Poised for council adoption on June 26, Berkeley’s “Middle Housing” plan would drastically upzone every residential neighborhood in the city except parts of the hills.
As I’ve reported, the plan mandates “by right” approval (no public hearing) of new residences up to three stories high (35 feet), side and rear setbacks of only five feet, up to 60 percent lot coverage, not counting ADUs, and five to seven units per lot, again not counting ADUs or the effects of the State Density Bonus law.
Lacking affordability provisions, this is a recipe for displacement and gentrification, especially in South and West Berkeley. The plan also lacks design standards—an omission that, combined with the specifications noted above, effectively authorizes the elimination of backyards.
To maximize citizen participation, eliminate it
These scenarios are bad enough.
What I realized last week is that to make the Citizen Participation Element of Berkeley’s General Plan conform to the Middle Housing plan, the city also wants to amend the Element’s Introduction in a style reminiscent of 1984’s Big Brother.
The proposed General Plan amendment and its rationale are described in the sole item on the council’s June 26 agenda. (The same text appeared in Item 30 on the council’s April 29, 2025, agenda.) From the 210-page item:
8. Improve Citizen Participation (Introduction)
This section in the Introduction summarizes the General Plan’s approach to citizen participation, and includes statements that citizens should be involved in decisions about “anything” that will have an impact on them and their neighborhoods, and that the General Plan mandates “maximum citizen involvement” in all public planning.
The proposed General Plan amendments include modifications to these statements to note that citizen involvement should be maximized “within the context of local and State policies and legal requirements that encourage and mandate the timely review of residential development projects.” The Middle Housing zoning amendments include provisions to allow residential development with the Zoning Certificate, which is a ministerial action, and the proposed General Plan amendments reflect the fact that this policy would be in place with adoption of the Middle Housing zoning amendments. (p.19, emphasis added)
The amended text would read like this [new material in italics]:
GP Goal: 4. Maximize and improve citizen participation in municipal decision making
Improve Citizen Participation
Citizens should be actively involved in making decisions about anything that will have an impact on them and their families and neighborhoods. The Plan mandates maximum citizen involvement in all public planning within the context of local and State policies and legal requirements that encourage and mandate the timely review of residential development projects. The Plan stresses the important role of neighborhoods and neighborhood groups in land use decisions.
Ministerial action or review means a project can be approved without a public hearing. In other words, in the immediate context, “timely review of residential development projects” means no public review. To say that this maximizes or improves citizen participation is to ask the public to condone an equivocation verging on a lie.
The reference to the “local and State policies and legal requirements” is also devious.
As the excerpted passage states, the local policy or legal requirement that would authorize this amendment would be mandated by the Middle Housing plan.
In other words, as indicated by Table 6 (p. 17), the plan would make the changes that would justify itself.
As for state policies that mandate “timely review of housing projects,” i.e., the elimination of public hearings: None are mentioned in connection with the amendment of the Citizen Participation Element. But the discussion of another proposed amendment of the General Plan, this one affecting the Urban Design and Preservation Element, specifies SB 9 and SB 2011:
11. Policy UD -22 Regulating New Construction and Alteration
This section of the Urban Design and Preservation Element states that the intention of the General Plan is to continue to require Use Permits and public hearings for all residential projects.
The proposed Middle Housing zoning amendments—as well as various housing development projects permitted under different state laws, such as SB 9 and AB 2011, allow residential development with a Zoning Certificate. Accordingly, the proposed General Plan Amendments remove the section that includes the requirement for Use Permits for all residential projects. (p. 20)
It’s the “accordingly” that’s provoking. As used here, the term implies that since state laws such as SB 9 and AB 2011 permit “various housing development projects” with a Zoning Certificate, that justifies ministerial approval of the kinds of housing projects specified by the Berkeley Middle Housing plan.
SB 9, authored by Toni Atkins and enacted in 2021, requires ministerial approval of a housing development of no more than two units in a single-family zone; the subdivision of a parcel zoned for residential use into two parcels; or both.
AB 2011, co-authored by Buffy Wicks, the California Conference of Carpenters, and the California Housing Consortium, and enacted in 2022, is a complex law that requires ministerial approval for qualifying multifamily projects on commercially zoned land, as specified.
And in the past decade, a major thrust of California housing policy and legislation and law has been the curtailment of public participation.
So what? Me-tooism is not an argument; it’s groupthink. Nowhere do we find an explicit rationale for eliminating public hearings for housing projects. Perhaps Berkeley planners think it’s too obvious to need explication.
Presumably that rationale would go like this: Housing prices are determined by supply. Public hearings delay the approval of new housing. To “unlock” supply, eliminate public hearings. Developers will build, and prices will fall.
This is the catechism reeled off by Yimbys and their apologists in Sacramento, the mainstream press, academia, and the planning profession. It’s disputed by a growing number of researchers, including, most recently, economist Michael Barnes.
In an article published by 48 hills on June 2, Barnes conclusively debunked the “supply-side orthodoxy” and the associated upzoning craze. “Public officials,” he wrote,
sometimes naively assume they can stimulate housing development today by streamlining approval processes, shifting infrastructure costs onto local government, and other techniques that lower developer costs. But for developers these moves don’t necessarily change the intertemporal equilibrium, which determines their optimal timeline for building. They may be thankful for the cost reductions, but they may still prefer to start building in the future, not now. The cost savings from building now also will save money if they instead build in the future, so this policy won’t necessarily stimulate building today.
To support his case, Barnes used statistics from San Francisco, where blanket upzoning is high on Mayor Lurie’s agenda, and Houston, which has no zoning for use. He also cited the March paper authored by two Federal Reserve economists and a UC Irvine graduate student that identifies local income inequality, not onerous regulations, as the culprit behind housing affordability problems.
The Bay Area has gaping income inequality and sky-high demand for housing. Add upzoning, which allows developers to squeeze more profit out of a parcel, and you’re inflating the value of land, which in turn raises real estate values and, it follows, the cost of housing.
Berkeley’s planning staff ought to advise the city’s elected officials that supply-side doctrine is a shaky foundation for housing policy and legislation. Instead, they push the Yimby line.
Citizen participation in the Berkeley General Plan
Staff propose amending just the introduction to the General Plan’s Citizen Participation Element. But eliminating the public hearings for housing projects clashes with the letter and spirit of the entire Element.
Approved in 2002, Berkeley’s General Plan lists citizen participation as one of its top goals. (Disclosure: I chaired the Planning Commission that drafted the 2002 General Plan.)
From the Plan’s introduction:
4. Maximize and improve citizen participation in municipal decision-making.
Goal #4: Maximize and improve citizen participation in municipal decision-making.
The high level of citizen participation is another important and distinctive characteristic of Berkeley. Several hundred citizens serve on boards and commissions and help to formulate policy and advise the City Council. There are many active neighborhood associations, merchant groups, and advocacy groups.Improve Notification and the Dissemination of Information.
Citizen complaints about inadequate notification about public meetings are common, and access to relevant information and reports can be difficult. The Plan contains policies to improve notification and to take advantage of recent technological changes that can make important information broadly available to the public.Improve Citizen Participation.
Citizens should be actively involved in making decisions about anything that will have an impact on them and their families and neighborhoods. The Plan mandates maximum citizen involvement in all public planning and decision-making processes. The Plan stresses the important role of neighborhoods and neighborhood groups in land use decisions.Improve the Responsiveness of City Administration and Staff.
Plan policies call for staff training and citizen involvement in evaluating the performance of the City’s administrative units.
The importance of citizen participation is further amplified in the General Plan’s Citizen Participation Element:
INTRODUCTION
The City of Berkeley has a long and rich history of citizen participation. While an element dealing with citizen participation is not, under State law, a required part of the General Plan, such an element formed an important part of the 1977 Berkeley General Plan. The presence of such an element acknowledges the importance of the participation philosophy that forms such a vital part of Berkeley public life.POLICY BACKGROUND
The General Plan, Area Plans, and the Planning Process
This General Plan update, which originated about 15 years ago, together with recent area planning such as the Southside Plan, ought to provide valuable lessons for Berkeley in how and how not to proceed in its planning processes in the future. What is needed is intelligent planning about planning. What has been learned is that citizens must be continuously and significantly involved in formulating, writing, and presenting the General Plan, area plans, and other planning documents.
The Element then lists six objectives:
- Ensure citizen and community participation in General Plan and other planning tasks.
- Improve citizen participation in relationship to the crucial decision-making bodies in land-use matters.
- Enhance notification, information, and process for citizen input in land use matters.
- Improve neighborhood participation in land use planning and decisions
- Increase the use of new technology for citizen participation
- Improve the role of City administrative structure and staff in relationship to meaningful citizen participation.
Next come “Policies and Actions.” Many bear on the Middle Housing planning process, but given the proposed amendment of the Citizen Participation Element, one in particular deserves to be highlighted:
Policy CP-2 Community Involvement in Planning2 Whenever an area plan, a strategic plan, or any other land use planning is undertaken, there must be continuous and maximum participation by those who will be affected by the plan including committees of residents who live in or near the plan area, merchants, and others who do business in the plan area, as well as members of interested groups and the general public2. (Also see Land Use Policy LU-5, Economic Development and Employment Policy ED-5, and Open Space Policy OS-5.)2
Action:2 A. The Planning Commission should use advisory committees made up of stakeholders and interested parties, review at Planning Commission meetings the progress of such groups, and consider the possible chairing of such groups by Commission members to effectively inform the Commission of citizen and neighborhood concerns and priorities2.
City staff realized that the Middle Housing plan’s elimination of public hearings for housing projects flagrantly violates the General Plan and thus requires amending the Plan. They should have clarified the full extent of the violation. But that would have meant amending much more than the introduction to the Citizen Participation Element—a revision that would have advertised the Middle Housing plan’s hostility to democratic decisionmaking.
To avert that exposé, they decided to mangle just the element’s introduction. Cherry-picking keywords from the General Plan, they cobbled up a claim that was both evasive and preposterous: Citizen participation would be maximized and improved by ministerial review, which is to say (but they didn’t say) by the elimination of citizen participation in the review of housing projects.
In the draft resolution adopting the General Plan amendments prepared for the council’s approval on June 26, staff had the audacity to include the following. (The first sentence is text taken from the California Government Code.)
(2) The proposed amendment is consistent and compatible with the General Plan.
Evidence: The proposed General Plan amendments would ensure internal consistency among General Plan elements. (p. 134)
Now they tell us
The proposed amendment of the Citizen Participation Element would codify the hobbling of citizen participation that has informed the Middle Housing planning process from the start.
Advocates of the Middle Housing plan say that the program has been the subject of numerous public meetings. That’s true, but it’s an incomplete truth. Many of those meetings concerned the revision of the city’s Housing Element, not the Middle Housing plan proper. Those that focused on Middle Housing were attended by a tiny fraction of the city’s residents. None involved the sort of “continuous” and “significant” citizen involvement called for by the General Plan; they were all top-down affairs with no opportunity for people to debate staff about the provisions of the Middle Housing plan or to propose alternative programs.
The final version of the Middle Housing ordinance appeared on the council’s April 29 agenda as the third public hearing of the evening, meaning that it would be deliberated late in the night; the massive upzoning proposal should have been the only item on a special council meeting agenda. That version has been presented in public meetings in only two of the city’s eight council districts. The one held last October was a Trumpian debacle presided over by Councilmember Rashi Kesarwani, who provoked an unruly protest by refusing to allow attendees to engage city staff and herself in a dialogue about the plan.
In another violation of the Citizen Participation Element, shortly before the April 29 council meeting, staff determined that they’d failed to notice residents and property owners in the R-1A zoning district, situated in West Berkeley and the Northbrae neighborhoods, about a change in the city’s Zoning Map that would be mandated by the Middle Housing plan: R-1A would be consolidated with the R-2 zone.
Correcting that oversight meant delaying the approval of the Middle Housing Plan until after the Planning Commission had held a public hearing on the matter and presumably recommended that the council adopt the change in the map. The hearing occurred on June 4, appearing as Item 10A on the agenda.
The General Plan’s vision of collaboration between the Planning Commission and advisory committees comprised of “stakeholders and interested parties” was never implemented. Instead, the commission, like the council that appoints its members, has increasingly operated with little if any regard for “neighborhood concerns” and “those who will be affected by [a] plan.”
As for “increas[ing] the use of new technology for citizen participation” (the sixth objective of the Citizen Participation Element: The city, which touts its support for “innovation,” doesn’t film the Planning Commission’s meetings. Since May 2024, Berkeley Public Eye, a nonprofit started by Bernard Marszalek and myself, has hired videographers to record the proceedings and posted the videos on its website. Appeals to the mayor and the council to help fund our work have gone unheeded.
On June 3, the day before the hearing, attorney Tom Lippe, representing Dean Metzger and myself, sent the Planning Commission a letter contending that notices for the public hearing associated with Item 10 “are legally defective because they are substantively misleading.” The letter also charges that “the description of agenda item 10A in the meeting agenda posted on May 30, 2025, fails to adequately describe the matter, in violation of the Brown Act.” The letter appears in “Supplemental Correspondence 2” posted under the June 4 agenda on the commission’s website.
The deceptiveness begins with what the notice of the hearing leaves out: allowed uses and development standards. It’s compounded by what both the notice and the staff report do say: that the council has decided “to consolidate zoning districts”—in this case R-1A and R2—“when regulatory distinctions between similar districts are minimal.” The regulatory distinctions between current R-1A and current R-2 are not minimal; they are significant.
In another major omission, the notice fails to state that under the Middle Housing plan, the allowed uses and development standards for R-2 are also being changed, and that the distinctions between current R-1A and new or Middle Housing R-2 are dramatic.
In fact, the discrepancies between the zoning districts appear in Tables 1 and 2 in the June 4 staff report.
From “Table 1. Allowed Uses” (Item 10A, p. 9):
Current R-1A does not permit “Multi-family housing”; new or Middle Housing R-2 does—with a zoning certificate, which means no public hearing.
From “Table 2. Development Standards Summary” (Item 10A, p. 10)):
The height limit in current R-1A is two stories (28 feet); in new or Middle Housing R-2, it’s three stories (35 feet).
The minimum setbacks in current R-1A are twenty feet on the rear and side; in new or Middle Housing R-2, they are five feet (front and rear combined must be at least twenty feet).
The maximum residential density per lot in current R-1A is two units; in new or Middle Housing R-2, it’s fifty.
The maximum lot coverage in current R-1A is 40-45%; in new or Middle Housing R-2, it’s 60%, not counting ADUs.
Lippe’s letter urges the Planning Commission to continue Item 10A to a future Planning meeting, and to direct staff to adequately describe the proposed changes in the agenda and public notice for that hearing.
During public comment, Commission Chair Emily Marthinsen twice told people lined up to speak that they were taking five seconds too long to get to the mike, and that if they didn’t move faster, she’d reduce the allotted time for a comment from two seconds to one.
Her soft bullying foreshadowed the commission’s disregard of both Lippe’s letter and the opposition to the Zoning Map change and the Middle Housing plan at large that was voiced 22 of the 33 people who spoke at public comment and the residents who commented via email (see the correspondence files for the commission’s June 4 meeting).
By a 7-0-1-0 vote (Commissioner Oatfield abstained; the second zero stands for the vacant seat that should be occupied by Mayor Ishii’s yet-to-be-appointed commissioner), the Planning Commission recommended that the council adopt the changes to the Zoning Map and the associated amendments to the city’s Zoning Ordinance.
After the vote, Marthinsen said that the resolution the commission had just approved (see Item 10A), Attachment 1) was “limited” and didn’t apply to Middle Housing.
That’s untrue. The preamble to the resolution mentions “middle housing” four times.
The preamble to the draft resolution prepared for the council’s approval on June 26 (Attachment 5) states that “on June 4, 2025, the Planning Commission held a duly noticed public hearing on Zoning Map amendments to parcels currently zoned R-1A…”
The danger of corrupt political language
Orwell warned that totalitarian governments rule through lies as well as physical force.
With its dodgy pronouncements and squelching of dissent, the Middle Housing planning process indicates that Berkeley’s current government is merely authoritarian.
That’s alarming enough.
A new organization, Build a Better Berkeley, is running a petition asking Mayor Ishii and the city council to reject the current Middle Housing plan and initiate a planning process that includes written notification to every affected property-owner, public meetings in every affected neighborhood, and robust debate.
