City Adopts Southside Development Plan

Discussions that led to the Southside Plan began more than 25 years ago —and ended Tuesday night with a unanimous council vote approving the plan.

The plan for future development of Berkeley’s Southside — located roughly between Dwight and Bancroft ways and between Prospect and Fulton streets — will serve as a guidepost for the city council and commissions when they make land use and transportation decisions for the area over at least the next decade.

The plan indicates where dense housing should be located — closer to the university — and where less dense housing is permitted; it speaks to the need to create student housing near the university and affordable housing near jobs; it talks about prioritizing pedestrians and bicyclists over drivers; it aims to buffer neighborhood residences from commercial areas (the various plan documents are available on the city's website.)

The difficulty in writing the plan reflects the diverse neighborhood it targets. “A complex conundrum is that the Southside must be a place which is at once easy to get to, yet where the transportation system and related infrastructure do not overwhelm or destroy the very qualities which draw people to the area,” states the plan description.  

While the Southside is just an area of 28 city blocks — 2.5 percent of the Berkeley’s land area — more than 11,000 people live there. “The Southside is a true mixed-use neighborhood offering residents and visitors housing, offices, retail shops, schools, churches, social institutions, parks and open space, recreational facilities, and parking,” the plan says. Southside borders on the university which attracts thousands of students, workers and visitors every day. The plan attempts to address “the sometimes conflicting values and needs of different community stakeholders.”

Those “conflicting values” brought more than a dozen students to the council meeting Tuesday night. Most of them were residents of the student co-operatives. They had come to ask the council to support affordable student housing as part of the plan. Specifically, they were asking the council to tell the university not to charge developers of student housing on university land a 4 percent “capital renewal fee” that would raise costs and ultimately make the student housing less affordable.

Many co-op residents are from low income families. “This [fee] would severely impact the affordability for students living in the co-ops,” said Adilene Lopez Valenzuela, representative to the Berkeley Student Co-operative Board from Fenwick, one of the student co-ops.

“I urge the Berkeley City Council to make student housing a priority in the Southside Plan,” Elaina Marshalek, board president of the Berkeley Students Cooperative, told the council, further asking that the council support a request to the university to exempt student housing from the fee.

The council responded by adding the students’ request to the plan. The addition “encourages the university to revise the ... capital renewal fee to provide blanket exemption for student housing.”

The university, however, is not subject to city zoning laws, although Councilmember Kriss Worthington, whose district includes the Southside, says he believes it will honor the plan.