proposed<\/a> by Yes Community Architects, will be located at 2425 Durant Ave. The complex will be 20 stories and 208 feet tall, consisting of 169 multifamily apartments for campus students. The City of Berkeley and the Zoning Adjustments Board, or ZAB, approved the project\u2019s use permit at a hearing Oct. 9.<\/p>\nYes Community Architects has requested concessions, or modifications of development standards that reduce the cost of providing affordable housing. The concessions would enable the company to build more units than what is usually allowed under the California State Density Bonus Law, or SDBL. The company has also requested to be exempt from apprenticeship requirements and health care expenditures under the HARD HATS Ordinance, as well as from apprenticeship standards for private development under Berkeley\u2019s Southside Plan.<\/p>\n
Adopted by the city in 2011, the Southside Plan states the city\u2019s policies for key land use, housing, transportation and other areas of concern. The city amended the plan in November 2023 to allow larger, higher-density developments.<\/p>\n
The city adopted the HARD HATS Ordinance in May 2023 in an effort to \u201cenhance the good health\u201d of construction workers and ensure that private contractors participate in \u201chigh-quality, industry-proven\u201d apprenticeship programs.<\/p>\n
Jolene Kramer and Andrea Matsuoka, lawyers at Weinberg, Roger & Rosenfeld who represent AFL-CIO and the Carpenters Council, submitted a letter to Mayor Adena Ishii, city council members and the city clerk Oct. 27.The letter contends that Berkeley should not grant concessions under the SDBL that would \u201cwaive local labor standards\u201d and characterizes Yes Community Architects\u2019 strategy of using these concessions to avoid construction labor standards as \u201cnovel and unorthodox.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe requested concessions are an attempted misuse of the SDBL to avoid important labor standards that the City enacted to protect public health and safety,\u201d the letter states.<\/p>\n
The letter alleges that the requested concessions would have a \u201cspecific, adverse effect upon public health and safety.\u201d It notes that the construction industry has one of the highest rates of injury and that workers without health coverage, apprenticeship requirements and prevailing wage requirements are more prone to accidents and injuries.<\/p>\n
\u201cGiven the policy behind the State Density Bonus Law, which is to build more affordable housing, it was surprising and disappointing, I would say, to our clients that the law would be used in this way to basically undercut labor standards on those projects,\u201d Kramer said.<\/p>\n
A hearing for the city council to reconsider the ZAB\u2019s approval of the use permit with the concessions has been scheduled for Feb. 10, 2026.<\/p>\n
Clarification: A previous version of this article implied that the development is exclusivey for UC Berkeley students. In fact, it is privately developed and consists of\u00a0multifamily apartments geared toward campus students.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two unions \u2014 the Building and Construction Trades Council of Alameda County, a child organization of the American…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49833,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[32257,32265,32256,32261,32259,32262,32264,32268,32258,143,145,144,32267,32263,32266,21345,32260],"class_list":["post-49832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-american-federation-of-labor-and-congress-of-industrial-organizations","tag-andrea-matsuoka","tag-building-and-construction-trades-council-of-alameda-county","tag-california-state-density-bonus-law","tag-city-of-berkeley","tag-hard-hats-ordinance","tag-jolene-kramer","tag-mayor-adena-ishii","tag-northern-california-carpenters-regional-council","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-roger-rosenfeld","tag-southside-plan","tag-weinberg","tag-yes-community-architects","tag-zoning-adjustments-board"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49832","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=49832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49832\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}