We are writing to you as young families living in and around the Elmwood. College Avenue is our backyard. We’ve experienced the struggle to find housing and know firsthand the negative effects that the housing crisis has had on the fabric of our community.

That is why we support legalizing mid-size apartment buildings on College Avenue.

It takes a village to raise a child, but too many of our peers have left the East Bay for Central Valley exurbs or have fled the state entirely. Every departure represents play dates that will never be scheduled, school projects that will never be collaborated on, and birthdays that will never be celebrated. Worse yet are our peers who want kids but cannot afford to have them. What will our neighborhoods be without young families? Or without the shop owners, teachers, babysitters, park staff, firefighters, and the thousands of other people who make up our town? This is already happening in neighborhoods like Thousand Oaks where “from 1980 to 2023, the median age climbed from 37 to 55.”

We cannot preserve neighborhood character without making sure that characters can afford to live in our neighborhood.

We're calling on Berkeley to do more: to allow for greater height and to upzone a wider area. We believe that the city of Berkeley should stand for integration, for doing its part to solve the housing crisis, and for protecting the environment by increasing housing in neighborhoods where residents can walk to shops, restaurants, and transit. NIMBYs are saying that more housing will ruin these neighborhoods, but we know better: more housing is actually what's going to save these neighborhoods from turning into ghost towns. More people will create vibrant, thriving business districts.

Please pass an ambitious upzoning that legalizes mid-size apartment buildings in the Elmwood.