North Berkeley BART housing project won’t break ground this year

The plan to build housing on what is now a parking lot at the North Berkeley BART station has been one of the city’s most contentious development fights. It has emerged as a key issue in the race to represent the City Council district that includes the station and its surrounding neighborhoods. Credit: Ximena Natera, Berkeleyside/CatchLight

The long-awaited project building hundreds of apartments atop the North Berkeley BART station will not break ground this year, according to the transit agency.

BART and city officials, as well as the development team that was chosen to build the 735-home project, have long said they hoped to start construction in 2025. The project calls for transforming the station’s parking lots into a transit village, made up of 13 new buildings with 377 subsidized affordable apartments built by local nonprofits and another 358 market-rate homes from the for-profit developer AvalonBay.

But BART spokesperson James Allison wrote in response to a Berkeleyside inquiry that the development group North Berkeley Housing Partners now hopes to start construction of the project’s first affordable housing building “as soon as early 2026,” so long as that project can secure funding.

The outlook is less clear for the market-rate development, meanwhile, which Allison wrote is “awaiting improved market conditions.” Housing construction has slowed in Berkeley and across the country since interest rates and materials costs shot up in 2022.

An artist’s rendering shows plans for new open spaces at the housing development at the North Berkeley BART station. Credit: David Baker Architects, Yes Duffy Architects, and Einwiller Kuehl Landscape Architecture

A representative for BRIDGE Housing, the affordable builder that leads the North Berkeley Housing Partners team, declined to comment for this article. AvalonBay did not respond to a request for comment.

The city signed off on plans for the project last December, capping a six-year planning process that stretched across dozens of public hearings and spurred an often contentious debate among station neighbors, housing advocates and lawmakers at the local and state level over the future of the eight-acre site.

BART has long seen housing projects like the one at North Berkeley as a key strategy for raising revenue, both through ground leases to the developers who build the housing and ridership from the residents who live in it. Those needs have only gotten more dire as changes to commute patterns since the emergence of COVID-19 threaten to plunge the rail system into a fiscal crisis.

But BART’s efforts to build have fallen short of the pace the system hoped to set, and other projects on its property are facing the same economic headwinds as the one at North Berkeley. About 4,200 homes have been built on BART land since the system started the push for more transit-oriented development, agency staff told its board at a meeting last month. BART had hoped to build 7,000 homes by this year, on its way to building 20,000 by 2040.

Like at the North Berkeley project, agency staff say affordable developments at many of their stations appear likely to break ground sooner than market-rate buildings. That’s because construction costs have risen faster than market-rate rents, making those projects less attractive to investors, while tax credits and increased funding for affordable housing — such as the money Berkeley has put toward affordable homes at its BART stations — have made it comparatively easier for those projects to move forward.

Berkeley recently signed off on design standards for a project to bring hundreds of apartments, more than a third of them affordable, to the Ashby BART station, and is now searching for a developer.

Kate Darby Rauch contributed reporting to this story.