Page One

The Library Gardens development, a five-building, 176-unit residential complex to be built behind the Berkeley Public Library, was approved by the Zoning Adjustments Board Thursday night. 

The project is the latest, but certainly not the last, of the major housing projects planned for the downtown area.  

A number of developers have recently set their sights on downtown – currently, there are at least four mid-sized to large housing developments apart from Library Gardens working their way through the city’s planning and permits process, for a total of 267 new apartments and condominiums. 

The rush to downtown seems to come in anticipation of the city’s new General Plan, which, if it is approved as expected next month, will place an emphasis on new housing construction in the center of the city. 

John DeClercq, senior vice president of TransAction Companies, which led the Library Gardens project, didn’t get the “9-0” vote he had hoped for from the ZAB, but he did come close. The board voted 7-1 on the project, with board member Carrie Sprague dissenting and board member Lawrence Capitelli absent. 

Sprague did have praise for Library Gardens’ “clever design,” but she said on Friday that out of concern for the neighborhood, she could not countenance the project’s intensive construction schedule. 

“They were very insistent that they wanted to work all day,” she said. “That’s the main thing I was worried about.” 

Library Gardens, with its 134,000 square feet of new floor space, is the largest housing development in Berkeley in recent memory. But it appears that much more is soon to follow in the downtown area, with the result that the economic and social dynamics of the city may be dramatically altered. 

The final draft of the Berkeley General Plan (July, 2001) calls for an increase in housing downtown in response to two needs: the housing crisis in the city and the Bay Area, and the ongoing revitalization of downtown. 

Steve Barton, director of the city’s Housing Department, said on Friday that he was pleased with the approval of Library Gardens, and that he looked forward to similar projects. Too often, he said, people want affordable housing but do not want either sprawl or greater density in urban areas. 

“People are in favor of housing in the abstract, but not in any particular place,” he said. “So it’s nice that in Berkeley there’s a general consensus to build new housing downtown.” 

Barton said that the housing crisis threatened the very character of the city, and that increased housing supply was one of the only ways that Berkeley could preserve its culture.  

“Often people here are not making as much money as they could if they wanted to,” he said. “People in Berkeley choose to work in research, or for a nonprofit, or in the arts, etc. That’s Berkeley’s role in the Bay Area, and if rents are not affordable, it is threatened.” 

The draft General Plan emphasizes residential development in the downtown partly because it well-served by mass transportation and partly because it could contribute to the area’s renaissance. Shattuck Avenue was once the unequivocal center of the city, but in the 1980’s it was injured, like many downtowns, by the nationwide exodus of people and business to the suburbs. 

Though revitalization programs in the 1990’s have been partly successful, the area still has not recovered its former glory. The downtown accounts for only 10 percent of all retail sales in the city – a figure equivalent to that of Telegraph Avenue, and dwarfed by West Berkeley’s 50 percent. 

Now, the hope is to invigorate the downtown by moving more people into the neighborhood. In the words of the Downtown Berkeley Association, “new permanent housing will increase street life, pedestrian traffic and a sense of community... and will generate increased demand for retail businesses – some of which are currently unavailable in the downtown.” 

If new residents are brought in, the thinking goes, new commercial and retail space will follow. The plan is reminiscent of Mayor Jerry Brown of Oakland’s pledge to bring in 10,000 new residents to revitalize the downtown of his city. 

Though the plan does enjoy widespread support, some people are beginning to voice their concerns. 

Carrie Olson, a long-time Berkeley resident and a member of the city’s Design Review Committee, said Friday that she wants to make sure that the diversity of downtown is preserved. 

“I want the growth to be sensible,” she said. “I want to have a mixed community in the downtown, a community that represents Berkeley as a whole.” 

Olson said that the Design Review Committee recently gave the ZAB an unfavorable report on one of the larger new projects being proposed for downtown. The units in the building were too small to support families or older couples, who usually want more living space than students. 

“If we end up with just students downtown, we will get another version of Telegraph Avenue,” she said. “Some of the new projects may not do their best to discourage that.” 

Olson said she was somewhat suspicious of the notion that increased housing would necessarily bring more retail opportunities, or more liveliness generally, to the downtown.  

“What works about a successful urban space – like some parts of Paris – is that you can go downstairs, out on the street and find what you need to cook dinner,” she said. “That doesn’t exist in the downtown right now.” 

“Part of the city’s responsibility is to make sure those services – grocery stores, laundries, drug stores, all the things you need for daily life – will be there.” 

But Victoria Eisen, the principal planner for the Association of Bay Area Governments’ Smart Growth Strategy project, said that Berkeley’s strategy to promote housing downtown fits perfectly with the vision of “Smart Growth” her group is developing. 

“It’s true that when people move into these units right now, there may be not be a supermarket you can walk to,” she said. “What Berkeley and other communities are doing is to bring in residents to support existing services, and hopefully attract new services.”