A Template for Berkeley’s Future
The Berkeley City Council recently voted unanimously to move away from single-family residential zoning. I live in a typical mixed-use neighborhood, in a 1902 “pattern house” that’s across the street from a 1920s apartment building. It’s three stories and residential in feeling. The next block has others, mostly three stories. Nearby, there’s a four-story apartment building and also courtyard housing — some three stories, others a ring of cottages.
Zoning is a template for a city’s future. Berkeley isn’t a blank slate — its neighborhoods have distinguishing characteristics valued by the people who live there. It also has commercial and industrial areas with their own histories and attributes. And Berkeley is more in flux than many cities. One of the world’s leading public research universities is part of it, drawing a substantial daytime population and many temporary and permanent residents. As a university city with a great climate and many walkable, transit-served districts, it attracts newcomers from across the Bay and around the world. How then should it grow?
This is a regional question as well as a local one. The region’s powerful economy is an attractant, and towns and cities here feel the impact of its pull. Berkeley can’t solve the region’s problems on its own, but it can be a conscious model for how to tackle them intelligently and well.
Berkeley’s conversation about zoning comes at a time when the City Council has rethought parking requirements, questioning if our car-centricity is forever and aiming to alter that picture in light of alternatives — including much smaller, less impactful vehicles. Climate change is on everyone’s minds. We wonder how to forestall it. Zoning is another doorway into this larger conversation about Berkeley at midcentury — the new one, 2050.
What makes zoning a particularly good doorway is that it forces us to consider the actual form the city will take. Since 2050 is less than 30 years away, what we do today will have a direct impact on the city the next generation will experience. Like so much else we do at a city level, we’re really doing it for them. Midcentury Berkeley will be our legacy.
Along with revisiting zoning, we need to reform the approvals process. The glacial pace of ordinary growth — projects that meet zoning or only involve minor variances — has raised costs and made development at every scale a slog. Growth has become contentious. Much of it should be by-right.
City growth means finding ways to accommodate it at higher densities. One approach is to revive prewar typologies that were consciously designed to fit into a mixed context. Another is to look for germane precedents elsewhere. California’s possible push into social housing, proposed by legislators Alex Lee and Buffy Wicks, alludes to multi-family social housing examples in Vienna and Singapore, among other cities.
We have homegrown examples of community-based, multi-family housing that engaged future residents and neighbors in its planning and design. Not surprisingly, they gave as much weight to communal uses as to personal ones. They understood that in a multi-family context, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. This is just as true for neighborhoods and districts. The city’s role is both to set the stage for this evolution, making it possible through zoning and other measures, and to be the backstop residents can depend on to help deliver the bigger sum to which they agreed.
Hats off to Berkeley’s City Council for leading this conversation. Berkeley is making history by tackling these issues head on, and zoning is a great place to start. But it’s not enough for us just to make history — we have to make a future that 2050 Berkeleyans will love (and be grateful that we did it).
