Plans have been approved for an 11-story apartment complex at 2900-2920 Shattuck Avenue in South Berkeley, Alameda County. The approval brings 242 residential units closer to reality at a low-slung commercial lot directly across from the Berkeley Bowl grocery store. NX Ventures is the project sponsor.
Stackhouse De la Peña Trachtenberg Architects is responsible for the design. Facade materials will include wood-look siding and insulated panels. The exterior will feature a checker pattern and Juliet balconies.
2920 Shattuck Avenue establishing view, rendering by SDT Architects
2920 Shattuck Avenue seen from across Ashby Avenue, rendering by SDT Architects
Details about the project remain unchanged since our last coverage. The 125-foot-tall structure is expected to total 131,600 square feet, including 127,860 square feet of housing and 3,720 square feet of ground-level retail. Of the 242 units, 219 will be studios, nine one-bedrooms, 13 two-bedrooms, and one three-bedroom residence. The complex will provide parking for 68 bicycles and 13 vehicles. Residents will get access to a ground-level backyard garden and two rooftop decks.
The development will include 30 units of affordable housing, of which 22 will be for very-low-income households and eight for moderate-income households. The inclusion of below-market-rate housing allowed the application to use the State Density Bonus law to increase residential capacity above base zoning with various waivers and concessions. For 2900 Shattuck Avenue, the application requested waivers for zoning rules related to open space, bicycle parking, height limits, front setbacks, lot coverage, and the floor area ratio.
2920 Shattuck Avenue corner retail view, rendering by SDT Architects
2900 Shattuck Avenue site outlined, image via Google Satellite
The 0.45-acre property is located at the corner of Shattuck Avenue and Russell Street. Future residents will live across from the Berkeley Bowl grocery store and two blocks away from the Ashby BART Station.
Demolition will be required for two existing commercial structures and a surface parking lot. Construction is expected to last around 16 months from groundbreaking to completion. Work is estimated to start early next year.
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A block from transit and a grocer next door. No better location to pile on this density (besides those scorched BART parking lots).
Good looking project, well scaled and good active zone to support retail. Love it.
But..but…is the parking lot historic?🤪
Maybe the concrete can be cut up and relocated to another location
Why do YIMBYs keep saying this? The only “historic” parking lot I know of is the West Berkeley Shellmound, and that is historic because it’s built on top of an Ohlone archaeological site. Trust me, no one is landmarking run of the mill parking lots.
Check your sources, bud. Wrong again, like usual.
“Is this S.F. parking garage really worthy of historic preservation?”
April 8, 2025 – SF Chronicle
“The Beautiful Facades of San Francisco’s Historic Parking Garages”
October 13, 2015 – National Trust for Historic Preservation
Mate, there is a big difference between a flat expanse of asphalt and a three-dimensional building – regardless of its use, but yes, including some garages – that may or may not have architectural or hsitorical significance.
Pendatic NIMBY for the win!
Enjoy the progress.
The fact that we would even consider blocking infill housing to preserve any kind of parking structure shows how unserious California/the USA is about tackling both the housing crisis and climate change. Actually progressive cities around the world are running laps around us while we’re stuck in an unaffordable and environmentally damaging status quo.
The current historic preservation efforts in the Castro and North Beach absolutely include preserving parking lots/structures. And in 2021 the “progressive” wing of the SF BOS voted to block infill housing on top of a parking lot at 469 Stevenson in SOMA, citing a desire to protect the neighborhood from gentrification(???). We keep on getting in our own way in the bay area, and the result is sky high rent (but plenty of parking, yay!)
Two more thriving businesses eliminated and a couple of hundred more unaffordable units that will be occupied mostly by people who don’t use transit.
I agree it’s unfortunate to lose the independently-owned hardware store. But I’m not sure what leads you to predict that the residents of 242 homes sharing 13 parking spaces 2 blocks from BART won’t use transit.
Where all do you think people are going on BART? Their jobs (most won’t have jobs)? Grocery shopping? I used to commute on BART back in the 80s – it was clean and well maintained with security. Now I wouldn’t take BART if my life depended on it.
Get a load of this loser. 😂
Are the 204,800 daily trip averages for September just fake news?
Hardly a loser. I made the correct choice to move out of the disgusting Bay Area and now live out on the beautiful Sacramento Delta. Grew up in El Cerrito – everything around Berkeley and Oakland is now a sewer. Places I used to frequent are now full of homeless people.
Peanut, I believe you’d be pleasantly surprised if/when you ride BART again. It’s clean and well maintained with security. (New and much more formidable fare gates have helped it become a safer system.) BART is not to be feared!
Uber and Lyft if they don’t own there own cars.
If you’re legitimately concerned about businesses being displaced, you should push for new developments to incorporate them in their completed projects.
Otherwise, Occam’s razor says it’s just another excuse to block housing, which is usually the case.
I don’t care about Occam’s Razor or what you think is usual. I’m in favor of affordable housing and new construction is fine with me but there is limited space for new building and affordability should be the rule not the exception.
30 new affordable housing units. Sounds pretty good to me.
The rich/upper middle class are gonna swallow up units regardless.
We see this all over the Bay Area and other in-demand cities. It doesn’t matter if it’s 100 years old or 20. If the area is hot, they will come.
If you over supply units that are not $8k/mo, more like $2-3k, there is very real tangible evidence of this helping alleviate market pressures. To date, we have not even begun the scratch the surface of oversupply. The fact that tract housing in the middle nowhere Gilroy and Central Valley continue to sell out proves our major cities have tons more work to do.
There’s nothing Fluffy McWhiskers hates more than housing for families than urban sprawl on undeveloped land.
We’ve got three choices.
– Build up our cities
– Build up our virgin land
– Lose more congressional representation to red states
The primary limitation on building affordable housing projects isn’t land, it’s funding. Funding for 100% affordable projects comes public funding, which is unfortunately limited. We can and should continue trying to get more funding for affordable housing, but projects like this provide affordable units by building market rate units that cross-subsidize the affordable ones. It’s basically “free” affordable housing that doesn’t use the limited public dollars for housing, resulting in more total affordable housing construction.
And that’s without even considering the benefit of building the market rate housing itself, which reduces our overall housing supply shortage and helps keep costs lower for everyone across the board.
Does it really cut costs for everyone? If you charge more for housing that locks out a good segment of the market. In the meantime you take up space with unaffordable housing. Housing units are not like widgets. It’s not in the interests of developers to charge less. Thousands of new units are being built yet rents keep going up. The main cause of homelessness is affordability and were wasting opportunities to actually deal with the problem.
Who will clean this building when all of the windows inevitably become dirty? Look at the rust already on some of the Shattuck “new” apartments. Have you look recently at the apartments this architect built on 6th street and University? The panels are already discoloring. Why doesn’t this hack architect build this monster building in the hills instead of gentrifying downtown? Stop the greed! Keep downtown buildings 3-4 stories high. 3 to 4 stories is the height of buildings that create community and well being. Read The Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander and stop this Architect from ruining a very nice neighborhood. Stop Him from blighting the landscape for future generations.