Citizens' Information Forum
Tuesday, January 17, 7:00 pm
South Berkeley Senior Center
Welcome, thanks for coming out despite the bad weather.
I'm Robert Lauriston, and I'm acting as moderator tonight. I live across from BART on Woolsey Street and have been involved as a participant and organizer in several successful neighborhood efforts to influence proposed developments, including the Ed Roberts Campus and the so-called "flying bungalow" at 3045 Shattuck. Full disclosure, I donated $250 to Max Anderson's city council campaign, thougth that doesn't mean he returns my phone calls.
So--why are we here? On December 13, the city council voted to support an application for a $120,000 grant from Caltrans to design a transit village at Ashby BART with a minimum of 300 units of housing plus retail space. Since that was the first public announcement of plans for such a project, we organized this meeting to give neighbors the background information necessary to understand what's going on and to provide an opportunity for the neighborhood to take the lead on this issue.
By proposing a specific development before consulting the neighborhood, the city has put the cart before the horse. Why housing and retail? Why not, say, recreational facilities or a park? We as a community need to start at square one and answer the fundamental question: What sort of development, if any, do we want on that site? Since the city hasn't bothered to consult us, it looks like we may have to figure that out for ourselves, and tell them.
Here's our plan for the meeting. First, I'll give a brief factual overview of the situation. Then I'll introduce the panelists, each of whom will speak for up to seven minutes. After that, we'll have public questions and comments, up to two minutes per person, so please hold your questions or comments until then.
The city is planning its own meeting, at which Mayor Bates, our council member Max Anderson, and the proposed project director Ed Church will pitch their project. So in this meeting we'll play catchup.
The city started talking about developing Ashby BART even before the station was built. In 1967, the city did a study that included four prototype designs including various configurations of housing and open space. Due to the expense of building an underground garage for BART commuters, nothing was built.
In the late 90s, the city started working on locating the Ed Roberts Campus on the east parking lot. The idea of the ERC is to consolidate the offices of various organizations that provide services or lobby for the disabled, such as the Center for Independent Living, into one building.
The original proposal was for a block-long, three-story building with inadequate parking. Neighborhood opposition was fairly strong until the ERC cut the proposal to two stories and convinced neighbors that it would provide adequate parking for its own uses and not eliminate any BART parking.
In February 2001, the city council passed a policy resolution that housing should be built on the west parking lot, with the vague provisos that "to the extent possible, housing should be affordable and available to public sector workers. If necessary, replacement parking and movement of Berkeley Flea Market to another site should be considered." This resolution was rushed through without giving the public a chance to hear about or comment on a proposal from the Jewish Federation of the Greater Bay Area to build a community center that would have included a gym and several swimming pools. A subsequent feasibility study found that building housing was economically unfeasible on the site, again due to the high cost of providing parking for BART commuters.
At that time, BART had a one-to-one replacement policy: any development at a BART station had to provide the same number of parking spaces for commuters as it displaced. Last year, BART changed that policy, and parking spaces for commuters can now be eliminated so long as the development promises to draw enough new commuters from or to the station to make up the difference. This change apparently started the series of events that brought us here tonight.
So what exactly is a "transit village"? The term has been used to describe a wide variety of developments around transit hubs, and may include any mix of retail, office, public spaces, community facilities, open space, and housing. The Ed Roberts Campus, which is an office building, has sometimes been called a transit village in order to qualify for government grants.
In contrast, a "transit village development district" is a legal tool that, according to California law, is intended to increase mass transit use and decrease automobile use. The City Council could declare most of the quarter-mile area around Ashby station a transit village development district, entitling all developments in that area to a 25 percent density bonus.
A transit village development district is not a redevelopment district: declaring one would not give the city the right to seize private property under eminent domain. However, there are proposals before the state legislature that would change that. Declaring a transit village development district would thus cede some local control over development standards to the state.
Mayor Tom Bates and our council representative Max Anderson are on record saying the city will not use eminent domain as part of this project, and that no construction is planned outside of the BART parking lot. However, they have not explicitly disavowed declaration of a transit village devlopment district.
As publicly described to date, the city's proposal is vague and confusing, partly because its proponents have contradicted themselves.
The grant application refers to a 6.5 acre site and says that, at 50 units per acre, that would be at least 300 units. For comparison, Lorin Station, the three-story mixed-use building at the corner of Adeline and Harmon, is 47 units per acre. Ed Church told the City Council on December 13 that the buildable portion of the site was only four or five acres so 300 units was probably the maximum rather than the minimum.
The grant application says 80% of these units would be market-rate, which reflects the Berkeley zoning code's minimum requirement that 20% be affordable to households with below-median income. Unfortunately, since by state law the median income used is of all Alameda County households, this does not result in units that are more affordable to Berkeley renters, who on average have much lower income. For example, last I heard the official maximum rent for a quote-unquote "affordable" studio in Berkeley was $863; ads for Berkeley studios on Craig's List last week ranged from $595 to $860.
In an op-ed piece they wrote for the Daily Planet, Mayor Bates and council member Anderson disavowed any specific proposal. They said the purpose of the grant is to fund a public process to quote "coordinate meetings with the community to develop a shared vision for the project" unquote, and only if that process is successful would a developer be chosen.
The grant application does not describe such an open-ended process, or such a large role for the public. It describes the primary goal is an agreement among the city, the South Berkeley Neighborhood Development Corporation, and a for-profit developer to build a mixed-use project with a minimum of 300 units of housing plus retail and arts spaces. As envisioned by the grant application, public participation would focus on the details of that project, such as rentals versus condos, or what kind of retail.