Berkeley remains a city where the Campanile marks the skyline, Fourth Street feels like a genteel mall, and foodies line up to buy organic produce at Monterey Market. But these days, there’s another feature on the landscape: new buildings.

After decades where no more than one or two multifamily structures might rise each year, a housing boomlet has made construction crews and wooden framing common sights. Roughly 900 apartments have been completed in the past two years, and 1,000 or so are under construction.

To be sure, Berkeley remains a fiercely liberal city where many community activists view developers with suspicion or outright contempt. But it also has emerged as a surprising example of how older Bay Area communities are trying to respond to the region’s housing crisis — though not without resistance.

Some pressure for change comes from residents frustrated by a political culture that long has put more value on the complaints of individual homeowners than the larger benefits that new housing can bring. Nor has the arrival of bigger buildings along major streets brought the uproar that opponents predicted.

Whatever the factors, the evolving dynamics are on view at the City Council level — where a progressive majority that was expected to curtail new market-rate construction instead is urging it on. This includes Mayor Jesse Arreguín, who entered public life as a pro-tenant member of the rent stabilization board.

“My position is that we don’t have enough market-rate housing, and we don’t have enough affordable housing,” said Arreguín, Berkeley’s mayor since 2017. “Sometimes this means thinking differently about things that once might have been controversial.”

That was the case in December, when the City Council voted unanimously to pursue negotiations with BART to fill the parking lots around the Ashby and North Berkeley stations with multistory housing. The vote calls for at least 35% of the units to be reserved for low-income residents.

More recently, the city’s planning commission said this month that it will conduct environmental studies to allow upward of 1,300 apartments on the blocks south of the UC Berkeley campus. Those would be in addition to four residential structures already under construction.

Arreguín and other council members even support the university’s effort to redevelop People’s Park, a scraggly green on Cal land created during the student protests of 1969, with dorms and supportive housing for formerly homeless people.

“Allowing much taller structures around the campus makes sense,” said Arreguín, who graduated from Cal in 2007. “We need to do what we can to make it possible for more student housing — buildings that would help relieve pressure on our housing that already exists.”

Another potential source of relief can be seen in the construction sites that dot the city of 122,000, best known to outsiders for the university and its long history of political activism.

The most concentrated changes are in Berkeley’s downtown core.

A half-dozen housing projects that would hold 370 apartments are now under construction, with another half-dozen approved. Five others have been completed since the 2012 approval of a downtown plan that raised heights throughout the district. There’s also the new home of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive on Center Street, while a 16-story hotel tower is rising next door.

Put all this together, and “we’re seeing a positive transformation downtown,” Arreguín said.

Arreguín struck a much different note in 2014, when he co-wrote a ballot initiative that essentially would have undermined the then-new downtown plan. It proposed lower heights on several blocks, while raising fees and affordability requirements and setting tougher environmental standards.

The measure lost by a hefty margin. But when the approval of an 18-story residential tower at 2190 Shattuck Ave. was appealed last year to the City Council — opponents were upset that the tower would crowd views of the bay from the foot of the Campanile — the mayor was part of the 6-0 majority vote to let the tower proceed.

From Arreguín’s perspective, the dearth of housing has altered the context of decision-making. Not only will the contested tower hold 274 apartments, the developers are obligated to pay $10.1 million to the city’s affordable housing fund.

“At one point, I was critical of the (downtown) plan,” Arreguín conceded, “but as mayor, my responsibility is to think about the needs of the entire city. A small intrusion into a view corridor was a compromise we needed to make.”

Arreguín’s co-author of the 2014 initiative, Sophie Hahn, is now vice mayor. Unlike her progressive ally, Hahn abstained from the 6-0 vote in favor of what would be Berkeley’s tallest residential building.

“Iconic views are a public asset, one of the things that make this an exhilarating region,” Hahn said. As for the housing funds generated if 2190 Shattuck gets built, “I don’t think that approving any old project because it will pay a fee is a good idea.”

Hahn, who represents northeast Berkeley, questions how the current debate is framed.

“I’m not that interested in housing, I’m interested in homes,” said Hahn, who considers the word “housing” to be “cold and transactional.” What needs to be emphasized instead, she argued, is the creation of, and protection of, places where lower-income people live.

Hahn and Arreguín led the successful 2018 campaign for a ballot measure that will allow the city to sell $135 million in bonds to help fund low-income housing. The first allocation of $14 million will go toward 152 low-income rental units as well as 44 shelter beds. Construction should begin this spring.

“What makes Berkeley Berkeley is the people,” Hahn said. “When we lose our diversity, our artists and our scrappy activists, we can’t get that back.”

But that diversity already is under siege — the median sales price for houses and condominiums was $1.21 million as of December, according to Zillow. The Jones, a five-story apartment complex on San Pablo Avenue near fabled Acme Bakery, will open with monthly rents for studios beginning at $3,000.

Hahn, like other Bay Area housing activists, says the solution lies in the nature of homeownership itself.

“I’m in favor of social housing, the Vienna or Copenhagen model,” Hahn said, referring to shared land trusts and other communal ownership models. “I’m a person who believes we can really transform how housing is done in America, and that can begin in Berkeley.”

Other council members take a more pragmatic view.

“People get lost in these conversations about how we need to transform Berkeley into a social housing model,” said Lori Droste, who joined the council in 2015 and represents southeast Berkeley. “If we could, great. But what we need is to build lots of housing, all kinds.”

Droste also is critical of the city’s drawn-out review process. The tower at 2190 Shattuck, which fit the parameters of the approved downtown plan, took 10 hearings and nearly three years to get approved. Other controversial projects have been delayed by lawsuits that can tie things up for another year or more.

“I don’t want to question some people’s good intentions” when they oppose new housing, Droste said. “But when it’s the same group of people again and again, you wonder.”

The pace of development reviews will change going forward. The cause: SB330, a statewide housing bill passed with relatively little fanfare last fall.

No more than five public hearings are allowed for any project, including appeals. Neighborhoods cannot be down-zoned. Permit charges or impact fees cannot be added to a project as it moves forward.

“It’s going to be an adjustment,” Arreguín admitted. But he supports the new legislation, which was written by state Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley. “The one thing I have heard from developers is ‘time is money.’ We need to reduce the time it takes to get a permit.”

There’s another factor at work, one that plays out in Bay Area cities beyond Berkeley: a generational tension between older homeowners who don’t want their surroundings to change and younger people frustrated by a lack of even semi-affordable housing options in large parts of the region.

There’s no simple correlation between age and being for or against multiunit buildings. But it has been a factor in recent Berkeley housing debates, including the push for dense housing at the North Berkeley BART Station. That station is surrounded by one- and two-family homes, yet neighbors raising the specter of intense growth were outnumbered by pro-housing neighbors as well as proponents of transit-oriented development.

More and more, “We’re hearing from a lot of younger people who are turning their frustration into local activism,” said Councilwoman Rashi Kesarwani, who represents the neighborhood around the North Berkeley BART station and was elected in 2017. “They’re bringing a different viewpoint — that Berkeley needs to embrace change and grow in an environmentally sustainable way.”

Kesarwani sees the challenge facing Berkeley and other progressive cities as making sure new development is aligned with a community’s social and cultural values, but also accepting they can’t pretend that the region’s housing crisis doesn’t matter.

“We can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Our ultimate goal is to keep building the housing we need,” she said. “One midsized city cannot solve what essentially is a statewide problem. But we can do our part.”

John King is The San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic. Email: jking@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @johnkingsfchron