As the Berkeley City Council\u2019s vote on the Corridors Zoning Update, or CZU, looms, Save Berkeley Shops is proposing an alternative zoning plan and is preparing to establish a ballot referendum against the upzoning.<\/p>\n
The CZU will allow for potential upzoning \u2014 the changing of zoning laws to allow for denser development in a given area \u2014 in multiple Berkeley neighborhoods, including the Elmwood area on College Avenue, which some worry will push out the local small businesses community.<\/p>\n
Save Berkeley Shops, or SBS, has proposed an alternative plan, called \u201ccommunity zoning,\u201d which incentivizes developers \u2014 through giving them expedited permits and the ability to build larger projects \u2014 to build modest family homes, affordable units and ground-floor retail space as part of their development plans.<\/p>\n
If the City Council does pass the controversial upzoning ordinance, SBS plans to push for a citywide referendum on the item.<\/p>\n
If it comes to that, the organization will have one month to gather signatures from approximately 6,000 registered Berkeley voters. If it succeeds, SBS will qualify the referendum for the ballot, and the ordinance will be frozen. It will not be able to take effect unless it is approved by voters in the next general election, which will take place in 2028.<\/p>\n
According to Donald Simon, president and cofounder of SBS, the organization had a meeting with multiple council members in June to present their findings and proposals, after which they sent the council a questionnaire asking what they believed the final proposal should look like.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo Berkeley is adding an enormous amount of housing. We still support them adding more because that\u2019s useful and helpful, but they don\u2019t need to be built right smack dab in the middle of these small business districts,\u201d Simon said. \u201cWe will lose ground floor retail space and \u2026 the disruption that comes from long construction projects like that \u2014 with roads being closed, traffic being rerouted, the noise, the disruption, the vibration \u2014 really impacts the remaining businesses there and threatens their continued survival.\u201d<\/p>\n
In May, the Berkeley Planning Commission considered the CZU, paying specific attention to small business protections, according to District 4 Councilmember Igor Tregub.<\/p>\n
However, Tregub said in an email that \u201cit is unclear when it will come to Council,\u201d and that he does not expect the vote to happen before next year.<\/p>\n
\u201cCity Council has changed its mind around when it\u2019s going to bring this before council no less than a dozen times since the process began. We get conflicting information every time we ask,\u201d Simon alleged. \u201cWe expect this to be brought before City Council sometime before the current City Council\u2019s terms expire at the end of November.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey can choose to adopt what we had proposed. It\u2019s very simple. Or, they can do something similar,\u201d Simon said. \u201cBut what they have proposed so far \u2014 and they admitted to use in a private meeting with the head of the planning department \u2014 is unenforceable. We will not have ground floor retail in these new housing projects. That\u2019s a shame, because we could have both.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As the Berkeley City Council\u2019s vote on the Corridors Zoning Update, or CZU, looms, Save Berkeley Shops is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":459442,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[7981,33481,78322,30530,30533,29028,14328,143,145,144,30532],"class_list":["post-459441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-berkeley-city-council","tag-berkeley-planning-commission","tag-college-ave","tag-corridors-zoning-update","tag-donald-simon","tag-elmwood","tag-igor-tregub","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-save-berkeley-shops"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=459441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459441\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/459442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=459441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=459441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=459441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}