City approves plan for North Berkeley BART housing

Planning officials signed off this week on a proposal to transform the parking lots atop the North Berkeley BART station into a dense new transit-oriented village of more than 700 homes, clearing the way for one of the city’s largest and most closely watched housing projects to be built.

Planning Director Jordan Klein wrote in a letter to the development team known as North Berkeley Housing Partners on Wednesday that the city has approved its application for the station site.

The group plans to build 377 subsidized affordable apartments and 358 market-rate homes at the 8-acre site, spread across 13 buildings that will range from three to eight stories tall. More than 50,000 square feet of new open space will knit the development together with pedestrian plazas, bike paths and gardens. It also includes a parking garage with 120 spaces for BART riders and another 176 for residents.

The development group is made up of the market-rate builder Avalon Bay and three affordable housing nonprofits: BRIDGE Housing Corporation, East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation and Insight Housing.

The approval this week was years in the making — the prospect of redeveloping the station’s parking lots has been discussed and debated at dozens of hearings dating back to early 2018.

“On long-term projects like this one you don’t get many moments to stop and celebrate a big milestone, and this is one of them,” Klein said in an interview. “Our team is incredibly proud that we have gotten to this point.”

Once zoning rules and design standards for the station site were finalized, a years-long process that wrapped up last December, new state housing laws meant North Berkeley Housing Partners’ proposal had a simpler path to approval without any further public hearings.

But even that expedited process took longer than expected. When the development team submitted its proposal to the city last February, Klein estimated it would be approved within four months; it wound up taking nearly 10. Klein attributed the longer process to a range of factors, including the complexity of the proposal — which involved four developers and reviews by staff from both the city and BART — as well as the need for documentation to show it was eligible to take advantage of a 2022 state law that streamlines approvals for affordable housing.

The next question is when will the project break ground.

Officials from BRIDGE, which led the development team, said in the past that they planned to start construction next year. Reached by email this week, Randy James, a spokesperson for BRIDGE, did not directly address whether a 2025 start is still feasible, but said the development team is working to begin building “as swiftly as possible.”