1500 San Pablo Avenue

1500 San Pablo Avenue - Project Description

1500 San Pablo Avenue is currently the site of a mostly vacant, former Cadillac automobile dealership. The site was developed in the 1950’s as San Pablo Avenue grew into an auto-oriented corridor that included car repair facilities, fast food restaurants and retail centers. In recent years, the cities along San Pablo Avenue – from Richmond to Oakland – have worked together to revitalize San Pablo Avenue and transform it into a sustainable transportation corridor. One of the elements of this transformation is an emphasis on transit-oriented-development to support and enhance the transit options planned for this corridor. In recent years, several four- and five-story mixed-use projects have been proposed for the street under this new vision and three projects have been constructed in Berkeley alone.

Hudson McDonald LLC is proposing converting 1500 San Pablo Avenue – at 77,000 square feet, one of the largest properties on the corridor in Berkeley and designated as a node in the General Plan and Zoning Ordinance – into a mixed-use community featuring ground floor retail stores with parking located behind the shops, mixed-income housing on the upper floors, an “art grove” and neighborhood services. It is our hope that this project will convert the obsolete facility into a vibrant community of homes, shops and a café that will help enhance the Cedar / San Pablo district’s continuing emergence as a local neighborhood shopping and gathering area.

Hudson McDonald has held three community meetings about this project at which zoning, the proposed project and design options were discussed. At these meetings, project neighbors shared their concerns, preferences and hopes for the project. We are currently synthesizing this community input into a final project design that will be submitted to the City of Berkeley for processing.

At present, the proposed project includes:

181 housing units, including 27 low income units

9,900 square feet of neighborhood-serving retail space

125 at-grade parking spaces

An “Art Grove” and a variety of public and semi-public open spaces

The proposed project will feature a wide variety of features designed to minimize the project’s environmental impact including on-site power generation, solar heating, water conservation and on-site storm water treatment, car-sharing, extensive bicycle parking facilities and public transit enhancements.

The project is in the early design stage. Updated plans and information will be posted as it becomes available.

Project Files:

Proposed Project Plans

Concept Elevations

We welcome continued community input about the project. Please direct any comments to

Christopher Hudson Chris@hudsonmcdonald.com 510.548.1065

1500 San Pablo Avenue - Potential Development Site

After the second community meeting (in July 2008), the design team pursued the idea of a building with 5-story heights that steps down from San Pablo Avenue. Consistent with this idea, the design team came up with three options shown below. Based on the preferences expressed during the third community meeting (in December), the design team is pursuing ideas developed in Option 2

This option features a modernist design, which is consistent with the quality along the San Pablo corridor. Heights step down from San Pablo Avenue to a single family residential scale, which fits in with the character of the residential portions of the neighborhood.

Option 2 is also being pursued as the basic design for the townhomes located along Tenth Street, with the possible addition of features for which project neighbors have expressed support, such as porches and front yards. Also, based on the discussion at the last community meeting, the design team is looking at ways to integrate the San Pablo frontage of Option 2 with the Tenth Street frontage of Option 1, a more traditional craftsman design.

While the design team is pursuing these ideas, which are based on the images below, they should be considered conceptual and will certainly change throughout the remaining design phase.

Existing Site (McNevin Cadillac)