Berkeley’s Zoning Adjustments Board has approved plans for a 20-story apartment tower at 2425 Durant Avenue in the Southside neighborhood. The development is poised to create 169 student-oriented units close to the UC Berkeley campus. Collabhome is the project developer.
2425 Durant Avenue view from across Telegraph Avenue, rendering by Yes Community Architects
2425 Durant Avenue sidewalk view, rendering by Yes Community Architects
Yes Community Architects is responsible for drafting the project. In a public statement published by the firm’s principal, Yes Duffy describes that the plan “organizes the tower into a series of ‘neighborhoods’—smaller social networks with community kitchens, study areas, and lounges—to support connection, wellness, and belonging in dense urban living. You can even see the community areas in the form and facade of the building.”
The development is expected to rise 208 feet tall to yield 148,940 square feet, including 130,970 square feet of housing and around 1,010 square feet of open space. Once complete, the structure will contain 169 units, with 105 studios, a one-bedroom unit, 46 two-bedroom apartments, and 17 three-bedroom apartments.
2425 Durant Avenue entry view, rendering by Yes Community Architects
2425 Durant Avenue, rendering by Yes Community Architects
Earlier this year, Berkeley City Council rejected an attempt to landmark the existing three structures on the site with 19 rent-controlled units, including an 1886-built Stick-style Victorian home, 1905-built flats, and a 1906 cottage that was expanded into a duplex in 1925.
2425 Durant Avenue elevation, illustration by Yes Community Architects
The application is now looking to feature 32 affordable homes, including six extremely low-income, seven very low-income, six low-income, and 13 moderate-income units. This consists of 19 units of replacement affordable housing25 for the existing residents.
2425 Durant Avenue, image via Google Street View
The 0.22-acre parcel is located between Dana Street and the busy Telegraph Avenue. The UC Berkeley campus’s primary southern entrance is just a block away, once on Telegraph Avenue. Rhoades Planning Group is the development consultant.
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Every 1-2 story structure in South Berkeley has a target on its back, and for good reason. Berkeley has seen the light…that it needs to build housing desperately, especially for students. Downtown Berkeley is going to feel like a very different place in 20 years. I wonder whether it will start to eat into Oakland’s demand / take residents from downtown Oakland.
Downtown Oakland has its own ecosystem of employment, amenities, cultural communities and proximity to jobs in SF. I don’t see this changing with more housing in downtown Berkeley. Every city needs to build like 5x what we have been averaging to push the needle from a demand perspective.
I’m mostly referring to avoiding crime. Downtown Oakland, and many areas nearby, still struggle with it. I have heard of multiple people leaving downtown or Lakeshore areas for places like Rockridge. Downtown Berkeley still provides access to SF, urban amenities and cultural communities, but without the drive-by shootings.
My point about Downtown Oakland is that its amenities are particular and unique. It’s not that Downtown Berkeley doesn’t have the same categories of urban features (perhaps except the Lake and waterfront proximity), it’s that Downtown Oakland’s ecosystem is one unto itself. And proximity to SF is much better, quatifiable in significant portions of ones life in commuting hours.
Crime is definitely as issue, and it has gone way down, but it is still a huge issue. It can be easily avoided when you know where and who to avoid, but that definitely doesn’t excuse it.
People always move away from urban cores. But fewer can afford to move to Rockridge, North Oakland or Berkeley, even if those are the folks you hear from. More are moving deeper into East Oakland, SL, Hayward or farther flung places in the outer or North East – East Bay.
While I think it’s true that Berkeley definitely needs more housing, and there are plenty of non-descript one or two-story buildings that should be replaced, this should be done in a thoughtful way. Instead, we have handed the reigns to Big Development. As a societ we are eventually going to regret destroying California’s robust environmental protection laws. It’s going to be like the 1960s all over again and within a decade downtown Berkeley will have all of the charm of Milpitas. And don’t get me started on all the greenfield sprawl that these new laws have incentivized. Well done all you East Coast YIMBYs!!!!
This is such a strange projection of your biases, I can’t tell if its genuine or sarcasm.
Nobody is building at a rate that would replace all the SFH’s in Berkeley, nor will the economics make that pan out fo a long time. If property owners decide to sell, or develop, however, that their right in a society with private property enshrined in our legal system. Yuo don’t get to bully them from selling or developing their property with illusions about neighborhood character or noise conerns that you manipulate CEQA for.
“Big Development” – many of the developers in Berkeley arenot “big,” and are local companies using local subs with local employees and local architects, engineers and consultants.
Robust environmental laws – CEQA was abolished for urban infill residential development under 80 feet high. Upzoning is primarly happening near dense transit corridors. No environments are threatened by this, we we get to offset urban sprawl into greenfields by allowing more urban development instead.
Spoken like a true Ayn Rand acolyte. I get the sense that YIMBYs stand for absolute property rights, something that we haven’t had in the USA since Victorian times, but yes, go on.
You guys are super strident with your “Build It” commentary. For the record, I think NIMBYs suck too, in large part because they have enabled this ridiculous black or white YIMBY backlash.
Actually, the environment includes historical resources. Check your CEQA, so yes, unrestricted development within cities can have significant adverse impacts.
And also, check out how SB330 is being used to justify greenfield development on prime farmland around Gilroy.
Not at all a Rand acolyte. I’m a Bernie and Lee voter.
It increasingly seems like you’re doing a very dumb bit, but we still can’t rule out that you’re also just both genuinely illiterate and lying.
Case in point, the CEQA exemptions apply to *INFILL* development.
“The project must be 20 acres or less, located in an incorporated municipality or urban area, on a previously developed or mostly surrounded site, not demolish historic structures, and meet minimum density thresholds.”
You cannot use the exemption to build low density detached single family sprawl outside of city limits or on the edges of cities where most surrounding land isn’t developed.
I cant speak to every person who wants more housing, but I think the YIMBY movement at its core is anti regulation when it comes to public goods that can easily be provided by the private sector (like market rate and near market rate housing) but pro-government when it comes to lifting people out of poverty and addressing market failures (universal healthcare, subsidized housing, paid family leave, support for poor families (through SNAP or UBI, or something else)).
But like what even is your point, you are saying you are pro housing, but this is an urban lot, with old-sub standard housing, near transit and a major employment and student center and its far away from any open space or waterway that could be adversely impacted. Its like the absolute most logical place for dense urban housing. If you are pro-housing but don’t like this site, where the heck would you approve of more housing? Also, CEQA is still intact for almost everything. It will still protect sensitive species and habitats in almost every situation where they exist. The carve outs only apply to urban sites that are already heavily impacted by prior development (for the most part). There is still such a tiny percentage of the state getting developed with multi-family housing anyway, its just such a non-issue in terms of impacts of any kind anyway.
FINALLY! one of these recently approved Berkeley towers with a decent design!
While not located right on the main arteries of Shattuck or University Ave, this project answers earlier criticisms about the sad lack of design quality and diversity in almost every one of the towers proposed for downtown Berkeley in recent years. If it is built with the reality approaching the quality in the renderings, just proves the point that good design is not entirely dependent on budget and the market, rather it is primarily the result of good designers being involved!
Durant Ave is a much busier area for pedestrian traffic than Shattuck and University. This is a much more ideal location for a student housing project.
How someone could extrapolate from a story about a 20 story student apartment tower into “Downtown Berkeley will look like Milpitas” boggles my mind. And given the historic use of CEQA. preservation elements NIMBYs would start using it to preserve 1975 7-11s and abandoned gas stations so yeah, the preservation fetish needed to be pushed back. Much more attractive than the shabby generic old boxes its is replacing
Sorry, you must be from Milpitas. Substitute Frisco, Texas, or any other banal exurb you want.
Thing is, Californians are finally waking up to what this astroturf, neo-liberal, developer-shilling YIMBY flim-flam really means.
Roadkill could speak more intelligently on these issues than you could ever hope to McWeiner. All the performative bs and lying on your part is genuinely pathetic and consistently debunked by basic facts.
I suspect that most of the Wiener/Wicks developer giveaways will be overturned once Californians realize that a cabal of high-income East Coast transplants has literally given away the store to developers.
YIMBY is already vociferously opposed in Los Angeles, where Latino workingclass residents realize that YIMBY = gentrification and displacement.
Look it up.
Berkeley has somewhat strict laws about displacement. Ask any landlord and they’ll tell you evicting rent controlled tenants is borderline impossible. Plus Berkeley is investing into public housing / below-market deeded units.
Regardless, development will allow more people to stay in Berkeley, since they’ll be, well, more housing.
If we don’t build anything then it’s guaranteed that south Berkeley will be fully gentrified away and all residents will be displaced. Demand is just that high.
Building reduces displacement. It does not increase it. Stop lying.
Gentrification is a meaningless word.
There was not an “attempt” to landmark this property. The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated it as such. The
City Council overturned the designation at the request of the developers! Are the developers so blind that they cannot see there is at least one building worth preserving on the site???
2 units that will make way for 169 units.
Math is hard, but no, there’s nothing worth preserving when it comes to these ratty shacks. The pearl clutchers can fork over the money to relocate their prized shanties or start paying taxes on the true value of their properties. Near-homeless citizens shouldn’t have to subsidize prime urban low-density.
The LPC landmarked it only after the developer proposed the project. The LPC did not landmark it when the Southside Plan spent years being drafted and all sites had been studied ahead of rezoning. Before the development, these houses were understood to be unremarkable and common Victorian units just a few feet from the world’s number 1 public university. The council reversed the landmark that would’ve prevented 169 households from living in Berkeley.
The Victorians could or should be moved to some other location in the East Bay but certainly not preserved over critically needed housing as BAHA attempted to do.
Also, I dont know any part of Milpitas that looks anything like this. Soon downtown Berkeley will have the charm of Brooklyn, NY.
As I understand it Berkeley invented residential zoning laws that became a model for the rest of the country and was the progenitor of NIMBYs obsession with preserving neighborhoods character.
Prior to the zoning laws that delightful mix of commercial, apartments and homes all intertwined. Was allowed.
ADU cottages were in backyards of large residential lots much as they will rise once again now that we have ended the onerous restrictions on backyard developments among other changes in housing laws.
And the fact Berkeley is now even building miidrise residential towers makes the full circle complete in housing laws in about 100 years time. Not a moment too soon to be sure.
As an aside I want to relay the mindset of one NIMBY in Berkeley whom I had encountered back in the teens who was speaking adamantly at a community meeting against building 4 story apartment buildings on San Pablo Ave in Berkeley.
Even for anti development advocates this seemed incredibly over the top as I couldn’t imagine anyplace more suitable to at least that type of development on an underutilized transportation corridor like that.
At the meeting I politely asked if she was aware of the acute housing shortage in Berkeley and the region as a whole and she said she wasn’t against building housing, just not there”.
Where would she then propose to build it I asked and there was for once nothing coming out of her mouth other that a bewildered look of astonishment that someone in the audience actually questioned her position against housing development on San Pablo , as was being proposed at the time.
The emcee at the community event later took her aside to explain that she should expect this kind of questioning of her position as a lot of people were becoming concerned at the lack of housing being built in the city that was exacerbating rents and driving homelessness.
I think this might have even been one of those turning points in public opinion in real time.
Yes it’s true that Durant (and Channing, Haste) would be good locations for more vertical infill close to campus. But I do think it needs to be done thoughtfully and possibly with some setbacks & tapered heights. I’ve noticed that the buildings put in along Bancroft cast a shadow all day long. No sunlight getting through impacts landscape, even along the edge of campus. Not against large projects, just that they do need to be well-considered, since we’ll all have to live with them into the 22d century.
(Also…are pseudonym OK here. Scott “Mc”Wiener. Really? If you’re not Senator Wiener, use your real name. Or a better made up one.) 🙄