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Presented with three significant documents—recommendations on UC Berkeley downtown developments, ground-floor uses and a proposed economic development package—citizen planners held off any final action Wednesday. 

Members of the Downtown Area Planning Advisory Committee—DAPAC—face a November deadline to complete their work on recommendations for a new downtown plan designed to accommodate 800,000 square feet of UC Berkeley uses in the city center, along with 1,200 parking spaces. 

Dorothy Walker, chair of the Subcommittee on City Interests in University Properties, presented the report of that panel, along with Kerry O’Banion, a UC planner who has served as an ex officio representative to DAPAC. 

Watching from the audience was Emily Marthinsen, the university’s assistant vice chancellor for Physical and Environmental Planning Capital Projects. 

Walker’s subcommittee was comprised of representatives of the university and DAPAC, heavily weighted with committee members who have found themselves in the minority in votes on key policy issues. 

The panel’s only consistent dissident was Helen Burke, a planning commissioner and Sierra Club activist who has consistently voted with the DAPAC majority. 

“A huge change of mind occurred,” said Walker, “and it’s a tribute to us that we were open.” 

The central change was the realization that “downtown will be not be attractive to big retail” like the department stores many had hoped to entice to the city. Instead, Berkeley needs to build on its strengths as an arts and cultural center and as a center of learning. 

“The plan must encourage arts and education first,” and work on attracting youth and the large university population to downtown attractions, she said. 

Walker, a retired UC Berkeley assistant vice chancellor for property development, praised her former employer. “All the work was done very collaboratively,” she said. “The university representatives repeatedly asked how they should be using their land downtown. They were very responsive.” 

O’Banion devoted most of his presentation to the two-block-long site of the former state Department of Health Services building at 2151 Berkeley Way, awarded to the university by the state legislature in September 2005. 

UC sites 

That property is one of three key development sites in what the university’s Long Range Development Plan (LRDP)—the document that sparked the lawsuit resulting in DAPAC’s creation—dubbed the “west adjacent blocks” where downtown development would take place. 

The other two sites are the location of the planned Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive and the Tang Center parking lot, the square block at the southeast corner of the intersection of Fulton Street and Bancroft Way. 

The Tang site is where the university plans to erect a “surge building,” an office complex to house staff and functions displaced during mandated seismic retrofit of campus buildings—though the subcommittee has hopes that faculty housing might be built on the southern edge of the block. 

But the DHS building is the site of the most intensive planned development, once the existing structure is demolished, O’Banion said. 

The proposed new use is as a “Community Health Campus,” shared by the schools of public health and optometry and the departments of neuroscience and psychology. 

“All four have outreach programs and subjects coming in for assistance and diagnosis. The optometry clinic is very heavily used, and there is also a lot of outreach. They are all good, likely candidates to be off the main campus,” he said. 

The university even has a slogan for the project “From Publication to Public Action,” summarizing the range of services planned for the new facility, ranging from research (publication) to action (treatment and public health measures). 

Gene Poschman, a DAPAC member planning commissioner, raised immediate questions: first, how would the site handle the traffic? 

“Health care facilities are probably the greatest traffic generators, except maybe for Trader Joe’s,” he quipped. 

O’Banion said the necessary studies hadn’t been done.  

“One solution might be one level of parking under all or part of the building,” he said. 

The non-agreement 

While university officials have said all along they’re willing to grant the city retail uses along the site’s Shattuck Avenue frontage, Poschman pointed out that the legislation transferring the property from one state agency to another included requiring the grant of the first 75 feet of property depth along the street for retail use. 

While the university was recommending a depth of 100 feet, O’Banion said, there was no agreement to allow any commercial use, because the law also stipulated that the grant of retail use would only apply if approved by UC’s Board of Regents—an action never taken. “Therefore, it’s not a mandatory agreement,” O’Banion said, evoking murmurs from committee members and the audience. 

“But it’s a state law,” said DAPAC member Wendy Alfsen. 

“Unfortunately, the law said it takes effect only if there’s an action by the regents which has never occurred,” Walker responded. 

Subcommittee members had requested the 100-foot depth based on comments from business advisors and planning staff, who said that much depth would be needed to attract so-called “junior retailers” like Pottery Barn and major electronic stores, the types of businesses they said Berkeley might be able to entice. 

Housing questions 

Other questions centered on where to house the university population in light of the university’s declaration that no new housing would be built on the campus itself, as well as the question of whom to house. 

The subcommittee’s only reference was to faculty housing, something the university admits it sorely needs, and that was only mentioned as part of a discussion of the Tang Center lot, as a recommendation to build housing along the site’s Durant Avenue frontage. 

Jesse Arreguin, a Cal student and city zoning commissioner, said he was very concerned that housing for graduate and undergraduate students wasn’t covered in the subcommittee report, in light of recommendations in both the university’s LRDP and New Century Plan that both the Tang and the University Hall sites—the latter at University Avenue and Oxford Street—should be considered for student housing. 

“We’re not ruling that out, if we can show that student housing downtown is fully utilized, which it is not,” said Mim Hawley, a subcommittee and former city council member, citing vacancies in the recently completed Library Gardens apartments downtown. “There’s plenty of room on campus,” she said, which would be good for ailing Telegraph Avenue businesses. 

O’Banion later reiterated that the university would build no housing on campus, and said the university had two sites south of campus where new units could be built on university-owned parking lots. 

“As long as it’s within two blocks of campus on the south side, we don’t have to worry,” said Hawley. 

Arreguin said he was concerned because the LRDP projected housing as far from campus as San Pablo Avenue and Oakland, which raised questions of safety and access to campus services. 

Rob Wrenn, a transportation commissioner and a parent of college students, said off-campus housing not owned by the university was often a better deal for students, cheaper and without the obligation to sign a hefty contract that included meals. 

Other questions 

Alfsen asked if the university planned to install any facilities from its controversial $500 million biofuel program funded by the former British Petroleum in the downtown area.  

“We’re still working that out,” O’Banion said, though he didn’t anticipate that it would be included in any of the 800,000 square feet cited in the LRDP. 

Walker said the subcommittee had also considered recommendations that the university relocate its planned Student Athlete High Performance Center from the current planned site west of Memorial Stadium—where protesters have been lodged since Dec. 2, high in the branches of a grove of oaks and other trees that would be killed to make way for the $125 million high tech gym. 

Jim Novosel, a recent DAPAC appointee, said he would recommend that the university relocate the gym to the site of the old extension building next to Edward Stadium on Oxford Way. “I strongly recommend that we reserve that site for a building,” he said. 

The fate of the gym at the stadium is currently tied up in lawsuits, which have also stalled other projects in the area. 

After minor revisions, the subcommittee’s report will return to the full committee for more discussion and a vote—including a decision on whether or not it should form a university element many members want to see in the plan—but which Walker and Chair Will Travis have opposed.