Berkeley's Zoning Adjustment Board meets tonight to review a proposal that would add 68 apartments above the Amoeba Music record store at the corner of Telegraph Avenue and Haste Street, transforming one of Southside's most recognizable retail sites into a dense student housing project while preserving the building's landmarked 1976 mural.
The meeting is scheduled for 7 pm today, September 10, 2026, with in-person attendance at the Berkeley Unified School District and an option to join via Zoom, according to San Francisco YIMBY. The project, dubbed Amoeba Apartments, is planned for the roughly 1.7-acre lot at 2455 Telegraph Avenue, a site near People's Park and the UC Berkeley campus that has housed the record store since it opened there in 1990. Property owner David Prinz, who works with Rhoades Planning Group, is behind the application, and the project is designed specifically for student living.
What the Project Would Build
As outlined by the same outlet, the development is expected to yield 84,100 square feet total, including 76,940 square feet of housing and 7,160 square feet of commercial retail space. The unit mix includes 43 five-bedroom apartments, 15 three-bedroom apartments, and 10 four-bedroom apartments, adding up to 68 units in all, with seven deed-restricted units set aside for very-low-income households. The building would rise 85 feet, and Studio KDA is serving as project architect, collaborating with 122 West Landscape Architecture on the design. No construction cost or timeline information has yet been shared.
Architectural details reported separately show the design leans on adaptive reuse of the existing structure's facade rather than a full teardown. Plans call for a second-floor setback that visually separates the preserved historic front from upper residential floors, with Art Deco accents and a scalloped stucco exterior, according to San Francisco YIMBY's February coverage of the filed zoning permits. That reporting also notes the project intends to preserve most of the arched rainbow entryway facing Telegraph Avenue, with historical preservation work overseen by Architectural Resources Group.
Saving a Landmark Mural
Central to the plan is preservation of the People's Park Mural, painted in 1976 by Osha Neumann along Haste Street, which memorializes the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s. The mural was designated an official City of Berkeley Landmark in 1990 and depicts seminal events including Mario Savio's Free Speech Movement speech and the 1969 People's Park conflict, according to a plaque cataloged at Read the Plaque. Neumann, a civil rights attorney who designed and co-painted the piece, endorsed the redevelopment after the owners pledged to retain the artwork and its historical context, per Berkeleyside.
The financial structure behind that preservation promise is notable: proceeds from the housing project are planned to fund a permanent endowment reserved exclusively for the mural's ongoing conservation and maintenance, per San Francisco YIMBY's earlier reporting on the plans. Berkeleyside's coverage adds that Amoeba Music co-owners Dave Prinz and Marc Weinstein are jointly developing the residential project alongside planning consultant Mark Rhoades of Rhoades Planning Group and representative Elisabeth Jewel.
A Site Layered With History
Amoeba's site has a history predating the store's arrival in 1990. The parcel previously housed a Lucky grocery store, and later became the Amoeba Music location.
Amoeba was founded that year by former Rasputin Records employees Marc Weinstein and Dave Prinz. Sales at the original Telegraph Avenue store dropped by more than 50 percent between 2008 and 2016 as students shifted from physical CDs to digital streaming, according to KQED. To offset those losses, Amoeba converted its former jazz room into the Hi-Fidelity cannabis dispensary in 2018, obtaining one of only six medical and recreational marijuana licenses issued by the City of Berkeley at the time, per reporting from The Berkeley High Jacket. Broader retail sales along the Telegraph Avenue corridor had already declined by more than 40 percent between the 1990s and 2013, according to Berkeley economic development statistics cited by Inc. Magazine.
A Familiar Playbook From Hollywood
The Berkeley proposal echoes a real estate strategy Amoeba's owners already carried out in Hollywood. There, the owners sold their Sunset Boulevard property to an apartment developer in 2015 for $34 million and relocated the record store to the ground floor of a nearby apartment project at 6200 Hollywood Boulevard, according to CoStar. The former Sunset Boulevard store was slated to be replaced by a 26-story luxury apartment tower.
Whether Berkeley's Zoning Adjustment Board approves the Amoeba Apartments plan as filed remains to be seen following tonight's review, but the proposal's backers are betting that pairing dense student housing with a planned mural endowment will be enough to satisfy both city planners and a neighborhood steeped in decades of protest, art, and reinvention.
