Spur Capital Partners aims to redevelop four blocks of defunct metal shops near the Berkeley waterfront into a 10-acre life science campus for UC startups.
The Oklahoma-based investor seeks to rezone 15 parcels to build an eight-building campus with 900,000 square feet for R&D and lab use around 640 Gilman Street, the San Francisco Business Times reported.
Rhoades Planning Group, based in the East Bay city, filed the rezoning application late last month on behalf of Spur Capital. A formal planning application is expected early this year.
The project, dubbed Gilman Gateway and designed by Chicago-based Perkins&Will, would include clusters of three-, four-, five- and six-story buildings, according to an early rendering. For tenants, it would target startups from the University of California — Berkeley.
It would span the equivalent of four city blocks, with 15 addresses on Eastshore Highway, Second, Third, Camelia and Gilman streets. Spur is under contract to buy “the balance” of those parcels, Rhoades Planning founder Mark Rhoades told the Business Times.
They include the former site of Berkeley’s Pacific Steel Casting, a shuttered manufacturing business based in West Oakland, and Berkeley Forge and Tool, a commercial forging and mining product business now shutting down.
Pacific Steel declared bankruptcy in 2014 before closing four years later after 84 years of smokestack work. Berkeley Forge and Tool is among the last remaining heavy manufacturers in the area.
Though the city sought to preserve West Berkeley’s manufacturing, many buildings aren’t up to modern standards, Rhoades said, and don’t generate many jobs. West Berkeley once had more than 100 factories.
“These are spaces we hope are going to accommodate the vast array of incredible startups that are coming off of the Cal campus, in particular, and don’t have places to grow and expand,” Rhoades told the newspaper. “And these are industrial jobs — jobs that, unlike dot-com, have a higher level of workforce that does not need college degrees.”
The Berkeley City Council has voted for an initiative to upgrade the city’s zoning codes to allow more flexibility for lab and R&D users to retain early-stage Berkeley-born startups as they grow and seek out larger facilities.
Lane Partners is now building Berkeley Commons, a 470,000-square-foot life science development at 600 Addison Street. SteelWave is constructing theLAB Berkeley, a $241 million, 284,000-square-foot life science project nearby.
About a mile away, RedCo is moving forward on an approved, 210,000-square-foot life science development at 742 Grayson Street.
— Dana Bartholomew
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