Berkeley: Middle Housing Zoning

Berkeley, California holds a place in housing history that the city has spent the last several years trying to undo. In 1916 it became the first city in the United States to adopt single-family zoning, a rule that made it illegal to build anything other than one house on one lot. The rule was first applied to the Elmwood neighborhood, and the people who wrote it were open about why (source).

The stated purpose was exclusion. Duncan McDuffie, a Berkeley real estate developer who championed the rule, attached racial covenants to his developments that barred owners from selling or renting to people of color. He wrote in a 1916 Berkeley Civic Bulletin that limiting an area to single-family homes would protect against an "invasion of their district by flats, apartment houses and stores with the deterioration of values that is sure to follow." The ordinance was enacted in part to keep a Black dance hall from opening on a prominent corner, and it pushed two Japanese laundries and one Chinese laundry out of locations where they had been operating legally (source).

This is the irony at the center of Berkeley's recent zoning reform. The same city that invented the tool used to separate people by race and income later set out to dismantle it. That history matters for British Columbia readers because it shows how deeply single-family zoning is woven into North American cities, and how hard it is to remove once it is in place.

On February 23, 2021, the Berkeley City Council voted 9 to 0 to begin ending single-family zoning across the city. The vote drew national headlines, but it is important to understand what it actually did. It was a resolution stating the Council's intent to end exclusionary zoning by December 2022 (source).

A resolution of intent is a statement of direction. It does not change any rule by itself. Reporting at the time described the February 2021 measure as symbolic, a historic gesture that started a community engagement process expected to run for about a year and a half before a binding council vote (source). In other words, on the day of the famous 9 to 0 vote, it was still illegal to build a duplex on most Berkeley lots. Nothing on the ground had changed.

This gap between announcing a goal and writing the rule is the single most useful lesson Berkeley offers. The headline said the city had ended single-family zoning. The legal reality was that it had only agreed to try.

The binding rule came years later. Berkeley's City Council adopted the Middle Housing Zoning Amendments ordinance on July 8, 2025, and the changes took effect on November 1, 2025 (source).

The ordinance permits a clear set of building types in residential neighborhoods: duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, courtyard apartments, and other small-scale multi-family housing (source). The headline number is the one most relevant to anyone running development math: on a typical 5,000-square-foot lot, the rules allow a three-story building with up to eight units. Accessory dwelling units, the small secondary suites often called ADUs, are not counted toward that eight-unit limit, so the real ceiling can be higher (source).

Other technical limits round out the envelope. Most districts allow 60 percent lot coverage, the height limit is preserved at 35 feet, and density is capped at roughly 70 units per acre (source). These projects are permitted by right, meaning a qualifying proposal does not need a discretionary public hearing to win approval. That is a meaningful difference, because discretionary review is where many small projects die in slow, expensive hearings.

The new rules apply across most of Berkeley, but not all of it. The hills neighborhoods were excluded from the Middle Housing ordinance while the city studies evacuation routes in what it classifies as a high fire-risk zone (source).

The reasoning is straightforward. Adding more homes means adding more people and more cars, and in a wildfire the people in those homes need to be able to leave quickly. Berkeley sits beside hills that have burned before, and narrow, winding hill roads can become deadly bottlenecks during an evacuation. Rather than push density into that terrain before the evacuation question was answered, the Council held the hills back pending the study (source).

This carve-out is honest urban planning, but it is also a limit worth naming plainly. The hills tend to hold some of Berkeley's most expensive land. Leaving them out means the parts of the city that arguably have the most room to absorb wealthier homeowners are, for now, the parts where the old single-family pattern stays in place. That tension feeds directly into the equity debate covered below.

The 2021 resolution set a target of December 2022. The actual ordinance was adopted in July 2025 and took effect in November 2025, roughly two and a half years past the original deadline (source, source). The effort spanned about four years from the time former Council member Lori Droste first introduced the resolution to end exclusionary zoning, before Council member Rashi Kesarwani advanced the final proposal (source).

The delay was not laziness. It was the cost of doing reform locally and from the ground up. A symbolic vote takes one meeting. A real ordinance has to define every number: how tall, how many units, how much lot coverage, which neighborhoods, what setbacks, what to do about fire risk. Each of those decisions invites public comment, staff analysis, redrafting, and political negotiation. The hills evacuation question alone required a separate study. The 2021-to-2025 gap is what the slow, careful, contested work of writing a binding rule actually looks like.

An honest assessment has to state this clearly: the effect of Berkeley's Middle Housing ordinance cannot yet be measured. The rules only took effect on November 1, 2025 (source). Real estate development moves in years, not months. Permits have to be drawn, financing arranged, and construction completed before anyone can count new homes built under the new rules. There is no meaningful uptake data to report.

Berkeley itself built a check into the ordinance. Staff must report back within two years of adoption, or after 25 applications have been filed, whichever comes first, to assess how effective the change has been and what its equity impacts are (source). That built-in review is the date to watch. Until then, any claim that the reform has succeeded or failed is guesswork. Anyone who tells you otherwise is getting ahead of the evidence.

Berkeley's ordinance passed over real objection, and the objections are worth taking seriously. The most pointed came from tenant advocates. Negeene Mosaed of the Berkeley Tenant Union told the Council, "There's no affordability in your plan. You are destroying it." Supporters answered on the basis of supply, with Councilmember Ben Bartlett arguing, "We cannot keep deluding ourselves that we don't have a scarcity problem" (source).

This is the central equity debate over middle housing everywhere. Allowing more units does not, by itself, require any of them to be affordable to lower-income renters. The worry is that loosening the rules makes existing modest homes more valuable as redevelopment sites, which can raise land prices and push out the very tenants the policy is meant to help. The hills exclusion sharpens the point, because the wealthiest land in the city is the land that, for now, keeps its single-family protection (source). Whether eight market-rate units on a former single-family lot ease the housing shortage or simply rebuild it more expensively is exactly what Berkeley's own two-year review is meant to test (source).

The most useful way for a BC reader to understand Berkeley is by contrast with British Columbia's own approach. BC did not ask cities to volunteer. The province passed Bill 44, the Housing Statutes (Residential Development) Amendment Act, which received royal assent in November 2023 and came into full force on June 30, 2024 (source).

Bill 44 overrides local zoning bylaws directly. On lots previously zoned for one or two homes, it requires a minimum of three units on parcels of 280 square metres or smaller and four units on larger parcels, rising to six units on larger lots near frequent transit. Because it is provincial law, municipalities including the City of Vancouver cannot opt out (source).

Set the two side by side. Berkeley's reform was a single city acting on its own. It began with a symbolic 9 to 0 vote in February 2021, then took until November 2025, more than two and a half years past its own target, to produce a binding rule, and it still left the hills out (source, source). BC's reform was a province forcing every qualifying municipality to comply by a single deadline, with no local veto (source).

The lesson for British Columbia is about the difference between a commitment and a rule. A symbolic vote generates a headline; a statute changes what you can build. BC's homeowners and builders work under a province-wide rule that does not depend on each council's appetite or pace. Berkeley shows what the slower path costs in time, and reminds BC that the real test of any housing reform is not the announcement, it is the binding text and what gets built underneath it.