Over a century ago, Berkeley, Calif., pioneered an approach to land-use policy that would go on to stifle housing production all over the country.
In 1916, Berkeley became one of the first cities in the country to enact single-family zoning. The policy was championed by one of the major developers in the city at the time, Duncan McDuffie.
As president of the city’s Civic Art Commission, McDuffie backed the request of the “property owners of Elmwood Park and vicinity” to be classified such that “no buildings shall be erected or maintained other than single-family dwellings” in their district. What these property owners would gain, McDuffie wrote, was “protection against the invasion of their district by flats, apartment houses and stores, with the deterioration of values that is sure to follow.”
What prompted the apparent upset among the petitioners was that “there have already been built three flats, an apartment house, a school and a number of stores.” The horror.
As KQED notes, the consequence of all of this was exactly as one would expect. “The single-family zoning designation in Elmwood made the neighborhood more exclusive, because developers could charge more for single-family homes than they could for duplexes or cottage apartments.” It wasn’t long after that these zoning powers would also be used against “Chinese and Japanese-owned laundries and prohibited a Black-owned dance hall from moving in.”
It is against this backdrop that the progressive city of Berkeley has been liberalizing some of its land use policies. In 2021, the Berkeley City Council adopted a resolution acknowledging the city’s history and vowed to end exclusionary zoning in the city. The city has, to its credit, seen the benefits of allowing more housing to get built. As The Real Deal reported last year, “Since 2015, the city has more than tripled its average annual housing production” and added over 2,200 units from 2022 to 2025. That no doubt helped the city drive down rents to 2018 levels last year.
The city has been doing its part to keep that positive momentum going and working through the common debates such matters kick up. Just last year, the city enacted a missing middle housing ordinance intended to encourage “duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, courtyard apartments and other small-scale multi-family housing types” across the city.
As SFGate noted, “The ordinance sets a density cap of 70 units per acre across residential zones, preserves current height limits of 35 feet, or three stories, and keeps lot coverage at 60%. Berkeley’s hillside neighborhoods are not included in the ordinance until a fire safety and evacuation study is executed.”
One of the most recent policy fights has been over proposed upzoning in some of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, including the Elmwood neighborhood at the epicenter of the city’s zoning changes over a century ago.
History has a way of repeating itself. Some in Elmwood have sought to thwart the City Council’s expected loosening of height restrictions along a commercial strip in the neighborhood — intended to encourage mid-rise apartments — by pushing for the strip to be designated “historic” status.
“Hundreds of people, including 17 owners of commercial properties in the neighborhood, signed petitions in support of the designation, which would have made it more difficult to demolish and redevelop buildings in the district,” reported Berkeleyside on June 5.
The application for historic designation would have shielded about three dozen buildings, some of which date back to 1916, from normal development processes. Projects in the district would have to go before the Landmarks Preservation Commission and even the City Council, entailing costly delays for any developer looking to get anything done in the area.
“It is a very expensive and long process,” Landmarks Commission member Theo Gordon noted, according to Berkeleyside. “That uncertainty makes it even harder [to build housing], and leads to abandoned projects.”
With these practical concerns and other considerations in mind, the Landmarks Preservation Commission narrowly rejected the move on a 5-4 vote this month, with some commissioners noting it was “inappropriate for Berkeley to honor how the Elmwood was shaped by the 1916 zoning code.”
Instead of declaring the whole area historic, commissioners also noted that individual properties could make their own case for individual recognition as landmarks. So stay tuned on that.
Beyond the zoning front, there are other barriers to housing, of course, including the city being among those with a longstanding rent-control policy on the books. According to the city’s rent board, more than 20,000 of the city’s 29,000 rental units are subject to government regulation. One wonders how much more robust the city’s rental housing market could be without those restrictions. But good luck repealing rent control in Berkeley anytime soon.
In any case, Berkeley seems to be directionally doing the right things. It’s legalizing more housing and more housing is getting built. That’s key to ensuring the city meets current and future demand. It took them a while to do it, but the city is righting the wrongs of the past.
Sal Rodriguez is opinion editor for the Southern California News Group and a senior fellow with the Pacific Research Institute. He is the author of Dynamism or Decay? Getting City Hall Out of the Way, published by the Pacific Research Institute.