BERKELEY — About two years after a developer selected for the supportive housing element of UC Berkeley’s controversial student housing project at People’s Park backed out, a new developer has been selected.
Berkeley-based nonprofit Satellite Affordable Housing Associates will now be building and operating a roughly 100-unit apartment building meant to serve as affordable housing for former homeless and low-income people, officials with University of California, Berkeley, announced Thursday.
The development is part of a larger UC Berkeley project to build more than 1,100 housing units of student housing on a 2.8-acre lot formerly home to People’s Park, an open green space with a decades-long history of activism.
“We are proud to bring six decades of affordable housing development and operating experience to our local community here in Berkeley,” Satellite Affordable Housing Associates CEO Susan Friedland said in a statement.
Since forming in 1966, the firm has built and managed thousands of homes from San Jose to Sacramento. The agency will replace Resources for Community Development, another Berkeley-based nonprofit that exited the project in 2023 amid legal challenges to the project.
UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons said the university was “proud to welcome” Satellite Affordable Housing Associates as a partner on the project.
“Our provision of this land for this project underscores the university’s deep commitment to advance the greater good by expanding the supply of urgently needed housing for our community’s most vulnerable residents. We look forward to continuing our extraordinary partnership with the City of Berkeley that has been so essential for this project,” Lyons said in a statement.
The university first acquired the People’s Park site in 1967 with plans to build student housing, but after structures on the lot were bulldozed, the property sat vacant. Soon after, activists took over, turning it into an unofficial park and sparking a decadeslong, sometimes violent, push and pull over what to do with the land.
Legal challenges aimed at stopping the project in recent years ultimately failed and the university began construction in the summer of 2024. Much of the student housing tower has since been erected.
More than $31 million of city and state funding will go toward the supportive housing project, though additional dollars will be needed, the university said. Construction will begin once the student housing portion of the project is complete, which is expected to happen in 2027.
Local officials, including Mayor Adena Ishii, former mayor and current state Sen. Jesse Arreguín and state Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, lauded the selection of Satellite Affordable Housing Associates as an important step toward moving the project forward “at a moment when follow-through really matters,” Wicks said.
“People’s Park has long been at the center of Berkeley’s housing conversation, and this next step demonstrates that we can honor the site’s history while delivering permanent supportive housing and real stability for people who need it most,” Wicks said in a statement. “Ensuring previously secured state and local funding remains in place is exactly how the public sector should show up — by removing uncertainty and making sure good projects get built.”