Berkeley Considers Middle Housing Plan That Could Reshape Neighborhoods

Aimee Baldwin is worried her home is in danger of being seen as the “scruffy house” on the block.

There’s often a jumble of loose lumber and supplies the artist uses for projects in front of the garage, plants that need to be potted and a sprawling garden she describes as “chaotic” — a mix of California native flowers and shrubs that spill from the front yard and run down the side.

In the backyard are the persimmon and Asian pear trees her grandparents, Frank and Jackie Kee, planted after they moved to Francisco Street in the mid-1950s, near what is now the North Berkeley BART station. Back then, it was a blue-collar neighborhood — her grandfather worked as a gardener at a Japanese-owned plant nursery — with a set of train tracks running through the block.

Today, those tracks have been converted into a greenway, complete with a pocket community garden Baldwin helps tend. Recently, the 960 square-foot house across from hers sold for $1.1 million, and the new owners are renovating.

“I kind of wonder how much are people going to start to look down on me for having things a little funky and weird,” she said, “when other people are clearly working on fixing up their house and fixing up their yard and trying to make it look nice.”

Baldwin is concerned not only for the changes already underway but also about what might come if the Berkeley City Council votes Thursday to allow more duplexes, fourplexes and small apartments in most neighborhoods throughout the city.

If the measure is approved, it would be a historic reversal of more than a century of city planning. In 1916, Berkeley set aside parts of the city as single-family neighborhoods, a provision first applied to Elmwood Park to combat a perceived invasion “by flats, apartment houses and stores.”

While California has already essentially outlawed single-family zoning by allowing homeowners to build both accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, on their properties and subdivide lots to build up to two duplexes in most urban neighborhoods, Berkeley’s proposed Middle Housing ordinance would go further. It would allow greater flexibility in home design and increase the number of units permitted in each building.

The ordinance would allow three-story buildings, with the number of units determined by lot size. A typical 5,000-square-foot property could potentially have five to seven units, not including ADUs. Neighborhoods in the Berkeley hills, with steep, narrow, winding roads, are excluded because of fire-safety concerns.

Councilmember Rashi Kesarwani, who has long championed the proposal, said the idea is to promote more housing on existing lots, with the expectation that the new homes will be more accessible to middle-income earners who don’t qualify for deed-restricted affordable housing.

“The goal is to think about the future of our city and what kind of community we want to be,” Kesarwani said. “I believe that we need to be a city that has housing opportunities for our middle-class workers. And really, the only way we can do that cost-effectively is through middle housing.”

Baldwin’s block already has a diverse mix of single-family homes, duplexes and the occasional low-rise apartment building, making it emblematic of the kind of development the city’s proposed Middle Housing ordinance seeks to promote. Despite this mix, the neighborhood maintains a suburban feel, she said. Baldwin is concerned that the plan could pressure the remaining working-class families to sell, driving them out of the city.

“What is middle housing getting us, besides what I fear is the opportunity for basically really large profiteering companies to come and strip our neighborhood of the community that we have,” she asked.

Her fears were echoed in letters sent to the council ahead of Thursday’s meeting. Some residents, like Clifford Fred, are concerned about the sheer volume of development that could be unleashed, writing: “Berkeley city officials are turning what used to be a beautiful, low-rise, human-scaled city into an ugly warren of high rises and massive buildings stretching relentlessly from the Oakland border to the Albany border.”

Others are more apprehensive about where the new homes and apartments would be built. The proposed Middle Housing ordinance would allow greater density in parts of the city that have historically allowed duplexes and apartments, and less density in the city’s existing single-family neighborhoods.

This would only further exacerbate disparities in development, wrote a group of residents, including Eugene Turitz of Friends of Adeline and Wilhelimenia Wilson, executive director of Healthy Black Families Inc., in a joint letter.

“[Middle Housing] is discriminatory because of its predictable consequences, as neighborhoods in the ‘flats’ become repositories of excessive densities — with no additional amenities like parks or neighborhood-supporting services,” they wrote.

It’s unclear, however, how developers will respond to Berkeley’s Middle Housing proposal, should it be adopted. In September, Sacramento approved a similar ordinance, becoming the first in the state to do so, though Santa Rosa is considering a proposal as well.

Since going into effect in October, Sacramento has received 19 applications, most for duplexes with ADUs, Nguyen Nguyen, an associate planner for the city, wrote in an email to KQED. Of those, nine have been approved and six are in progress.

Nguyen said staff are seeing projects that otherwise would not have been allowed without the new ordinance, but added that developers tend to prefer projects on vacant lots over properties with existing homes that would first need to be demolished.

Builders proposing projects under the ordinance have also tended to be less experienced than typical developers, he said. “They are usually a local property owner or local entrepreneur or small real estate investor who needs extra hand-holding and technical assistance,” he added.

Financing is also a challenge, according to Nguyen. Projects proposing three or more units are reviewed under the Commercial Building Code, which creates higher construction and permitting costs. Projects with four or more units require a licensed professional, which adds more cost.

Sacramento’s experience, though nascent, aligns with predictions from a study David Garcia published last year for UC Berkeley’s Terner Center on Housing Innovation. In it, he found that most forms of “middle housing” — buildings with two and 10 units — are not financially feasible, except for duplexes under the right conditions.

“There are so many other factors that go into whether or not a missing middle housing project can work in real life. So, it’s not just the zoning,” Garcia told KQED. “It’s all these other little rules that dictate what can be built on the sites — whether that’s setbacks, height restrictions, roof pitch materials, easements, things like that.”

Developers who pursue middle housing projects often find themselves mired in site-by-site problem-solving, Garcia said, making the projects unappealing to large, corporate investors.

“There’s no economies of scale there,” Garcia said. “A traditional large developer is not really gonna get out of bed for anything lower than 100 units. And that’s not what we’re talking about here.”

Jordan Klein, director of planning and development in Berkeley, thinks it unlikely his department will be overwhelmed with applications. In the first three years after the state’s lot-split law, SB 9, went into effect, developers submitted 17 applications, 12 of which were deemed eligible. Of those dozen, five single-family homes and one ADU have been approved.

“If we get 10 middle housing projects a year, I think that’ll be a success,” Klein said. “I think we’ll be excited about that. Adding maybe an average of three units per project. That’s 40 units a year. That would be great.”

In fact, some proponents of the ordinance say it doesn’t go far enough and want to see it strengthened by removing density limits to allow for more units within the same building envelope.

In South Berkeley, resident and real estate agent Deborah Matthews shares concerns about limiting development in the city’s historically exclusionary neighborhoods — but also acknowledges the demographic shift that has already taken place.

To her, the city’s downzoning efforts in the 1960s, which limited new apartments in residential neighborhoods, have already driven up home prices and pushed out many lower- and middle-income families, including many Black residents. Berkeley’s Black population peaked in 1970 at about 24% of the population. In 2024, it was just over 7%.

The exodus is felt on Sunday strolls through South Berkeley, as much as it is heard. Where gospel music once rang out from churches, now there is silence.

“It was such a wonderful celebration,” Matthews said, recalling her weekly walks some three decades ago. “You would interact with people that would walk by. They’d stop and start talking with you, and people would kind of do a little rhythm dance or hand clapping or just something that they enjoyed about listening to that music.”

Over the past 25 years, the price of a “typical” Berkeley home rose more than 270%, from around $385,000 in January 2000 to just over $1.4 million in May 2025, according to Zillow.

And while the Middle Housing ordinance doesn’t specifically address homeownership, the city is considering separate proposals to allow homeowners to convert ADUs into condominiums and to subdivide lots that don’t qualify under the state’s lot split law. Taken together with Middle Housing, Matthews said, it will allow more opportunity for homeownership.

“What I’m hoping is that it will provide an opportunity, first of all, for homeownership and access to people who haven’t had it before, or who feel that they’ve been left out for a number of years — and rightfully so,” she said. “That assumption, that feeling, that lack of being able to participate in the housing market, it has been very accurate.”

But she said the final proposal should provide that opportunity throughout the city, rather than concentrating development in areas that have already borne the brunt of it.

“Berkeley must implement inclusionary housing development in more than a ceremonial process,” Matthews said. “Middle Housing must be an equitable action throughout our city, providing housing in every district and neighborhood to meet residents’ needs.”