
First, I think we must and should acknowledge that there are cases where these changes will have impacts on adjacent properties and neighbors.
If you currently have a one story house and at some point that next door that somebody builds a three story triplex at thirty five feet could be a single family home.
And that may well mean less direct sunlight for your house or yard, or for example.
And maybe with climate change, this change would be welcome in some cases.
But I understand and respect why in most cases, or at least in some cases, it might not be welcome.
I think such impacts will mostly be modest.
You know, I heard that from Mr.
Horner, but I do think we should be honest.
But ultimately, I worry much more about the negative consequences of failing to act boldly on these long overdue changes to make housing more accessible and affordable to more people.
What is a bigger hit to our quality of life? Losing a few hours of direct sunlight in the winter or losing our children to another state when they can't afford a home in California? What really makes life in Berkeley less pleasant? A few more cars parked on the streets, hopefully more bicycles, you know, in foyers or seeing more and more human beings forced to sleep on our streets.
And when young people can't afford homes, they forego or delay building their own families.
That's unfair.
Is it really more important to see a particular view than to see our kids have children of their own? This may sound hyperbolic, but these are the sort of terrible consequences that we create when we cling to the status quo instead of making room for the next generation.
And here's where I think I may be privileged to speak when maybe some other folks on the dais aren't.
I'm struck by the stark generational divide on display here tonight and in the communications we've received to our mailboxes.
And that divide showed up, as I understand it, in the recent planning commission meeting.
The vast majority of opposition to middle housing has come from people my age or older.
I'm the oldest on council here by a significant margin.
While our young people are almost uniformly in support of these overdue reforms, I counted one who may not have been.
Therefore, I think I'm uniquely positioned to say that those of us in the older generations need to take a long, hard look in the mirror and at the world we are leaving our kids and grandkids.
And this is true for me.
I came of an age, we came of an age, when so many things were relatively cheap.
A college education.
When I went to law school at Berkeley, it was either $1,500 a semester or a year, I can't remember.
Houses, child care, and now mainly because of policy changes our generation made, these things have receded out of reach for many of our young people.
We pulled up the drawbridge because we didn't want to pay our taxes or share our neighborhoods and cities.
A lack of willingness to make any sort of personal effort, let alone sacrifice, for the common good is one of those things that is poisoning our politics.
And we see that right now in America.
Berkeley can't talk a big game about welcoming and inclusion and then insist it's someone else's responsibility to actually live up to those values.
I'd ask for more time, Madam Mayor.
Okay, I'll give you more time.
I know this is a big topic, so I'm just going to, go ahead.
Okay, I'll do my best.
We can't be pro-immigrant but declare there's no room for people to immigrate to Berkeley.
We can't be pro-environment but insist new housing be relegated to the hinterlands where it will pave over our farms, fields, and forests.
That's where the real environmental impact happens.
If we build here, we save the Greenlands.
We can't be pro-LGBTQI+, but perpetuate policies that make Berkeley a haven only for wealthy members of marginalized communities.
We have a choice to make tonight.
Are we truly a progressive community? Or do we merely cosplay as one? I also want to speak directly to those who hear about the racist legacy of exclusionary housing and feel that somehow we are personally, or I am personally, accusing them of racism.
I think it's perfectly understandable to have concerns about how new homes may physically impact your property or neighborhood.
We can discuss that and reasonably weigh the trade-offs, but when we talk about the historic realities of single-family zonings, racist origins, and yes, it's just incontrovertible, that is not a personal attack on you.
I keep hearing that.
When we read our land acknowledgment at the beginning of our meetings, we're not accusing anybody in Berkeley of harboring anti-indigenous bias.
We're just talking about history.
It's just a fact.
Recognizing the racist origins of single-family zoning serves a similar purpose.
Now I'll wrap up on more positive notes.
Creating a naturally affordable housing types or more than one and taking pressure off our overall housing market would be huge wins for our community.
I'm excited to see new homes built that are safer, more energy efficient, and more resilient, for example, than the 1913 prairie style that I live in that just leaks heat out the walls.
I'm eager to welcome more people to our city to live lower-carbon lifestyles and bring with them their creativity, their cultures, and their character.
I look forward to working with my colleagues to hopefully arrive at a final version that we can all support, and I've got some ideas.
Overall, I think that the supplemental from Council Member Keserwani and her colleagues in their circle, including Council Members Bartlett, Lunapara, and the mayor, I should just name them, is a terrific addition to the baseline staff recommendation.
I believe I could support most of what appears in the supplemental with some caveats.
First, I wanted to offer what I hope would be a couple friendly amendments to the supplemental from Council Member Keserwani et al.
I think that having a report back to Council is a great idea, but I wondered if we might revise this too, and I've got some language here.
My legislative aide can send it to Council Member Keserwani now.
As I read it, maybe Eric can send a cleaned-up copy.
Amend the impact analysis element of the supplemental to set a firm date for a simple quantitative report on A, the number of middle housing project applications and potential units therein, B, the number granted building permits, and C, the number granted certificates of occupancy.
So we can keep track of what's going on here.
And, or but, instead of setting a hard date for the equity report, which I think is critical, have the equity report be triggered by a certain number of middle housing projects or units submitting planning applications.
So that could be 50, could be 100.
I'll ask Eric to send you this text.
Because if we're at year three and have only received applications for five projects, then a report on equity wouldn't probably make sense.
So, you know, maybe it's 50, maybe it's 100.
I'm not sure.
But we can tinker with that, if that's okay.
Okay.
Very quickly.
Okay.
Point of order.
I'd like to extend the meeting to 1145 p.m.
Sorry.
Sorry.
Can we take the roll? Let's take the roll on that real quick.
Okay.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
Okay.
To extend the meeting, Council Member Keserwani? Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Sorry.
We were getting close.
Thank you.
Second, there's been a lot of discussion about exactly what numerical standards we should adopt for dwelling units per acre.
I'm absolutely in favor of equalizing them across historic, you know, zones.
I think it's a reflection of past racist practices to have, to perpetuate those differentials in what comes out tonight.
I do have some, you know, a little bit of discomfort about the number 90.
I think that's so far from what, you know, has been discussed with the public and part of the public outreach, that I would propose the number of 70 as something of a Solomonic difference between the top 60 and your 90.
And I wonder if you might find that acceptable.
Thank you, Mayor.
Thank you, Council Member Hubbard.
We don't have a motion on the floor, but I'm listening.
But I'm just asking.
And I appreciate it.
Okay.
Thank you.
And I want to hear from everyone, and then we will make a motion.
Thank you.
And, you know what, I think that's probably all I have.
And I really, I'm just really thrilled that we're getting to a place where we can pass something tonight.
I feel confident.
And I also want to say that the trans person who spoke here tonight, that person's testimony was incredibly compelling.
Thank you.
Thank you, Council Member.
We're going to move on to Council Member Blackabee.
Thank you, Madam Mayor.
When I first moved to San Francisco in 1996, after graduating from college, I didn't think I'd still be in the Bay Area 30 years later.
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest.
Most of my family lives in Oregon and Washington.
My parents still live in Walla Walla, where I attended high school.
But my partner, Larry, joined me in San Francisco after he graduated in 1997.
We loved living in our small apartment on Knob Hill, where we could walk to work, walk to Chinatown and North Beach, and hop on the bus to watch the Giants.
But in 2005, we were ready to put down roots, to move to a place where we could afford to buy a home and be a part of a vibrant, progressive community.
So we moved to Berkeley.
We're now 20 years later, maybe against our better judgment, but we're still here, and we love living here.
We've been so lucky.
We started a business together here.
We're raising our two kids here.
We appreciate the arts and culture, the restaurants, the cafes, the cocktail bars, and the proximity to UC Berkeley, which reminds us both of the time we spent together in college.
It's hard to imagine living in a better community, and more people should have that same chance to move here, stay here, and raise their families here, whether they've been here for generations or if they're moving to Berkeley for the very first time.
As I said repeatedly during my campaign for city council, I'm committed to doing everything I can to make Berkeley a better, safer, more affordable, and more welcoming place for everyone, so more families can have the same opportunities we've had and continue to enjoy.
Public safety, fire safety, and transportation are certainly essential to that goal, but making housing more affordable and accessible through production, preservation, and protection is also vital.
As I said during the campaign, I support an all-of-the-above approach to housing, and that includes adding significant housing density near transit along key corridors that have the infrastructure to support that density, but it also means adding gentle density to other parts of Berkeley where it is safe to do so.
I want to thank our planning staff.
I want to thank my colleagues for agreeing that we should not add more density to fire hazard zones in the hills.
That's my district.
It's just not safe at this point to add more people and more cars to an area that we know faces significant fire risk where evacuation is a huge challenge.
I'm proud that we are taking steps to address this risk.
We're not sitting silently and doing nothing.
We passed EMBER a couple of weeks ago.
We're working with our regional partners to do more to make ourselves safe, and we'll be reviewing and acting in response to the upcoming evacuation study, but there is so much more work we have to do to keep existing residents safe.
Outside the fire hazard zone, I do believe that middle housing should be an important part of Berkeley's strategy for providing more housing.
It's not the only component, for sure, and maybe it's not the biggest component, but it is an important one.
I believe the key really is threading the needle and developing middle housing that is truly affordable, and that means with enough density that allows for the creation of enough housing units on each parcel that bring the size and cost of those units within reach for more families.
I want to thank my current colleagues, Councilmembers Cassarwani, Taplin, Bartlett, and Humbert, as well as our former mayor, Jesse Arreguin, and Councilmember Droste, as well as Jordan Klein and his team, who launched Berkeley on this journey before I joined the Council.
And I want to thank my colleagues tonight, including the mayor and Councilmembers Cassarwani, Lunapara, Bartlett, and Traigud, for the supplemental items they've put forward.
I very much support their efforts to equalize density across the various zones.
I support the added provisions for rooftop access and pitched roofs, the equity analysis study to make sure middle housing is truly working as intended, and checking back with Council frequently on that score, and also the creation of objective design standards to ensure that middle housing development is well incorporated into the fabric of existing neighborhoods.
And as Councilmember Humbert said, I'm also looking forward to working with colleagues to arrive at a dwelling unit per acre level that sufficiently balances appropriate density with the creation of units at a size and price point that is more accessible for more middle-class families, so we're not just creating more units for upper-income residents.
But above all, let me just say I very much look forward to joining with my colleagues to move middle housing forward tonight, and I thank everyone again, activists, the members of the public who spoke, our wonderful staff, and my colleagues for everyone who's brought us to this point.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I want to entertain a motion to close the public hearing, by the way, since we are no longer— So moved.
Thank you.
Second.
Thank you.
Can we take the roll, please, clerk? Okay.
Councilmember Kastelwani? Yes.
Tapland? Yes.
Bartlett? Yes.
Tregub? Aye.
O'Keefe? Yes.
Blackabay? Yes.
Lunapara? Yes.
Humbert? Yes.
And Mayor Ishii? Yes.
Okay.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Well, what a night.
I want to thank the planning team here, and Director Klein, you've really outdone yourself.
Again, thank you and your team for your work here, and I want to thank the vice mayor.
No one calls you that.
They forget.
They forget, don't they? They forget.
I'm telling you.
I don't—I remember.
I remember.
Thank the vice mayor for your tremendous leadership here.
Thank you so much.
And thank the actual mayor for your work as well.
I want to thank Councilman Lunapara for your wonderful presentation.
You made the numbers and the math look digestible to people like me.
I'm a words person, not a math person.
You know, this—tonight, I was kind of—I kind of wasn't prepared for the timber of the evening.
I was expecting a different sort of debate, and I love the debate.
I love that people come out of the house.
I love they get involved.
I say this every time.
I want you out of the house.
I want you to engage each other, engage us.
So I was kind of surprised at the timber of the debate.
It reminded me of a movie, a science fiction film called Tenet, came out during the pandemic.
A classic, very talk—it's a talkie, very talkie, but very good.
It's about time travel and people waging war across times.
And at one point, the main character, he says, why is the future attacking us? Because they're coming back and attacking this present.
And someone says, well, it's every generation out for themselves.
And that line really stuck with me, and to this evening reminds me of that line.
And I don't want to believe that for this community, because I know many of the people here who came and expressed their displeasure at what we're doing are wonderful people that care about us and care about young people and care about opportunity and have given it to people like me.
So I know we're better than that.
But I've got to say, though, what you're really upset about is something existential, because we're not giving you roommates.
That's what it feels like to you.
There's nothing preventing someone from building a mansion right next door to your house.
They can do that right now and impede your way of life.
What this is, though, this is the equity issue of our time.
The moral character of this city is simply not aligned with the effects of housing scarcity, because it shuts people out of living, out of ownership, out of opportunity, out of being in the good life.
And it's time to bring our housing supply in line with these legitimate demands of our community.
We cannot keep deluding ourselves that we don't have a scarcity problem.
We talk about inequality as good people, good liberals here in Berkeley.
We're obsessed with income inequality and talking about it.
But you have to realize, land is the foundation of wealth.
And yet it remains out of reach due to the same scarcity that we prescribe, that we invented in our zoning code here.
And so I do want to say this to the proponents of housing, all of us here and everyone else.
This legislation we heard is not a panacea, right? But also, to the other people, it's not the end times either.
But it does move the ball forward in addressing the legacy of zoning codes that have enforced our intergenerational deprivation.
Now let's settle this once and for all.
Capacity works.
We've proven it.
When we came in, we inherited five decades of no housing production at all, despite population growth.
And now, after a building boom that we've launched, of all the forms of housing, market rate, affordable and otherwise, rents are at historic lows.
Developers are complaining that we have too much housing, so they can't get financing from banks because they can't count the rents being high.
So the ones you see being built now are like the last ones under the last interest rates and banking protocols, because our capacity is so great that it's getting hard to finance.
That's a good thing.
We want that problem.
Now, and here, too.
So we lowered rents, and next, we've said this for a while now, and next, we're coming for homeownership.
That's next.
Because the surefire way to prevent displacement, and I've dedicated so much energy to this, the surefire way to prevent displacement is become an owner.
Owners don't get displaced.
Now we heard talk about a million dollar townhouse that could manifest from here, but what I'm talking about are small starter homes, small condominiums, half a million dollars, 550.
That's what we can do.
We have legislation in the books here called the Open Doors Initiative, written by, I guess, me, that calls for the facilitation of condo creation in these houses in exchange for affordable ownership.
And next, at the SP BART station, the east lot, we are bringing affordable homeownership to that lot.
The people will own land again.
Now, this is important, this last piece here.
And this really hits the juxtaposition that we find ourselves in, you know, Berkeley as being the birthplace, the creator of exclusionary zoning.
They called race zoning originally.
It's race zoning.
That's the actual name.
Race zoning.
Okay? It's zoning now, but it's race zoning.
But we're also home of the Fair Housing Bill, adopted by Richard Nixon for the United States.
So we're both at once, you know, just as we are becoming a place of the super rich and super poor.
And so to the opponents, my wonderful elders in your homes, yes, you bought the houses when the getting was good.
You're lucky.
You're fortunate.
You're super fortunate.
And you've experienced windfall.
You're millionaires now.
I get that.
You're still the same person inside.
You're still the same humble Berkeley person.
However, when you pass on, who's going to buy your house? An actual millionaire.
And so that leaves us as a city of two distinct lottery winners, millionaires and the very few people who get onto the list for affordable housing.
Two super lucky, rare individuals in this town dominating it.
That's not going to work for our children.
So think about the future and go with this.
Go with the recommendation here.
What is extremely, as a person said, is extremely reasonable.
Extremely reasonable.
And that's the future our children deserve and demand.
Thank you.
Thank you, Council Member.
Moving on to Council Member O'Keefe.
My turn to make a speech.
Got to do it.
So my back story, where a lot of us are telling our stories, I'll tell mine.
So my parents, who gave me permission to say this, by the way, they're both watching.
They always do.
Hi, Mom.
They moved here in the late 1960s.
My mom actually went to college here.
But they set down roots in the late 1960s, and neither one of them had any access to generational wealth.
They were a young family with one income, and they were just starting out, and they were able to buy a home on Roosevelt.
And they went from there.
And that was years before I was born.
I have much older siblings.
Because of their choice and ability to put down roots and raise their family here are the reason that I have had the amazing, beautiful, glorious chance to grow up in this city that I hope it's very obvious to everyone I care very much about.
I talk about it all the time.
And I want that for more young families whose kids I hope to be my students one day.
And I also want to say, I don't think anyone said this yet, we've been talking about families all night.
It's fun to talk about families.
People without children, I also want them to come here.
You are also welcome and desired.
So just don't feel left out.
Everyone loves to think about children.
But yeah, we want everyone to be able to come here.
So this policy, which I have always supported, is a no-brainer change to increasing the occurrence of the rare opportunity for someone without $300,000 for a down payment and a monthly income that can only be achieved with certain very specific types of careers to be able to put down roots here.
I want to make it so that people without that can live here.
Some people think that we don't listen to the comments and we don't care about the emails.
I've heard that said a number of times.
That's not true.
I've heard a couple of the themes and I would actually like to respond to them.
Just a few things.
People say this was rammed through and have described it as undemocratic.
We've had years of public process on this topic, so many that the time it's taken actually could be the subject of one of those expose articles on how we can't get anything done in the blue states.
I think this might make a good candidate.
That's how much process we've had.
And for those who said it's not democratic, each person up here was elected in the normal way.
And we all had our positions on middle housing on the record.
Has anyone not asked about it during the campaign? We all were.
So this is democratic.
And you know, just because a group of people who are around you all agree with you doesn't mean that represents the majority.
Selection bias.

Segment 10

I knocked on a lot of doors when I was running for office, and I talked to a lot of people who probably aren't people who are planning to ever come to a city council meeting, and I talked about this policy, and most people I talked to either already supported it or thought it sounded like a great idea, because it is.
It's common sense, good policy.
Now if you disagree with it, I am sorry, and that's okay.
This will change how the neighborhoods feel somewhat, I'll be honest.
I don't think tragically, and I don't think fundamentally, but it will represent a change, and if you aren't into that, I get it.
It doesn't bother me, but I totally understand and empathize if you look at that possibility and you're a no to that.
It's fine.
I respect that opinion.
And I want to thank you.
I think most people here were actually speaking in favor, but I do want to thank the people who came to say anything at all, pro or con, for sharing your thoughts, and I just want to say one of the many things I love about the city is the civic engagement and the outspoken passion for all things, and I love that regardless of the content.
I promise I would not be in this line of work if I didn't love that.
But I'm not here for the vibes.
That's not my main purpose.
I'm here because, as I stated earlier, I love this city, and I want it to stay amazing, and I want it to grow, yes, grow into an even better, more equitable, and more welcoming place.
So this proposal, at long last, is very much what I'm here to do.
So that's my speech, and I'll just say, because we're all interested in how we're going to vote, I want to associate myself with Mark's position.
We kind of discussed that before.
I think that I'm obviously supporting this today.
I said before, I felt this is very democratic.
I felt we had a lot of process.
I am a little reluctant to make such a big change from what was presented.
I'm a little uncomfortable with that, but I do agree with the goal of equitable density, and I forget what you said, 70.
There's a number that I'll feel comfortable with, and we can figure that.
70, yeah, that sounds okay to me.
So just putting out there, since you're counting votes, that's about what I'm comfortable with.
So thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks, Council Member.
Council Member Lunapar.
Thank you.
I want to thank Jordan and Justin and the entire planning staff who have worked tirelessly on this project for six years.
I am so incredibly proud to live in a city where our staff are so committed to compassionately and gracefully engaging the community on contentious problems.
Thank you so much.
Berkeley's current zoning patterns, originally designed to segregate the city, continue to further genderfy our city and displace long-term residents by restricting the development of smaller units.
The status quo is displacing people.
Last year, the Berkeley Property Owners Association sent a letter to landlords across the city, encouraging landlords to lower rents for their tenants due to the fact that the supply and demand balance has shifted in tenants' favors, citing that owners are no longer able to command their rents for their vacancies that they once could.
Rents in Berkeley are back to 2018 prices, despite high inflation.
More housing is working.
Nonetheless, Berkeley continues to be in a housing crisis, and we must use every tool at our disposal to tackle it.
The four lease signs in downtown and south side of campus are there because 40,000 of our residents, students, move in and out of apartments every single year, many in search of cheaper units, others as they are facing homelessness and housing insecurity while they study at one of the top universities in the world.
Medium-density housing has proven effective in creating more affordable units, reducing small development, and decreasing carbon emissions.
Additionally, developments over 5,000 square feet will pay into our city's affordable housing fund to develop and preserve low-income, 100% affordable housing.
A 9,000-square-foot building would pay $224,000 into our inclusionary zoning fee.
This is $224,000 more towards capital A affordable housing than the single-family homes that currently stand there.
I hear and really strongly empathize the concerns around displacement and gentrification.
And while I make the argument that the status quo is and has been causing gentrification in our city, I do want to highlight and ease some of the very real and personal fears of displacement.
Our city has some of the strongest tenant protections in the country, especially around demolition.
Every single protected unit, which includes rent-controlled units, homes occupied by low-income residents, and units with low-income deed restrictions must be replaced one-to-one with an affordable unit as defined in the BMC.
Any sitting tenants must be provided relocation assistance, a right of first refusal, and a replacement unit comparable in size, amenities, and rent.
Low-income residents making 50% of area median income or less must be offered a comparable unit affordable to households of 30% of area median income.
And recent no-fault evictions and tenant harassment automatically blocks demolition.
Even if the household income of a tenant is unknown, households would be presumed to be low-income in proportion to households throughout the city.
These protections ensure that changes to our built environment are tools of anti-displacement.
Also, in terms of environmentalism, there's a lot of really strong arguments and scholarship that demonstrate how important denser housing is for the environment, but I also want to point out that the most carbon-neutral and environmentally-friendly residents in the city are the residents of Southside, which also happens to be the densest part of Berkeley.
I'd also like to thank Mayor Ishii and Councilmembers Kisarani and Bartlett for their partnership, and I'm looking forward to discussing the specifics further with my colleagues.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Councilmember Trigub? I'm in the middle of the missing middle.
I'm not in a Brown Act circle, so I thought it was fitting for me to go last.
I'm not in a Brown Act circle, so I thought it was fitting for me to go last.
I too want to thank everyone for engaging in this very important public process.
I will tell you my origin story as well.
I have been a renter in multifamily housing for most of my life.
I was born in a 9-story, 9-story building in Kiev, Ukraine.
The kind of 9-story buildings, by the way, that too many folks who were kids just like I was, ended up being bombed out of.
Berkeley became my home.
I was one of the many folks who came to the mic who talked about how either through the grace of God and the ability to find something on the market that they've been able to stay in Berkeley after graduating from college or while in college, that person was me as well.
Not that long ago.
So, I want to say, I see you.
To the well-intentioned folks with whom we've organized neighborhood watch parties, with whom we have made pedestrian crossings on busy intersections safer, I lived in an 8-plex while I was doing that for a long period of my time in Berkeley.
I would not have been able to do that alongside of you if I did not have that opportunity.
This immigrant from Ukraine, whose partner is an immigrant from the Philippines and the daughter of farm workers, we were only able to stay in Berkeley because of housing opportunities that were possible for the very kind of buildings that are being contemplated through this missing middle proposal.
So, I see myself in many of your stories, but I'm not doing this for myself.
I want to do this for everyone who has ever dreamt about being able to stay in Berkeley or be able to actually find something affordable enough that they can come back here or come here for the first time.
We got in a few emails that our salaries are exorbitant.
Like all of my council colleagues, I earn less than $90,000 a year from this job that I think all of us spend easily more than 60 hours a week doing.
And on that salary, I cannot qualify for BMR units, and yet home ownership is out of reach.
And that is true every two years.
I talk to voters at the door about ballot measures or whatever.
And for years, the story has been similar and similarly heartbreaking around parents that talk about how they wish their son or daughter, that first responder, the person who works at a nonprofit, that they wish they could stay in Berkeley and that they can't because they're priced out.
And it was actually only in the last year that I went to a downtown Berkeley association meeting where someone on the board who was a developer and owns some property said in a, like, I'm very happy we're building all this housing and I have to reduce my rents down by 50%.
To which I said, do you still have a lease available? But the truth of the matter, as a late stage millennial, I don't want to be a renter for the rest of my life.
I don't want my or any other strategy to be able to be a homeowner, to be a parent's or someone else's will to get an inheritance.
That is tragic.
That is not how things are supposed to be.
I want folks to be able to be our neighbors.
And so, by the way, and I will just and I'm almost done, but I'm just going to say, yeah, there's obviously no guarantee about affordability.
But I can tell you that I have not seen a single family home in years in Berkeley that costs less than nine hundred fifty K.
And as I was doing some land trusts with council member Luna Parra, and I will close shortly, the council member reminded me it was the housing by McGee Baptist Church.
If it had been demolished and rebuilt, which was a possibility, given the dilapidated nature of it, thankfully, they were able to rehab it.
But it would actually have been illegal given current zoning to rebuild it.
So, seven renters would have been displaced.
Folks are probably interested in hearing where I stand on this.
I will say one thing about the democratic process.
I read all my emails.
I've read every single email, hundreds of emails on missing middle.
I have responded to every email from a constituent as well as some neighbors that are not direct constituents that I was asked to respond to.
Our team hosted two community meetings over the span of a year, almost a year for the benefit of one hundred fifty people.
I held ten individual meetings with 50 community members.
Council member, I'm sorry.
We're just running up on our time.
So could you motion to extend? Would you do do you mind? Yeah.
Is it eleven forty five? Yeah, it is.
But we're we're getting close because there's still some more comments.
Motion to extend.
No, no, no.
Twelve, fifteen.
Twelve, fifteen.
Motion to extend to twelve, fifteen.
Second.
All right.
Can we take the roll, please? Okay.
To extend to twelve, fifteen.
Councilor Kisarwani? Yes.
Kaplan? Yes.
Bartlett? Yes.
Traeger? Aye.
O'Keefe? Yes.
I was spacing out.
Sorry.
Yes.
Humber? Yes.
And Mary? Yes.
But my comment still stands because we're almost twice the amount of time as the five minutes.
So go ahead.
Comment acknowledged.
I will just submit to you for those of you who have and this is a very small minority of the folks.
This is a very small minority of the folks we've heard from that accusing us of being anti-democratic or Trumpian.
I will just say this.
My grandfather fought the Nazis in World War II.
My parents fled an authoritarian government so that I would have a better future here.
And I know enough about fascism or an authoritarian government to know it would not take six years of public process for them to do something.
So with that, where I stand, I hope that we may be able to meet in the middle, perhaps.
So I associate my position with council members Taplin, Humbert, and O'Keefe around a 70-ish dwelling unit standard.
And I also appreciate council members Cassavonese's other amendments because I think they are very much in line with where I was trying to go after hearing a lot of community input on objective design standards and an equity study.
So I hope that we may be able to land somewhere, maybe it's in the middle between the staff proposal and the supplemental, but where we can take a unanimous vote on this matter.
I ran on a platform of a Berkeley we can all call home.
This to me is not a slogan.
This is what we're doing right here.
So I look forward to joining my colleagues and taking this step.
And let's not make it another six years for the next one.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks, council member.
OK, council member.
Thank you very much.
Madam Mayor.
Thank you.
Council member.
Thank you to our staff.
It's been such a beautiful night.
I was telling some of the New York council members we have not had a meeting like this since they have joined the council.
So I want to thank everyone who spoke in support.
I want to thank the people who came and expressed differences of opinion.
I especially I really want to thank our staff because I know you worked really hard this week to make this happen.
And I appreciate I appreciate it a lot.
I want to thank former council member Lori Drosty, who is here, who initiated this in 2019.
I want to thank her again.
I have to say that that Gerstein is also here.
She has helped me reply to more than 350 emails on middle housing.
So I just will quickly briefly share my housing story is that I did grow up in one of those more affordable condos in a master planned community in suburban Southern California.
It happened to be in a safe neighborhood with solid public schools.
And that is part of why this is so personal and important to me, because I want the grad student living in a garage.
I believe he is still here.
I want I want him to have a place.
I want the young people who we heard from who desperately want to build their lives in our community to have the option to do so.
We saw in the beginning of this meeting, parents holding their young children and babies.
And I have a child as well.
I know many of us have young children on this dais.
We want our kids to have the option to live here when they grow up.
So, you know, we did not hear from tonight and somebody made a note of it.
We didn't hear from the developers tonight.
So I do want to talk about feasibility and why they weren't here.
The reason why is because a UC Berkeley Turner Center on Housing Innovation study found that most forms of middle housing are not financially feasible, except for duplexes under the right conditions.
That's similar to what our own feasibility study found, that only ownership middle housing was financially feasible at this time, such as small lot, single family homes created by subdividing a larger parcel or a fourplex condo or townhome.
The author of the Turner Center study, David Garcia, said in this week's KQED news story about tonight's meeting that developers who pursue middle housing projects often find themselves mired in site-by-site problem solving, making the projects unappealing to large corporate investors.
David Garcia said, and I quote, there's no economies of scale there.
A traditional large developer is not really going to get out of bed for anything less than 100 units.
I think it's less than that, but that's what he said.
And that's not what we're talking about here.
So in some ways, you may ask yourselves, well, why are we pushing for this higher dwelling units per acre, then, if the feasibility is so low? In some ways, we are having a theoretical conversation for a future in which we are hoping that more housing typologies would be feasible.
And I think it is important to be as ambitious as we can tonight because we don't know how certain economic factors could change in the future.
We don't know if it's going to take another six years to get an opportunity to amend this ordinance.
So we want to give the flexibility that might be valuable in the future.
We want to provide that flexibility tonight.
And I was also thinking about the possibility that you could have an existing multi-unit parcel that has space for a new duplex, for instance, but wouldn't be able to create it because of the maximum density standard being too restrictive.
So having said all that, I want to work on getting a motion on the floor.
So, you know, I know that we had a Brown Act circle of four of us who put forward the concept of 90 dwelling units per acre, but I believe that it is important for us to speak with one voice on this.
And I would love for this to be unanimous.
So I think that 70 dwelling units per acre is extremely ambitious.
That is eight units on a typical 5,000 square foot lot.
And so I want to propose that.
And I'm going to make a motion, but I have some questions for staff first.
So I think on this report, I know Council Member Tragoop, you had the concept of looking at other comparable jurisdictions.
I want to incorporate that concept into recommendation number five.
I know Council Member Humbert, you had a number of recommendations.
Oh, that's the timer for the extension.
So I have Council Member Humbert's language from his legislative aid.
So I'm just going to read it aloud.
I can also share a screen if that's desirable.
I think that's good if you can.
Okay.
Okay.
Sure.
Okay.
Hang on.
Sure.
You can all see.
Oh, not yet.
Okay.
I know it's not big enough, right? It'll read it.
It'll adjust.
Okay.
So Council Member Humbert's amendment to direct planning staff to return to the City Council by November 30th, 2026, and annually thereafter with a simple quantitative report listing for the present year and all previous years beginning in 2025, number of middle housing project applications, total number of units proposed within those middle housing project applications, number of middle housing projects units granted building permits, and the number of middle housing projects units granted certificates of occupancy.
Director Klein, do you have input on that? Yes, thank you, Council Member Keselwani.
Yeah, about the reporting requirements.
Firstly, very much appreciate the referral of an effectiveness assessment and an equity analysis.
I do think a year does feel soon, feel quickly, and I wonder if, I think the point was made earlier, will we really have a large enough sample size within just one year? I'm not sure.
I like the idea.
I mean, two years.
Also, that idea of identifying a number of projects as a trigger, I think, is a good idea.
If Council's concerned about the urgency of receiving that report, you could say two years or 50 middle housing projects, whichever occurs sooner.
So for that reporting requirement, regarding the production numbers, that totally makes sense.
I think what I would ask is that you adjust the reporting date to April 1st annually, because that way it would align with the annual progress report that we're required to submit annually to the state.
So we're already doing an annual accounting of unit production.
So that means you'll get the first report in just a few months, right, early next year, next April, and then each year thereafter.
So if you would make that change, that would make a lot of sense for us.
Okay.
I'm going to incorporate that into my motion.
And then I also have this other language from Councilmember Humbert about having a trigger for the equity impact analysis so that you would do it.
We had said originally after two years of implementation, and I'm open to input from others on this, Councilmember Humbert is suggesting a threshold of a certain number of projects that would trigger it.
I think it should be a relatively low number, but not so low that we can't necessarily see patterns out of it.
So I'm suggesting 20 here.
Okay.
I'm open to feedback.
Yeah, 20 projects.
Whatever is the will of the Council, we can work with that.
Okay.
Let me try 50 here.
Okay.
So I'm going to make a motion to move to adopt the staff recommendation and to adopt the Keserwani supplemental with the following changes.
Recommendation number two is change to 70 dwelling units per acre in all applicable zones, R1, R2, R2A, and MUR.
That excludes the hillside overlay zone.
Recommendation five to incorporate the request from Councilmember Trage to consider results from other comparable jurisdictions and Councilmember Humbert's amendment as described.
And the equity report is triggered after 50 middle housing projects.
You know, I apologize for interrupting.
50 projects is a high number.
I would recommend for both the equity analysis and the effectiveness analysis as described in Councilmember Trager's supplemental, I would recommend two years or 25 projects, whichever comes first.
Okay.
25 or two years, whichever comes first.
Okay.
Okay.
So making that amendment in real time to the motion.
And then recommendation number six is about objective design standards, and I want to incorporate Councilmember Tragoob's suggestions around this.
And Director Klein, tell me if this language, if you have any amendments to it.
I want to acknowledge to the extent feasible, the objective design standards referral should consider loss of open or permeable yard space, solar access, privacy, tree canopy, biodiversity, and opportunities for stormwater runoff mitigations with consideration of costs and not reducing the development potential of the ordinance as proposed.
That's my motion.
Second.
Thank you.
Okay, I think Councilmember Chapman had a hand up, but I can't see him anymore.
Yes, I'm here.
Can you see me? Hello.
I can hear you, but I can't.
I mean, I can't.
I can't see you yet.
Thank you.
Now we can see.
Thank you so much.
And thank you to Councilmember Castorwani and Councilmember Bartlett for moving and seconding the recommendation.
I didn't realize you were doing origin stories and getting extra time.
I did have some time left in my balance, so I did want to share my origin story and why this vote to me is so significant.
So I live in the R1A.
I'm in the southern half of the historic Oceanview.
I'm the oldest neighborhood in Berkeley.
And when I was born, my mother and my sister and I were living in a soft story near Ashby Bar, and we moved to 10th Street when I was 5, and I've been here ever since.
I'm still in my same neighborhood.
And growing up, we lived next to a duplex that was next to a triplex around the corner from a duplex.
And at my intersection, there's two triplexes, two duplexes, and I live in a studio inside of a fiveplex with two ADUs.
And, you know, down the block, there's apartment buildings.
And I grew up in this mix of housing types I thought was totally normal and didn't know had been made illegal at a certain point.
And as pretty much the last kid from this neighborhood who's still here, and having lived through housing precarity and seeing what.

Segment 11

Exclusionary Housing Policy has done to neighborhoods, to families like mine, I've always felt a deep sense of responsibility to restore what we once had in this neighborhood and to legalize housing across the city.
And I really want to thank Councilmember Kesarwani, or Vice-Mayor Kesarwani, and Councilmember Bartlett, and former Vice-Mayor Lori Joste, for their work on housing, housing justice, and in particular, creating homeownership opportunities, so that kids who grew up here can live here, can serve here, and can remain here.
And for us to hopefully pass this unanimously, to embark on this together, means the world to me.
So thank you all so much.
Thank you.
All right, I realize I'm the one that's keeping us from taking the vote, but I do just want to share.
I'm a person who came here for school and stayed.
I made Berkeley my home.
I got very involved in the community, and I've done everything I can to make it a better place.
I want to encourage more people to come here, and I am very aware that a lot of the reason most folks, or many folks, supported me is because of my positions around housing.
I currently live in South Berkeley.
I've been here for a majority of the time that I've lived in the city, and I was very lucky to move from a teeny, teeny, tiny closet into a single-family home, where I currently live with my family.
I want to share that I really understand the history of redlining in my neighborhood.
I've seen a lot of my neighbors leave over the time that I've been there, and it's been incredibly concerning to me, and that is the reason why I'm supporting what we're doing today.
On my block, I moved in next to a 12-unit apartment building, and I have to tell you, they are so incredibly quiet.
We always joke that we are the loud neighbors, and I had to literally go and count how many units there were, because I was shocked that there were 12.
So, honestly, I wish we were able to be a bit more aggressive in how many units that we're putting in each building, because I think that a lot of folks don't realize that the building itself isn't getting bigger.
We're just able to have more units, and so I really had supported our 90 number, but I understand folks are feeling comfortable at 70, and I understand the benefit of wanting to have this be unanimous.
I want to make a friendly amendment request that the second reading take place on July 8th.
Yes, I accept that, Madam Mayor, and I also want to amend my own motion.
Yeah, let me just okay, and the other thing I want to say is that, as many people have said already, but Missy Middle is just 1 of a number of strategies to meet our goals here in the city around housing, and I'm committed to other strategies to support affordable housing.
Like, we keep saying this is just 1 tool in the toolbox.
The other day, yes, I know that folks have been talking about the land trust funding, the small sites funding that we had a reduction in that, and that is really unfortunate.
But I am working very hard to make sure we have more affordable housing in the city, and I really do understand the impact here of gentrification and displacement.
I speak about it with my neighbors quite often, and I'm very excited.
I'm honored that I get to be mayor during this time.
I'm really proud of our council for coming together on this.
I'm really grateful to everyone who came and gave their public comments and spoke.
Thank you all very much.
I'm going to see what your adjustments to your motion are.
Yes, I just wanted to further add to the language that we want to request a corresponding edit to the general plan to reflect the amended density standard.
Okay, is ready to vote? Yep, I think we're ready to vote.
Can you take the roll, please, clerk? Okay, on the motion as read by Council Member, Vice Mayor Kesarwani.
Council Member, sorry, Vice Mayor Kesarwani? Yes.
Tapwin? Yes.
Bartlett? Yes.
Trago? Aye.
O'Keefe? Yes.
Blackabay? Yes.
Lunapara? Yes.
Humbert? Yes.
And Mayor Ishii? Yes.
Motion carried.
I would stand, but I'm so tall, you wouldn't see me anywhere.
And with that, my friends, I will entertain a motion to adjourn.
So moved.
Second.
No.
Okay, roll please, clerk.
Okay, to adjourn, Vice Mayor Kesarwani.
Yes.
Council Member Tapwin? Yes.
Bartlett? Yes.
Trago? Aye.
O'Keefe? Yes.
Blackabay? Yes.
Lunapara? Yes.
Humbert? Yes.
And Mayor Ishii? Yes.
Okay.
Thank you all.
Thank you, staff.
Thank you, everyone, for staying so late.
Recording stopped.