Fully Affordable Housing Project Proposed in West Berkeley

The third time might be the charm for a site in West Berkeley that has twice been considered for housing in recent years.

Los Altos-based developer California Supportive Housing filed an application last week with the City of Berkeley to build a 94-unit, 100-percent affordable apartment building at 2147 San Pablo Avenue, the San Francisco Business Times reported. The proposal calls for demolishing an existing auto body and auto glass shop to make way for a six-story workforce housing building with a 46-space parking garage.

If approved, the development would bring “much needed affordable workforce housing to a commercial district along a major transit corridor in West Berkeley,” California Supportive Housing’s application said.

The developer is using AB 2011, which limits zoning changes after applications are filed and streamlines approvals for housing on commercial sites. The firm took advantage of the state density bonus, which permits developers to build more housing on a site than zoning rules would typically allow in exchange for a certain number of affordable units.

The site is owned by Alameda-based Wang Brothers Investments, which purchased the location in 2022 for nearly $2.8 million. Wang Brothers applied to build a 128-unit co-living development with ground-floor retail at the site. That effort appears to be inactive, according to the Business Times. Wang Brothers, in tandem with Studio KDA, submitted several plan revisions, including increasing the number of units to 144 and cutting down on the ground-floor retail space. The plan was last updated in November 2024 and was considered by the Design Review Commission in February 2025.

That was the second proposal submitted for the site. The previous owner, an unnamed applicant, floated building a 44-unit apartment building geared toward students at the University of California, Berkeley.

As Berkeley faces an ongoing housing shortage, developers have been filing applications to build residences to fill the gap. New state housing laws like AB 2011, SB 330 and California’s density bonus have made new construction projects more financially feasible. Many of those proposals are centered around the UC Berkeley campus east of downtown.

— Chris Malone Méndez