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The health and welfare of children will be a primary focus of the public hearing on the neighbors’ appeal of 1500 San Pablo Avenue at the City Council on Tuesday July 19 at 7 PM.

The appeal has two components: the need for traffic mitigation and a request for design modifications based on expansion of underground parking.

The appeal was signed by 36 neighbors residing on surrounding streets: Jones, Ninth, Tenth, Cedar, and San Pablo Avenue. Their contention is that they were denied due process in influencing the decisions of the Zoning Adjustment Board, which did not adequately consider the detriments of the project and possible mitigations. In two meetings, the Design Review Committee had produced only cosmetic changes to the exterior and better natural lighting of long dark corridors. Neither design review nor ZAB tried to reduce the mass of the five story building that was the neighbors’ main complaint.

The appeal also criticizes the traffic and parking study conducted by AECOM, which looked at six major intersections, four on San Pablo and two on Sixth, but did not examine the patterns on Gilman, Ninth and Tenth, nor estimate the routes that drivers would take during the construction of the Gilman Interchange. Rather than demand a new traffic study, the appellants are asking for concrete bollards on Jones west of the project to prevent vehicles from traversing the adjacent streets. Examples of such diverters are Tenth and Camelia near REI and Berkeley Way at the entrance of Trader Joe’s.  

The neighborhood in the vicinity of the proposed project is popular with young families who are moving into West Berkeley at a rapid rate, driving up house prices – even small cottages - to around a million bucks. According to realtors, the area is hot because of the walkability score, the schools, parks, tree lined streets, eclectic mix of architecture including historic houses, climate, and public transit. The 72 buses including a rapid service, run along San Pablo Avenue, and the 52 uses Cedar Street. The project area is about ten blocks to the North Berkeley BART station. The resulting popularity with young families means the streets are teeming with children, who were much evident at a recent block party. 

The appeal also contends that the ZAB inappropriately granted six waivers to the developer, three in the residential zone adjoining the neighborhood. The density bonus law allows zoning waivers, incentives, and concessions as a reward for building affordable housing. This project includes 16 such units available to very low income people. A waiver is a zoning set aside based on structural necessity, whereas a concession is a change in the code based on financial necessity. When a developer requests a concession, s/he must produce a financial pro-forma that analyzes income and costs, whereby the City asks a third party such as PlaceWorks to evaluate economic feasibility. 

The project site is now occupied by the vacant McNevin Cadillac showroom and adjoining parking lot. McNevin owns the single parcel, which is zoned C-W (commercial west) on the San Pablo Avenue side and R-1A (low density residential) on Tenth Street. An option was once attempted by Hudson McDonald and relinquished by them as a result of the recession following the banking crisis of 2008. 

While C-W mixed use zoning presents opportunity for dense housing, the R-1A is restricted to two dwelling units with setbacks, maximum lot coverage, a 28’ height limit, parking, and usable open space requirements. These standards have been waived to allow for 11 three story townhouses, most attached to each other side-by-side and all attached to the wall of a large parking garage with 148 residential and 25 commercial spaces. The usual 20’ minimum backyard in the R-1A has been exchanged for the garage, eliminating any chance of back doors and windows on the first two floors of the townhouses, which are intended for families. 

The appeal contends that the intrusion of the garage into the R-1A zone, an unpermitted use in our municipal zoning code that differentiates between a parking lot and a parking structure, is actually a concession, not a waiver, and that the developer must produce evidence of financial necessity in not fully excavating a parking garage under the commercial square footage on San Pablo Avenue. 

This has staff talking, and in fact the design of this project might boil down to the opinion of Zach Cowan, the City attorney. In addition to the legal question is the financial: can rents cover the cost of the redesign and added excavation and construction? There could be cost savings in the redesign, but that remains to be seen. 

It’s the Design, Stupid 

The design modifications are the pro-bono work of two architects in the project vicinity who contributed over one hundred hours on behalf of the neighborhood and have presented their ideas to the project developer Amir Massih and Peter Waller, the lead Pyatok architect. The developer is the brother of Kava Massih, the architect of the Berkeley Bowl West and other local buildings; both are Berkeley residents. 

The neighborhood design team came up with two alternatives: Plan A and Plan B, the first removing the fifth floor and repositioning the apartments next to a garden courtyard created by moving the parking garage. Plan A was rejected by the developer and ZAB on May 12. 

Plan B retains about two-thirds of the fifth floor, moves ten units to the garden, and has room for six more in case the developer needs added income to cover the costs. The garden courtyard also serves as the backyard of the townhouses, which would have windows and doors opening onto an area that could be planted with trees in the natural ground and have outdoor seating, a barbecue area, and a playground. Plan B slightly increases the overall density of the project while improving outdoor space for family living. 

There are other benefits to Plan B. The fifth floor is recessed, which creates the appearance of a four story building like the apartments on north Shattuck near Virginia. This reduces the mass and harmonizes with the neighborhood. The recess also allows better natural lighting of the interior courtyard/well and the apartments that surround it on the bottom floor. Our architectural team estimates that 13 units will otherwise never receive any direct sunlight, and the courtyard itself will mostly be shaded. The design revision fixes that problem. 

Plan B upgrades the quality of the project, not only by sun lighting the interior well, but in creating deluxe penthouse apartments with view balconies. The townhouses get ground floor access to the garden courtyard that serves as a collective backyard shared with the garden apartments. 

The interior community courtyard is a European concept, and it’s no surprise that one of the neighborhood architects went to design school in Germany. My brother lives in Copenhagen, Denmark where five story apartment buildings are the rule, built right to the sidewalk, but the entire interior block is a shared parklike space with playgrounds, barbecues, picnic tables, lawns, trees, and benches. 

On Tuesday night, Ed Herzog will present the appeal traffic concerns, and I will speak for the design team. It will be impossible to cover the issues in the short amount of time available. We have been lobbying for the last two weeks and have found that it takes at least a half hour to do the presentation; some of our meetings have lasted an hour. We will have a few minutes, and the public even less time. We ask neighbors to bring the children and support the traffic diverters on Jones Street, a recessed fifth floor, and other features of Plan B. And whatever happens, we ask for civility and dignity to set a good example and to allow the Council to cogitate in an atmosphere of relative quiet. 

A private park or parking? 

The issue of undergrounding parking has emerged as a primary problem in designing for our transit corridors. A subterranean garage lowers the height of the building and releases the ground floor for more creative, sidewalk friendly uses like live/work studios, cafes and restaurants, retail shops, and services. We want to increase the walkability of our commercial streets. The exit/entrance of a parking garage usually intrudes on a neighborhood street, but placing the parking on the ground floor is a huge waste of premium space. 

But undergrounding the parking is expensive, and rather than hide the pro-forma, the developer should release it to staff and the general public. Reading a cost and income spread sheet is not rocket science. Anybody who has run a business should be able to “pencil out” the variables. The neighborhood design team feels that rents from the six extra apartments and the deluxe fifth floor penthouses should pay back the costs. The new owners of the project will be Shorenstein, a huge real estate company with billions in assets; they can easily afford the investment, so it’s quite an insult to have them nickel- and-dime the City of Berkeley. 

As for our internal politics, let’s stop a moment and consider the contradictions of this predicament. Here we are, allowing an apartment building on a transit corridor in the smart growth belief that people will use the available buses and BART, but putting a parking garage where a private park should be located. We are either hypocrites or fools. 

Please come to the appeal public hearing, especially if you live or work in the neighborhood. This project is going to add traffic on Cedar Street, effect the views or property owners to the west and east, and impact the area in many ways, both positive and negative. Unless something happens between now and Tuesday night, we will be asking for a continuance so that staff can get the financial statement from the developer and hash out the design questions. 

If the garage is not excavated and moved towards San Pablo Avenue, the children in the townhouses and other family units will have no place to play except the streets, which brings us back to traffic. Instead of Irish students splattered on Kittredge Street, we’ll have kids at risk of being run over on Tenth and Jones Streets by vehicles coming and going from their own project.