The community around San Pablo Avenue would like the San Pablo Avenue Specific Plan (SPASP) to be an attempt to transform the San Pablo corridor in Berkeley into a vibrant, pedestrian-friendly area and create a variety of housing types to meet different community needs. As it does on other commercial corridors like the Elmwood, North Shattuck, and Solano Avenue, the City Council proposes raising building heights, allowing for greater housing density than currently exists. However, comments by council members during meetings to discuss the SPASP indicate that market rate housing is the primary objective, there is very little interest in commercial development, and they have little interest in listening to their staff or the public.

To its credit, city staff met with SPASP stakeholders several times, engaging with community members and encouraging them to offer their vision for the transformation of San Pablo Avenue. These meetings and area tours resulted in a comprehensive document provided to staff by community members. Staff took the ideas to heart and incorporated many of them into the draft plan.

With the SPASP still technically in the discussion phase, the City Council started discussion of the plan at 11 p.m. at its meeting on November 6, 2025. By that hour, most of the community members, both in person and on Zoom, had abandoned the meeting, yet the Council refused multiple requests to postpone the public comment due to the late hour. The result was minimal input from concerned residents and small business owners.

Council members then proceeded to recommend that the plan be stripped of most of the community input the staff had included. Councilmember Kesarwani expressed the desire that there be no objective design standards for the new buildings (except maybe at ground level), aside from “you know, things like having windows and things like that”. Eliminating objective design standards would eliminate the requirements on San Pablo Avenue for step-backs from major streets or neighborhood transitions next to adjacent residential areas (ways to create the illusion of less intrusive bulk for tall buildings), common private open space, and many other elements that affect the residents and the streetscape.

Councilmember Kesarwani indicated that she did not want a single inch of space that could be allocated to housing be used for anything else. Public open spaces incorporated as part of the building design? “I don’t think that that creates a lot of value”. Massing breaks to avoid long, bleak, building facades? “Having massing breaks eliminates residential square footage that I think we want”. Things other than building more housing, that could help provide the desired result of a vibrant public realm? You will have to ask her.

In a tacit admission that much of the ground floor “commercial” space of the new buildings would never be filled with actual businesses, and that businesses that were displaced would never come back, the City Council suggested that ground floor space no longer be allocated to commercial use and residential uses be allowed in its stead.

The plan as presented to the council by staff proposed an increase of approximately 2,500 residential units and 100,000 sq ft of new commercial space, and heights of 5 stories in “residential-mixed-use” areas, except for San Pablo intersections with Dwight and Cedar (6 stories) and Ashby, University, and Gilman (8 stories), including various ways to make sure there would not be the effect of monolithic building mass. The ideas that emerged that evening from council envisioned a universal building height of 7 stories (14, if the 100% density bonus is invoked) throughout all of the corridors (San Pablo, College, North Shattuck and Solano), a reduction or elimination of community enhancements, a small amount of commercial space for basic needs, and almost nothing to support the idea of a “vibrant, pedestrian friendly area”.

Our council members, who continually tout their commitment to equity, had spent 5 hours talking about the commercial corridors in what is referred to as the ‘high resource areas’ of north and east Berkeley, with scores of interested parties able to make public comments. But when it came to San Pablo Avenue in west Berkeley, they spent barely over an hour, not willing to consider the things that staff recommended, after over two years of work (including paid consultants), that could make it as vibrant and pedestrian friendly as the other areas, and they did it so late at night that the public was effectively shut out of the discussion.

It was a shameful performance.

The final plan will be brought back to the council for approval in spring or summer 2026.