UC Berkeley has announced initial plans to build a 23-story residence hall for Cal freshmen and sophomores in the Southside neighborhood.

If approved by the UC Regents, the high-rise, located in the area currently occupied by the university’s public affairs office and an adjacent parking lot at Bancroft Way and Fulton Street, would be the UC’s tallest residence hall to date Berkeley will provide housing and approximately 1,500 student beds.

The building’s final height, footprint and project schedule are still in flux, but UC Berkeley aims to present the proposal to the regents in March or May, Kyle Gibson, a spokesman for UC Berkeley Capitol Strategies, told Berkeleyside. Construction on the estimated 350,000-square-foot project could begin “as early as” late 2025 and is expected to take between 2.5 and 3 years, he said.

According to preliminary renderings submitted by UC Berkeley to the city’s Zoning Adjustments Board’s Design Review Committee for discussion earlier this fall, the all-electric building could stand up to 276 feet tall – making it the tallest building to date in the Southside neighborhood is one of the highest in the city. The planned UC Berkeley residence hall would not require city approval because it is a UC project.

“We’re not saying it’s necessarily going to be that high, but that’s the height we’re currently exploring designs for,” Gibson said.

Berkeley’s tallest building is currently the Campanile at 307 feet tall, followed by the SkyDeck Tower, which is the tallest building in downtown Berkeley at approximately 190 feet tall. Several towers that could surpass Skydeck’s title have been built for downtown Berkeley: at Shattuck over the site of the former Walgreens pharmacy, at Oxford and Center across from BAMPFA, and at the corner of University and Shattuck, where a McDonald’s currently stands.

In the Southside neighborhood, where zoning regulations requiring taller buildings went into effect last year, a developer recently built a 200-foot-tall, 20-story residential tower on Durant Avenue on land next to Yogurt Park, SF YIMBY reported.

Where else does UC Berkeley build dorms?

Cal is in the midst of a student housing boom after decades of underproduction made UC the campus that offers guaranteed housing to the smallest percentage of its students.

This year, UC Berkeley opened the 772-bed Anchor House and a 761-bed graduate student residence in Albany called xučyun ruwway, a Chochenyo Ohlone name meant to honor the local indigenous population. Previously, in 2018, the 752-bed Blackwell Hall opened in the Southside neighborhood, named for the school’s first tenured African-American professor.

And within the shipping container walls that surround People’s Park, UC Berkeley broke ground in July on a 1,100-bed student housing complex — a hotly contested project that has been stalled amid protests and lawsuits aimed at halting development of the iconic historic site to stop, delayed Berkeley’s counterculture by three years.

In 2017, then-Chancellor Carol Christ set a goal of providing two years of campus housing for freshmen and one year of housing for transfer students — the equivalent of 9,000 beds, based on current enrollment data, Gibson said.

UC Berkeley says it has projects in the pipeline that would achieve more than half of that goal. The Channing-Ellsworth parking garage “could be used on deck for residential purposes in the future,” Gibson said.

Most of the units in the proposed residence hall are triple rooms

Unlike the $300 million Helen Diller Anchor House, which opened earlier this year and features apartment-style student housing, you can expect Bancroft and Fulton’s project to look more like a classic dorm — meaning shared bathrooms and study spaces . A two-story, 500-seat dining room will have some outdoor seating.

A “vast majority” of the units will be three-person units, Gibson said. There will also be some double and single rooms available, although single rooms are reserved primarily for residential assistants and disabled students who require accessible accommodation units.

There will be no parking lot, but Cal plans to make up for the parking spaces lost to new construction by rebuilding the Bancroft parking garage.

A cost estimate for the residence hall was not available at the time of publication, but UC Berkeley plans to finance construction with limited project revenue bond loans, meaning it would take on debt and pay it back with rental income.

Gibson did not say how much the students are expected to pay in rent. The rates set by UC Berkeley Housing will be “relatively the same rates for the same type of housing in all of our buildings,” he said. “We want our students and population to be mixed and not necessarily divided based on how much you can afford.”

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