Brian Lee-Mounger Hendershot is the managing editor for Western City magazine; he can be reached at bhendershot@calcities.org. Additional contributions by Jackie Krentzman, a Bay Area-based writer and editor.

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Berkeley was the first city in the U.S. to enact single-family zoning. Now, it’s one of several cities upzoning vast chunks of land to incentivize courtyard apartments and other modest, multi-unit forms of housing. It’s a sharp turnaround from even a few years ago, when Rigel Robinson, one of the state’s rising political stars, left city council after years of harassment for his efforts to get policies like this across the finish line.

“We’ve seen a dramatic shift in attitudes, and it’s permeated even the normies — not just the nerds like me,” says Lori Droste, a former council member and policy wonk who leads SPUR’s planning and housing policy wing. “You’re hearing a lot more that, if we want to address affordability, we have to talk about creating housing because it is a public good.”

To understand just how significant this change is, you need to understand just how complicated the city’s attitude towards housing has been.

A contradicting legacy

The city’s original zoning plan was created to separate poor people of color from rich white people, a practice that perpetuates inequality to this day. But a few decades later, the city council banned racial discrimination in housing sales and rentals — which was then temporarily repealed by a referendum. By the late 1960s, the city’s countercultural progressive bent had become wrapped up with a healthy suspicion of developers that intensified in the dot-com era as luxury apartment construction increased.

According to Mark Rhoades, the city’s planning manager from 1997 to 2007, the city was approving about six new units per year gross on average before his tenure. It wasn’t uncommon for solar panels or tomato plants to block new housing.

“When I started development at Berkeley 35 years ago, I would go to public meetings and be compared to Hitler, Attila the Hun — I’m not exaggerating,” chuckles Patrick Kennedy, a longtime local developer. “The local paper called [an eight-story building I built] a Stalinist monstrosity and monument to civic corruption.”

At the time, the structure was the largest building in the city built since 1972.

Today, public sentiment is much different. One tempting read is that those attitudes only started to shift in recent years as housing prices reached dizzying new heights. But by the 90s, academics were already concerned about the impact sprawling neighborhoods can have on the environment. In many communities, those conversations might have remained siloed to academia and bureaucrats. But in Berkeley, a city home to a famous university, those concerns began to bubble up at the community level.

“I think the regulatory environment is what really needed to shift, and that shifted in part due to changes in state law, but also local political leadership — people wanting to pursue zoning reform in Berkeley and make it a priority,” Jordan Klein, the city’s planning and development director, says. He notes that the work on the city’s first big zoning change began in 2008, which resulted in an explosion of housing downtown years later.

Still, these changes didn’t come easily. Rhoades says the city was sued around ten times over housing projects during his tenure. The city won each case, many of which became case law.

“We were fighting bloody battles every week to try and push housing projects through,” says Rhoades, once referred to as a “duplicitous insect” in a local paper. “It was a firestorm for 10 years.” 

That firestorm seems to have been worth it. Adena Ishii, the city’s current mayor, won a tight race in 2024 on a campaign built, in part, on more density. Ishii, a relative political outsider, won endorsements from several high-profile politicians well-known for advancing big, ambitious housing legislation.

“Everything was a battle back then, but that’s all changed in the last five years,” says Kennedy, the developer. “And now I think Berkeley leadership is probably among the most enlightened in the state.”

From toothless to one of the first

When the Berkeley City Council outlawed racial discrimination in housing sales and rentals, they did so a few months before the state did. And in recent years, the city has continued to be ahead of, or in lock step with, the state’s shifting housing rules. The city and many of its residents have also largely embraced affordable housing development. An affordable housing bond handily cleared a two-thirds majority in 2018, as did a measure authorizing over 3,000 units of affordable housing in 2022. The city also has a housing trust fund, financed by a variety of sources, including developers and the federal government.

Still, something like a missing middle housing policy, which went into effect on Nov. 1, was never a sure thing. The policy allows developers to build small apartment buildings in the city’s flatland residential neighborhoods. (City leaders excluded the city’s hilly communities over fire concerns.)

When Droste first introduced the concept with Robinson and others in 2019, council meetings devolved into screaming matches. A community member even assaulted one council member in part over the policy. By this summer, the mood had shifted: The city council voted unanimously in favor of the update, making it one of the first cities in the state to enact such a policy.

The key, says Droste, was starting small — first with legislation to study the concept, which was upended by the pandemic. Two years later, she introduced an “admittedly completely toothless” resolution laying out the council’s commitment to addressing structural barriers to housing, followed by legislation to do just that at the next meeting.

“That’s the way we have to do this, in a way that we’re going to succeed,” she remembers telling another council member. “We have to study it, bring people along.”

Another element may have been the relentless march of time and evolving public opinion. Developer Kennedy notes that he has simply outlived his fiercest critics. In fact, the city council is much younger today than it was when Droste left, with members campaigning on some form of denser housing — market-rate and affordable.

Planning officials project that the missing middle policy will bring in under 2,000 units, many nestled in predominantly single-family neighborhoods instead of busy downtown and commercial corridors. Ideally, these projects will cost less to build, in part because of their smaller footprint, but also because of a bevy of associated changes to height, setback, and coverage rules that the city and the community felt were necessary, as well as efforts to speed up review times. These changes, in theory, will allow developers to increase revenue without proportionally increasing costs.

In the grand scheme of the housing crisis, that’s a small number. But then again, accessory dwelling units have far outpaced statewide expectations. Regardless, it’s a big moment for a city once lauded by California Real Estate magazine for its zoning “protection[s] against invasion of Negroes and Asiatics.”

“I think the symbolism is important, particularly when you think about Berkeley’s role in the history of the development of single-family exclusionary zoning,” Klein says.

Droste agrees. “You see these signs up in people’s yards that say, ‘In this house, we value science. We value diversity,’” she says. “And if that is the case, if we do value all these things, then we need to be able to provide places for people to live.”

Officials and developers hope the lower price point and smaller footprint will be particularly attractive for the city’s aging population, as well as residents looking for more affordable, walkable housing options. “Downtown Berkeley is struggling because it doesn’t have the foot traffic and the business that it used to have when it was a much younger and more dynamic community,” says developer Kennedy. “Parts of Berkeley are in danger of becoming a geriatric ward, and part of the reason for that is these people do not have housing alternatives that are attractive to them.”

“We’re getting people used to change again,” Rhoades, the former planning manager, says, “Cities live and breathe through their development and their architecture. If they are not changing, they are dying.”

Zoning reform bears fruit. But for how long and how much?

There’s some evidence to suggest that the city’s overall housing efforts will have the intended effect: Earlier this year, Berkeleyside reported that the rents for older apartment buildings had dropped to their 2018 levels thanks to a surge in new construction.

“There is definitely something to be proud of, to see all the building that has happened in the last five years,” says Don Falk, a longtime Berkeley resident and affordable housing developer who has sat on several local and national housing boards.

But the city is facing some significant headwinds beyond its control, even with this ambitious new policy.

For starters, there is simply a lack of people and firms who have experience doing this type of development. The construction industry never fully recovered from the 2008 Great Recession, and is now facing steep disruptions due to ramped-up federal immigration enforcement. Plus, most such projects don’t pencil out — and not just because of local rules. Underwriting terms and federal building codes can also increase costs. Add on the high price of construction and labor — compounded by tariffs, high interest rates, and dwindling, oversubscribed public funding — and financing becomes even more tenuous.

Of course, the city isn’t putting all its eggs in one basket. In fact, this article started as a look at the city’s efforts to increase residential development on land owned by churches and schools. But affordable housing projects are even harder to finance, even in cities where the cost of new housing is lower. Many of those projects must go through other entities, such as a project near a BART station or one on school property.

“Just getting things allowed is a long, long way from actually producing housing — especially affordable housing,” Falk says. “The rezoning is going to set things up for the future, but it’s going to be more than a decade before we see a lot of affordable housing built.”

Moreover, there is still a vocal — albeit dwindling — contingent of older, wealthier residents who don’t want their neighborhood to change and wield a lot of political power. “A lot of the pro-housing people aren’t in the discussion because they’re not in the city,” says Kennedy, noting many young families have been priced out.  

“We [residents] could do more,” Falk says, noting that a 2022 affordable housing bond fell short of the required two-thirds majority and that upzoning can benefit wealthy landowners at the expense of existing residents.

Quietly routine

As I wrote this story, my mind couldn’t help but turn to Rigel Robinson. Since leaving city council, Robinson has moved to Paris, where he leads transatlantic engagement for the Bay Area Council. I shot him a message, and in a quick exchange, he recounted a story about a recent housing vote.

This summer, a member of the city’s zoning board that Robinson had appointed years ago texted him on the evening of a particularly packed agenda. The board was considering several hundred new units of housing, including a 28-story apartment building in the heart of downtown — the tallest ever proposed in the city.

“It’s exactly the sort of meeting that used to draw a packed crowd, last for several hours, and tended to escalate into shouting and chaos,” Robinson messaged. “But that evening? Crickets.”

There were only a handful of people in attendance, and, as reported by Berkeleyside, only three public comments were submitted objecting to the project. The board member was bewildered that they were able to approve the tower unanimously, a scenario that would have been unthinkable a few short years ago.

“Housing victories that once felt like battles are now quietly routine,” Robinson said. “That’s progress.”