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New: Affordable Housing and the View from the Campanile: Response to Comments from Berkeley Mayor (Public Comment)
Opposition continues to grow to the 2211 Harold Way mega-development proposed for Downtown Berkeley. The luxury apartment / condo tower would be Berkeley’s biggest private building ever as well as—at 194 feet—the tallest private building ever constructed in Berkeley, and the second tallest overall after the Campanile.
Part of that huge bulk and height would block a significant portion of the historic view down Campanile Way on the UC Berkeley campus towards the Golden Gate.
This view corridor—established in 1873 and formalized with the construction of the Sather Campanile one hundred years ago—was oriented to connect the campus to the Golden Gate, San Francisco Bay, and Alcatraz Island. It is also the last place on the Berkeley campus where the Bay and the Golden Gate can be seen from ground level.
Alexandra Smith, a Cal student, recently started an online petition to protest the loss of the view. In barely a week the petition now has nearly 3,000 signatures, and many of those signing have added moving comments about what the view has meant to them.
April 30, Channel 5 / KPIX ran a story on the Campanile Way controversy. In that story, this is what Mayor Tom Bates says when asked about preserving the view. Appropriately, the Mayor appears to be standing in front of a big construction site.
"I think it's an important 'Way' but I don't think you necessarily need to see the Golden Gate Bridge. We need to have some Downtown affordable housing built so it's a trade off."
This reasoning doesn’t make any sense.
Bates conflates two unrelated issues in his comment.
First, the 302-unit building proposed is luxury housing. The developers themselves projected in October 2014, that rents would be at least $5.10 cents per square foot per month if the units are rented as apartments.
For the average size 729 square foot unit, that works out to $3,718 / month per apartment, or nearly $45,000 a year in rent.
Conventional wisdom is that you shouldn’t be spending more than a third of your total income on rent. So only the independently wealthy or those with jobs paying $150,000 a year or more will be able to afford to rent those units.
Hardly “affordable housing.”
Now, to be fair, the Mayor may be implying that the more luxury housing built, the more fees the developers pay and that money can be used by the City to fund affordable housing.
If that’s his argument, he might start by reforming his own “affordable housing” policies.
The City of Berkeley is supposed to be charging developers $28,000 per apartment unit to put in the public affordable housing fund. That’s the Affordable Housing Mitigation fee the Council established, with Bates leading, in 2012.
But wait…the Council, with Bates voting in favor again, “temporarily” lower the fee in early 2013 to $20,000 a unit, a reduction of nearly a third. That reduction is still in force.
Given today’s construction costs, a $20,000 fee would barely buy a bathroom remodel, much less fund much affordable housing development. But it’s still a start.
And if the fee were brought back to the original Council approved level, then the Harold Way development would be generating nearly two and a half million dollars more for the Affordable Housing fund.
Or, to put it another way, if the City was charging the Harold Way project $28,000 instead of $20,000 per unit, the whole development could be 30% smaller (less view impact!) and still generate the same amount of affordable housing funding for the City.
As long as Bates and his Council majority keep the fees artificially low, it’s absurd for him to argue that luxury highrise housing development needs to be maxed out—with huge community impacts and costs—to provide for theoretical affordable housing. He’s talking out of both sides of his mouth.
Now back to those estimated rents for a moment. An average rent of $3,718 per apartment per month translates into more than $1.12 million dollars a month in rental income from the 302 units.
Yes, these apartments will truly have the proverbial “million dollar views”, which will be taken from the public and Campanile Way.
The million dollars is what would go each month to the Southern California developer in income. The public just ends up losing the view.
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To sign the petition to save the view down Campanile Way, see:
https://www.change.org/p/city-of-berkeley-save-the-golden-gate-view-from-campanile-way
For developer’s estimate of rental income from project, see page 32 of this document:
For background on the Council reduction in the affordable housing fee: http://www.dailycal.org/2013/02/24/berkeley-lowers-affordable-housing-fee/
