Emeryville Emerges As Bay Area Pro-Housing Leader
- Josh Stephens
- May 3, 2022
- 6 min read
To put it mildly, Emeryville Mayor John Bauters takes to Twitter prolifically—especially for an elected official. Amid endorsements of peanut butter ice cream, backpacking, otters, and support for LBGTQ+ youth, Bauters makes his urbanist sensibilities clear. He enjoys biking, walking, public transit, and street trees. He loves affordable housing. He critiques the slow pace of housing production in San Francisco, directly across the bay.
And Bauters does not like obstructionist NIMBYism one bit. He tweeted recently, “I’m tired of it all. I’m tired of being told that as a local elected I should defend ‘local control’ all the time. When used in the housing context, it’s a racist weapon. It needs to be reformed, and NIMBYs need to be neutralized. They perpetuate our housing crisis.”
Bauters is simply – though loudly – reflecting his city’s own commitment to housing. San Francisco loudly espouses liberal virtues without building much housing. Cities like Berkeley and Oakland have slowly embraced the prospect of permitting more housing, and more suburban Bay Area cities have contorted their regulations to avert even the production of accessory dwelling units.
But Emeryville has embraced housing on a scale that no other Bay Area city has even considered. In particular, the city hopes to not only meet its Regional Housing Needs Allocation goals, but to exceed it — by as much as 50%.
“It means they definitely are supportive of housing development projects, sometimes at higher densities than other cities may be interested in, and possibly even higher than what our zoning may allow,” said Emeryville Community Development Director Charles Bryant, referring to the City Council.
It does help to be small. Emeryville currently has a current population of 13,000. In the RHNA process, the Association of Bay Area Governments has assigned the city an increase of about 1,800 units. If built, those units will not alleviate the area’s housing shortages on their own. But for many leaders in Emeryville, the greater densities that the RHNA goal will require, and the amenities that will accompany them, are goals in and of themselves.
“I don’t know many other cities that are as happy to meet their RHNA goals as we are,” said Bauters.
The city is also deliberately pursuing a “Prohousing Designation” from the Department of Housing and Community Development, which will unlock financial assistance from the state.
Most of Emeryville’s new units are likely to be built on former industrial sites and in other underused spaces left over from a different era. For most of the 20th century, Emeryville was known as a home of heavy industry, with a paint factory, a scrap metal mill, a truck factory, and extensive rail yards. It was also known for brothels and speakeasies.
Many of those businesses have given way to tech and science-related firms, including major offices of Pixar Animation, Novartis, Peete’s Coffee, and Clif Bar. The city has roughly twice as many jobs as residents.
In suburban areas, aggressive housing increases often entail relatively indiscriminate development of single-unit homes on greenfield sites—resulting in sprawl--a development pattern that, Bryant said, "kind of makes my skin crawl." In Emeryville’s case, sprawl is not an option—the city is bounded by the cities of Oakland to the east and south, Berkeley to the north, and the San Francisco Bay to the west—and the city’s planning process allows for anything but a free-for-all.
“A pro-housing attitude doesn’t mean that people can do whatever they want,” said Bryant.
Emeryville requires developers to meet certain conditions and provide some combination of public amenities and upgrades in order to gain approval, including affordable housing set-asides, impact fees, public art, park space, and active transportation infrastructure.
The city requires 12-18% affordable units in all new buildings, and it has a density bonus system that allows for a bonuses up to a nearly unheard-of 100%.
