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Photo: Pete Rosos
The Berkeley City Council unanimously denounced the racist history of single-family zoning in the city on Tuesday night, beginning a two-year process to change the city’s general plan and introduce more multi-unit housing in every part of the city.
Read our live-tweets from the City Council meeting on housing
As council members emphasized repeatedly during the late-night meeting the approved Resolution to End Exclusionary Zoning in Berkeley is just a document of intent, meaning it’s largely symbolic and doesn’t immediately change any city zoning rules. That’s a much longer, involved process that requires multiple handoffs between the Planning Commission and the City Council, and is slated to be completed by the end of 2022.
Berkeley may eliminate single-family zoning in neighborhoods like this one on Hillegass Avenue in The Elmwood. Photo: Frances Dinkelspiel
The future of Berkeley could be denser and less segregated, thanks to new proposals to scrap historically racist single-family zoning and legalize the widespread construction of fourplexes.
On Feb. 23, the City Council will vote on a resolution that could start a process to eliminate “exclusionary zoning” – typically viewed as the R1 or single-family-only zones that predominate in richer, whiter neighborhoods in North and Southeast Berkeley, by December 2022. Separately, the council and the mayor are considering allowing multiplexes in places zoned for single families, potentially opening the door for residents of more-diverse socioeconomic backgrounds.
When I was speaking across the country promoting the housing policy changes urged in my book,
Generation Priced Out, I did not foresee my hometown of Berkeley ending exclusionary zoning before Seattle, Denver and other cities. To the contrary, my book discusses how Berkeley’s 1973 “Neighborhood Preservation Ordinance” became a national model for using “neighborhood character” and “public input” to stop new apartments.
Through most of 2020, Berkeley refused to end exclusionary zoning. City officials would not even back Councilmember Lori Droste’s proposal to study allowing new “missing middle” fourplexes in many neighborhoods.
But that was prior to last November’s elections. Berkeley politics has since been transformed.
A Model For Other Cities?
When I was speaking across the country promoting the housing policy changes urged in Generation Priced Out, I did not foresee my hometown of Berkeley, California ending exclusionary zoning before Seattle, Denver and other cities. To the contrary, my book discusses how Berkeley’s 1973 “Neighborhood Preservation Ordinance” became a national model for using “neighborhood character” and “public input” to stop new apartments.
Through most of 2020, Berkeley refused to end exclusionary zoning. City officials would not even back Councilmember Lori Droste’s proposal to study allowing new “missing middle” fourplexes in many neighborhoods.
But that was prior to last November’s elections. Berkeley politics has since been transformed.