The City Council has signed off on a deal with BART to advance a project bringing hundreds of apartments, more than a third of them affordable, to the Ashby BART station.
The agreement that was approved Monday night calls for Berkeley to drop a claim, one it has held for decades, to the air rights over the Ashby station in exchange for a slate of community benefits from BART. It paves the way for BART to build up the station’s west parking lot, a 4.7-acre wedge of land between Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Adeline Street and Ashby Avenue. The city, meanwhile, will take over and lease a smaller 1.7-acre lot adjacent to the Ed Roberts Campus along Adeline Street to a developer for construction.
Under the terms of the deal, which BART’s board of directors approved last year, at least 35% of all homes built at the lots must be affordable, including at least half of the first 602 apartments built on the BART-managed west lot. Berkeley will contribute $26.5 million towards the affordable housing, $8 million of that at its own east lot site. The agreement also mandates the project provide new site for the Berkeley Flea Market and at least 5,000 square feet of commercial space for community groups at below-market-rate rents, among other terms.
New construction is projected to shrink parking available to Ashby BART riders from 535 spaces to 85, an 84% reduction, said Rachel Factor, a principal planner for BART.
Though the council has effectively blessed the terms of the deal in an 8-0 vote Monday (Councilmember Susan Wengraf, who attended virtually, was not present for the vote), the city manager and city attorney must still draft official contractual agreements for the council to approve, likely in November, said Alisa Shen, a principal planner for the city’s Planning and Development Department. BART anticipates soliciting developers beginning in December.
Council members and some speakers were enthusiastic about the agreement. But several other public speakers criticized the deal for not mandating a greater share of affordable housing.
“I think that ‘power over’ instead of ‘power with’ the community approach — not necessarily from the city, but by BART — has really declinated the opportunity that we have to reach affordable housing,” Mina Wilson, executive director of the South Berkeley nonprofit Healthy Black Families, said Monday.
Critics also said the agreement fell short of redressing the displacement of wide swathes of South Berkeley, particularly Black residents, when BART first began building in the neighborhood.
“Gentrification has been destroying Black Berkeley and anything short of 100% low income, including large percentages for very low income and extremely low income units, will continue this harm and continue this extraction,” said Aya de León, the city’s poet laureate and a UC Berkeley professor.
Mayor Jesse Arreguín said that while the city also wanted to get as much affordable housing as possible, “there is a certain reality in terms of what we can actually achieve.” Were the city to have held out for a 100% affordability requirement, he said, there might not be enough funding to build it, nor any developers interested in doing so.
Arreguín and South Berkeley Councilmember Ben Bartlett brought up the 2022 failure of Measure L, a $650 million bond measure that would have funded affordable housing and infrastructure repair.
“This is not the Shangri La, but it is useful and it is unique,” Bartlett said. “We’ve afforded this opportunity, all of us together, to create something new, something dynamic, that can live on … So be optimistic, because the story is not yet written.”
Staff writer Nico Savidge contributed reporting.
