To: Mayor Ishii and the Berkeley City Council
From: Toni Mester, D2
RE: Middle Housing zoning
June 23, 2025 

Please reconsider voting on this deeply flawed ordinance that could cause irreparable harm to individual and family-owned homes in Berkeley’s neighborhoods, as the standards are grotesquely out-of-proportion to existing houses. What was presented to the community as a gentle expansion of housing opportunities actually has the potential of allowing the use of the density bonus to build up to five stories. 

Use of the density bonus was anticipated.
Although staff has downplayed this potential, use of the density bonus appears to have been intentional as stated in the memo to the Council on September 20, 2022 and included in the Housing Element p.528: “Projects with five or more units that include affordable units on-site would be eligible to utilize the State Density Bonus Law.”  

Consolidate the R-1A and R-2
Council should go ahead and consolidate the R-1A and R-2 on Thursday night to show good faith in the upzoning effort but postpone adopting new standards until more data is available to determine how many parcels would allow five or more units and therefore be eligible for the density bonus. 

More data on lot size needed
It may be convenient to use an “average” size of 5,000 square feet to approximate tax increases for ballot measures, but not for zoning allowances.  Nobody owns an average lot. The Council should ask the IT department to calculate the number of parcels in various ranges such as up to 4,000 square feet, 4,000 to 5,000 square feet, etc. for each district so that we all understand the risk of outsized development.

Outreach to the community
Although this initiative has been in the works for a few years, the community is sadly uninformed, mostly because many Planning Commission and Council meetings took place during the COVID state of emergency when most people were more concerned with staying alive than the shape and scale of their neighborhoods. More outreach and education is badly needed, as zoning needs to be explained. Many owners and tenants do not know the square footage of their properties, the zone they live in, zoning terminology, or how to calculate densities. Property owners have a right to understand what can be developed on their own and their neighbors’ properties.  And it seems that even some on the Planning Commission did not understand floor area ratio, and so they left FAR out of their recommendation despite staff input.  FAR is an important standard that helps shape the mass of a building. 

No Recourse for negative impacts on adjacent properties
The constitutional private property rights of incumbent owners could be jeopardized by the by-right approval of disproportionately large buildings without a permit hearing to ensure that existing properties maintain their livability and value. 

Failure to utilize homeowner equity
Building to the proposed standards exceeds the financial abilities of most individual and family owners but are rather designed for corporate developers, a transition that would change the basic control of our neighborhoods and the character and culture of Berkeley as a whole. It would be preferable to enact measures that exploit the vast reservoir of homeowner equity, the largely untapped wealth of our community that is mostly going to waste with the exception of the ADU boom. As a lobbyist for the ADU exemption, I take satisfaction in the response: 636 ADUs permitted since the passage of Measure Q. In like manner, restoration of the owner-occupied exemptions in the 1980 RSO would result in an explosion of affordable units in the neighborhoods financed by homeowner equity without the need for corporate capital.