Downtown Berkeley is not a victim of the market. It’s a victim of its own rules.

Spend enough time downtown and a pattern becomes obvious. It is not that people have stopped coming. It is not that Berkeley suddenly became undesirable. The Downtown Berkeley BART station still unloads onto Shattuck in steady waves, and the restaurants still do real business. What keeps repeating instead is the same quiet outcome. Proposals appear. Meetings happen. Renderings circulate. Then years pass and nothing gets built.

The easy explanation is the market. Construction is expensive. Interest rates move. Retail is volatile. But the more accurate explanation is regulatory unpredictability, much of it generated locally. Berkeley has spent years telling itself it supports infill housing near transit, and it has certainly written that commitment into plans and zoning. The friction shows up when a project meets the basic zoning envelope and still gets pulled into a discretionary process that adds subjectivity, delay, and litigation exposure.

Where the process turns from rules into vibes

State law has attempted to close this loophole. The Housing Accountability Act, Government Code section 65589.5, is designed to prevent cities from denying housing projects that comply with objective standards. Over time, the Legislature strengthened it because cities learned they could avoid outright denial and still achieve the same result through delay, redesign cycles, or shifting criteria.

In Berkeley, one of the main levers is discretionary design review. When an approval decision becomes discretionary, it becomes appealable, and it becomes easier for opponents to invoke CEQA as leverage. CEQA is not inherently anti-housing, but in practice it can become a delay tool when timelines and risk are weaponized. Even when an infill project is eligible for statutory exemptions or streamlining intended for urban areas, developers are often pushed into extra studies because everyone knows that a lawsuit, even a weak one, can burn months and money.

This is where the city’s posture matters. A city can comply with state law in spirit by treating objective standards as objective, narrowing discretion, and moving projects quickly. Or it can comply on paper while recreating discretion through design “guidelines” that function like requirements. The latter may avoid a clean denial, but it still chills production.

Streamlining exists, but only if a city lets it work

Berkeley’s history of falling short on lower income housing production has made it eligible, at various points, for state streamlining tools such as SB 35, which provides ministerial approval for certain projects that meet specified criteria. The point of ministerial approval is that it reduces subjectivity and therefore reduces opportunities for delay. The friction is that cities sometimes reintroduce subjectivity by arguing that particular standards are not met, or by embedding subjective requirements into what is labeled objective.

The consequences show up downtown in the form of missed opportunities. Every year a lot sits idle is another year of lost residents who would have supported local businesses by simply living nearby. It is another year where the city’s climate goals are undercut by longer commutes and regional displacement. It is another year where the public treats housing as a permanent “issue” instead of something that can be built if the rules are made legible and the timelines are respected.

Downtown Berkeley is not a ghost town. It is a place with immense transit access and constant demand. The question is whether Berkeley is willing to treat housing law as binding, not optional, and whether it is willing to accept that a city cannot both ask for housing and also preserve every veto point that makes housing impossible.