High-rise towers are coming to Berkeley, whether the city likes it or not.
On Feb. 23, the City Council approved the construction of a 20-story complex in Berkeley’s Southside and a 23-story complex in Downtown Berkeley. While skyscrapers may seem novel in Berkeley, these projects are only two of the many proposed in recent years. While these projects promise much-needed density, they also expose a new and urgent conflict at the heart of California’s housing policy: the push for affordable housing risks sacrificing the rights of the workers who build them.
For most of its history, Berkeley’s cityscape has remained lush and horizontal, consisting predominantly of single-family homes, leafy streets and quiet residential blocks. The upzoning of the idyllic aesthetics signals a rising trend that seeks to challenge the century-old suburban ideal.
The urban planning policies that shaped Berkeley structurally prevented equitable access to housing. Since the city passed one of the nation’s first zoning ordinances in 1916, a plan championed by developer Duncan McDuffie to protect his investments from deterioration and local residents “against the nuisances from which they have suffered for many years,” the city’s design has been used to entrench division. By concentrating single-family homes in the eastern hills and dispersing multi-unit housing in the rest of the city, the code effectively prevented the formation of mixed-income communities, separating the wealthy from the poor and white people from people of color. More than a century later, this framework has ossified into a cityscape defined by segregation and a housing market defined by high rent and few options.
Against the conventions of Berkeley’s urban planning, the high-rise towers offered a radical reimagination. In recent years, California lawmakers have increasingly pushed cities to create denser housing to address California’s housing shortage. However, the strive for denser housing does not come without tension.
The Density Bonus Law encourages developers to build affordable housing: if developers agree to set aside a portion of units at below-market rates, they can stack additional units and build taller structures than the set maximum under city policy. This idea, indeed, incentivized the developers of Berkeley’s two up-and-coming high-rises to take affordability into consideration. As of now, at least 56 affordable units would be built. Moreover, the law requires cities to waive local development standards that would potentially make the project “economically infeasible.”
In theory, the policy offers a supply-side solution to the housing crisis, and — by expanding the accommodative capacity of each project — provides the potential to overcome previous discriminatory zoning practices. However, granting concessions to developers introduces new conflicts at the local level. The two projects approved Feb. 23 relied on the Density Bonus Law to bypass the city’s 2023 “HARD HATS” ordinance, or Helping Achieve Responsible Development with Healthcare and Apprenticeship Training Standards. This act requires large developments to provide healthcare coverage and apprenticeship opportunities for construction workers. Developers argued that complying with these labor standards would significantly increase project costs, allowing them to request and claim an exemption under the state law’s incentives, which would deviate from the local development regulations.
Although several council members expressed support for the labor protections, highlighting that they could not support housing that “will be built on the backs of the workforce,” the opposition proved merely symbolic. City officials ultimately allowed the project to proceed, with Councilmember Rashi Kesarwani citing that the city would have to take on an expensive legal battle that it would likely lose if it attempted to enforce the requirements mandated by the “HARD HATS” ordinance.
This dynamic exposes an emerging loophole: state density bonuses, designed to circumvent exclusionary zoning, can also be used to evade hard-won labor protections. The impending implementation of California SB 79 also reflects this tendency. SB 79 requires cities to approve “by right,” or to unilaterally pass without public consultation, qualifying higher-density housing projects near major transit stops. Therefore, the law shrinks project-by-project entitlement negotiations, where local labor unions have traditionally exercised leverage to secure worker protections.
This reveals a concerning overreliance on the market in California’s housing framework. By hollowing out the negotiation process with local stakeholders, the housing production is treated as a technical problem to be solved through market supply, rather than as a political issue that addresses dealing with society’s everyday reality. This approach may accelerate construction, but it also sidelines the voices of labor unions in the decision-making process, privileging the demographic that developers find profitable or important.
Instead, California legislatures must prioritize greater state intervention: direct public funding to build affordable housing that integrates strong labor standards. California must also ensure that worker protections are embedded in state law, not left vulnerable to waiver under density bonus concessions. The health and rights of the workforce behind new housing need to be addressed with the same urgency as the housing itself, or it risks exploiting the very people the initiative intends to help.
In a college town such as Berkeley, where many of the new housing programs are explicitly designed for or marketed towards students, this phenomenon risks creating a new kind of segregation that separates a transient student population from the locally-based, working-class residents who keep the city operating.
As students on campus and residents of Berkeley — temporary or not — we should support the efforts of labor unions through civic engagement and direct advocacy. If the view of a diversified Berkeley from inside an apartment we can afford is built from the compromise of workers’ rights and welfare, then the inequality etched into the layout of the city will not go away: It will merely grow taller around old divides.