Features

DAPAC Chair Will Travis insists that a scenario for creating a new downtown Berkeley landscape studded with high-rise, apartment-filled “point towers” is solely for modeling purposes. 

During a recent meeting of the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee, Travis made a point of stressing this to a reporter covering the session. 

But city planning staff members have told the committee—charged with drafting a new plan by November—that they see the high-rises as a plausible way of accommodating the potential density mandated by the state and its regional arm, the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), in the city center. 

Putting it anywhere else, except on properties lining the city’s major transportation corridors, would meet with potentially insurmountable neighborhood opposition, city Planning Director Dan Marks has told the committee. 

The tower-studded high-density model, which will be presented to members Wednesday night, is one of two alternatives that will be used to craft the final model for DAPAC’s use in drafting a new downtown plan for Berkeley and for the preparation of environmental documents, which will be legally required before the ultimate version of the plan can be adopted by the City Council. 

DAPAC members will devote another session to discussion of the models on Wednesday, when they gather at 7 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. at Martin Luther King Jr. Way. 

The towers, projected at 16 stories, would rise to the height of one of the downtown’s two existing high-rises, the Wells Fargo building at the northwest corner of the University Avenue/Center Street intersection. 

It’s not that the housing will actually be built; that’s something that only the market can decide. ABAG’s mandate requires the city to be willing to accommodate the growth if and when investors are ready to back the digging of foundations and the pouring of concrete. 

Implementation of the high-density model would require major revisions to the city’s existing zoning ordinance, which theoretically limits buildings downtown to a maximum of seven stories—though Marks and downtown planner Matt Taecker say the practicalities of construction technology and costs limit heights to five stories. 

(Existing ordinances under the alternative “baseline” scenario are still loose enough that city housing staff was able to decide that developers of the mid-rise condo complex now nearing construction just across Center Street from the new Berkeley City College building were legally entitled to 14 stories—though the plans now being completed call for nine and a half floors, with an additional loft level on the penthouse level.)  

The second version, dubbed the “baseline scenario,” projects a continuation of existing city codes and policies, with the exception of the controversial “cultural bonus,” which in any case, Marks said, will die with the adoption of any new plan. 

Both models include the construction that is the reason a new plan is being created, the 800,000 square feet of new buildings and 1,000 parking spaces dictated in UC Berkeley’s Long Range Development Plan 2020. 

It was a lawsuit over the impacts of that plan that led to the university-funded planning effort, which will end with a new city plan for an expanded downtown area which encompasses the school’s ambitious expansion program. 

The Planning Commission will have its own go at the plan once DAPAC winds up by the end of November. 

The committee will also look at transportation scenarios which include alternatives for Shattuck Avenue, the downtown’s primary north/south corridor. All of the models include dedicated lanes for AC Transit’s developing Bus Rapid Transit program (BRT). 

Four models are proposed, three leaving the existing four lanes of car traffic: 

• One car lane in either direction, with parallel BRT lanes adjacent to the center dividers. 

• Two models leave the existing passenger car lanes, differing only because one has the BRT lanes adjacent to the median and the other has the BRT lanes closest to the dividers separating traffic from parking areas. 

• A fourth model with four car lanes and one northbound BRT lane that would loop east on University Avenue, then head south on Oxford/Fulton Street. In the three other models, northbound buses would loop around Shattuck Square to University Avenue before returning to the southbound Shattuck lanes. 

Also on the agenda for Wednesday’s meeting is a draft chapter of the plan’s Housing and Community Services element prepared by Marks, Taecker and Steve Barton and Jane Micallef of the city’s Housing Department.