Affordable Housing for Teachers Planned in Berkeley
Developers who are planning to build an affordable housing project on land owned by the Berkeley Unified School District are aiming for a specific group of tenants: teachers who work for the school district.
Los Angeles-based Abode Communities and Berkeley-based Satellite Affordable Housing are slated to start construction in March on a 110-unit multifamily campus at 1701 San Pablo Avenue, a site currently occupied by the Berkeley Adult School’s surface parking lot.
The joint venture said in application materials filed with the city that the units will have a preference for Berkeley Unified School District employees, the San Francisco Business Times reported.
“Teachers in California are feeling the housing pinch, especially in Berkeley where housing costs are among the highest in the state. By creating equitable housing options, teachers can live where they work and focus on what matters most, students,” said Holley Benson, president and CEO of Adobe Communities.
The San Pablo Ave. project is receiving $24.5M in funding from Berkeley’s Affordable Housing Bond Revenue, known as Measure O, a $135M fund for affordable and middle-income housing that was passed by Berkeley voters in 2018 with 78% approval.
The project is using SB 35, a law that provides a ministerial path to approval for projects with more than 50% designated affordable units, and it is invoking the state’s density bonus program. The campus at 1701 San Pablo will include 12 units designated for extremely low income households, 20 units for very low income households and 48 units for low income households.
In September, Berkeley and Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) reached an agreement to develop hundreds of affordable housing units on two parcels in proximity to the Ashby Station, a project that has been allocated $26.5M in Measure O bond funding.
In July, Berkeley amended its zoning code to encourage the development of more middle-income housing by making it possible to build higher density, multi-unit projects in single-family neighborhoods. Low-density neighborhoods, which include duplexes and small apartment buildings, were upzoned to increase unit density.
The amendments, which effectively limit single-family zoning in Berkeley to a few areas in the hillside at high risk of wildfires, also established a streamlined city review process for higher density projects with objective standards that, if met, allow approval by right.
Berkeley’s zoning amendments were adopted to facilitate the city’s state-mandated housing element plan, which requires Berkeley to plan for almost 9,000 new housing units during the current eight-year cycle.
In January 2023, the California Housing and Community Development (HCD) agency rejected Berkeley’s plan and told it to go further in upzoning neighborhoods in North Berkeley. The city amended the plan, which was then approved by HCD in March of last year.
State officials have estimated that more than 2.5M new homes will need to be added in California during the next eight years in order to address the Golden State’s housing shortage.
In August, California’s Department of Education (DOE) launched a statewide plan to develop housing on land owned by the state’s school districts. According to the state DOE, school districts in California own 7,000 properties encompassing 75,000 acres of developable land.
The Berkeley school district issued a request for development proposals for workforce housing in 2021.
Source: GlobeSt/ALM