San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Transit villages spur optimism, opposition
Demand, new rules fuel building on BART land
The average BART rider may not know the term “transitoriented development,” but when trains enter Oakland’s MacArthur Station, they see it facetoface.
A sevenstory building with limegreen accents covers land that five years ago held parking lots. It’s part of a 385unit apartment complex being marketed as “sleek and modern with a retro vibe ... perfect for your life on the go.” A few yards away, workers have nearly completed the concrete frame for a 24story apartment tower that will open next spring.
MacArthur’s transformation isn’t an isolated event. Construction is under way or recently completed at seven other East Bay BART stations, and projects at three others could break ground within the next year. Cities across the system are putting plans in place to allow bigger buildings near BART.
Long touted by boosters as pedestrianfriendly transit villages, such projects on BARTowned land are gaining support as never before. The change is fueled by factors including the region’s incessant housing demand and a new state law that loosens development restrictions on BART property. National developers are taking notice.
None of this comes without opposition. Many people who live near BART see the trends as an imposition or outright assault on their neighborhoods. Recent history suggests the changes won’t come as quickly as boosters hope or as critics fear.
Even if 20,000 residential units someday fill BART lots, the agency’s official goal, they would go only a small way toward providing the 525,000 homes that housing advocates estimate the region needs in coming years. What’s significant is that the Bay Area’s transportation lines and housing needs are being looked at together, rather than separately — an approach that is long overdue.
The idea of adding housing to BART stations predates the beginning of service in 1972: Renderings from 1967 show 12story apartment buildings amid lowslung neighborhoods in Berkeley. But no formal policy for such growth was established until 2005. Since then, 1,725 units have been built at seven stations.
The current policy, adopted in 2016, seeks to add up to 18,000 units by 2040, filling 250 acres at 27 stations. It also sets a goal that 35% of these units should be reserved for belowmarket housing.
There are factors at work beyond housing needs: BART hopes to improve its revenue by leasing the land to developers. Some station developments would include office buildings or hotels. Meanwhile, the guidelines no longer require new
projects to include parking garages to replace all the surface spaces that would be lost.
“We set the bar pretty high for ourselves,” said Abby ThorneLyman, program manager for BART’s transitorienteddevelopment program. “It will be interesting to see if we can deliver.”
One boost will be a bill signed into law last year by thenGov. Jerry Brown.
Cities along the transit line are required to loosen zoning by July 2022 so that higherdensity housing complexes can be built on BARTowned land. If they don’t, BART’s own height and density targets from 2016 will be imposed, a set of categories that include minimum heights of five, seven or 12 stories depending on whether a station is categorized as a “town center,” a “city center” or a “regional center.”
This bill upends the timehonored precedent giving local governments final say over development within their boundaries. Instead, it calls the need for new transitfriendly housing “an urgent matter of statewide concern” — so cities must make room for it.
“The Bay Area is in the midst of the worst housing crisis we have ever experienced,” said Assemblyman David Chiu, DSan Francisco, the bill’s author. “There are hundreds of acres around dozens of BART stations that could hold thousands of new housing units with a high percentage of affordability. This is exactly what we need, where it makes the most sense.”
But BART’s history shows that making plans is one thing. Getting something built is another.
The saga of the MacArthur BART transit village began in 1993, when a neighborhood group was formed to work with officials to plan the future of 10 acres, including the station parking lot and a few adjacent parcels.
After a decade of onandoff discussions, a formal competition was held. The winning team was nonprofit Bridge Housing and McGrath Properties, and in 2008 the Oakland City Council approved a transit village with 624 residential units in five buildings no taller than six stories. Twenty percent were required to be affordable.
A parking garage opened in 2014, followed a year later by 90 apartments for lowincome residents. By the time construction began on the next phase in 2017 — the three buildings now dubbed MacArthur Commons — the site that remained had plans for a 24story tower that would increase the overall number of apartments to 877.
The change was sought by a new developer, Boston Properties — best known locally for its role in building Salesforce Tower. The firm argued that MacArthur is an ideal spot for extra housing, and the City Council unanimously approved the tower despite complaints from residents of nearby neighborhoods that its height violated the original plans.
“Some people who supported
me no longer are supporters,” admitted Dan Kalb, the district’s councilman.
Kalb himself has no qualms, especially after Boston Properties included 45 affordable apartments to reach the overall transit village target of 20%. Also, $1.3 million in community benefits will fund such projects as upgrades to nearby Mosswood Park.
“I don’t understand how your quality of life is going to be affected by seeing a tower several blocks away,” Kalb said. “With time, I hope people will see it as part of the neighborhood.”
Four stops to the south, at Fruitvale Station, construction workers are completing 94 units of affordable housing dubbed Casa Arabella. Set to open this fall, the $65 million project is being developed by the nonprofit Unity Council with East Bay Asian Local Development Corp. On the parking lot next door, 181 lowincome apartments are to break ground next year.
The building comes 15 years after Unity’s Fruitvale Village, where 47 modestly priced apartments atop a shoplined plaza opened in 2004. It was intended as the start of a larger effort to revitalize the neighborhood by connecting BART to International Boulevard, two short blocks to the east.
The first phase received awards from everyone from the Sierra Club to Builder Magazine, but the 2008 recession put the sequels on hold. Casa Arabella didn’t begin to stir until 2014, when Unity Council received an $8 million state grant for transitoriented development. Construction began in March 2018.
“The impact on the community — people seeing that we were finally building again — was much stronger than we expected,” said Chris Iglesias, the Unity Council’s chief executive officer. “It sent a message that’s really exciting.”
Ambitious marketrate projects move slowly, as well.
In 1984, the Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors rezoned the unincorporated land around the Pleasant Hill BART Station to allow buildings up to 12 stories.
Several large office buildings followed within the next decade, along with a 10story hotel. The hole in the development doughnut was BART’s parking, and in 2002 BART and the county signed off on a concept that included three residential buildings.
It was 2008 before the details were worked out and construction began. The first two apartment buildings opened in 2010, along with a shaded plaza that comes alive when food trucks pull up twice a week. Work resumed in 2017, and the final piece should open this fall with 200 apartments.
“It all took a lot longer than expected,” said Maureen Toms, the county’s deputy director of planning. “I’m pleasantly surprised that everything has worked out . ... It would have been nice if it wasn’t so complicated.”
At all three stations, grand visions were hobbled by the complexity of working with a multitude of players that often have rival interests, as well as other issues that demand their attention.
BART may like the idea of new buildings on its land — especially if they mean revenueproducing ground leases — but it’s a transit agency with a small planning staff. Cities can be reluctant to bless projects that will do away with parking spaces that many residents rely on. It can be difficult to make a budget pencil out when various groups are pushing for a range of public benefits, such as lowcost housing and high percentages of local hiring.
The difference now is that the pressure to build is palpable — not only from transit and housing advocates and the state, but in cities where supporters are eager to make their case at public hearings. BART officials, meanwhile, say the agency can handle the extra load.
“We’ve learned a lot,” ThorneLyman said. The agency intends to be more active in nudging projects along, rather than selecting a developer and leaving it to them. BART also has heard the frustration from developers who, say, have to redraw designs when transit engineers change their mind on where to place passenger dropoff zones.
As for the new state law that weakens local control over BARTowned land, ThorneLyman plays down the shortterm impact.
“We have no incentive or desire to try and grab power,” she said. “There are so many interested cities, there’s no reason to be aggressive.”
Critics, though, see a onesize fits all threat to local character.
That’s the case right now in North Berkeley, where a small station in a sea of parking is surrounded by singlefamily homes and duplexes. The nearest shops are three blocks away.
Despite the quiet setting, BART in 2016 classified the 8acre site as a “city center.” And Chiu’s bill says that new housing in such a zone must be at least seven stories.
The agency and Berkeley have agreed to begin planning for as many as 750 apartments. Neighbors who support the idea have yard signs that proclaim, “Let’s build Paradise instead of a parking lot.” Others oppose what they fear will be an outofscale monster.
“We support housing on the lot, but it should be contextual,” said Sue Martin, who lives a half block away and wants no building to be taller than four stories. “You don’t want a little piece of San Francisco plopped into the neighborhood.”
Another objection to redeveloping BART lots is that the system was designed to offer an alternative to automobile commuting. Critics say BART shouldn’t now make it harder for passengers who don’t live near a station to find a place to park their cars.
“I have no problem with dense development. I have a problem with not looking at a transit station as transit first and foremost,” said Gina Papan, a member of the Millbrae City Council. She was one of two “no” votes last year when the council approved a project with 400 housing units and 150,000 square feet of commercial space on BART land.
“It’s really, really troublesome to think that people are going to use public transit if they can’t park there,” Papan argued, referring to residents of largely singlefamily communities such as Millbrae and its neighbors on the Peninsula. “BART had this flash that it has to do housing, and didn’t think out the entire process.”
Whatever the objections, more cities are clearing the way for intensified growth.
Hayward, for instance, updated its downtown plan in April to allow buildings as tall as 11 stories on BART land: “This is the direction things are going,” said Sara Buizer, the city’s planning manager. “We want to get in front and let developers see that there’s a market here for development at higher densities.”
That may take time in some cities along BART lines. But it already has happened in Oakland, where large developers see fields of opportunity in housing sites with an abundance of transit options. MacArthur Commons was built by Hines, a Texas developer that was involved in Salesforce Tower with Boston Properties but has branched out into wellplaced apartment complexes.
“It’s a product type we like very much, and BART’s presence here is critical,” said Paul Paradis of Hines. Not only is MacArthur a 20minute ride from San Francisco, but also UC Berkeley is two stops to the north. There’s a shuttle to the tech campuses in Emeryville and to the jobrich hospitals of Oakland’s “Pill Hill.”
“This location defines connected,” Paradis said.
Life at MacArthur Commons’ three buildings isn’t cheap. Rents start at $2,745 for a studio; a twobedroom unit with a balcony goes for $4,000. There’s a bicycle repair room and a “dog spa,” as well as an alcove designed to store packages from Amazon and other online vendors.
One lobby includes a communal bench that from above resembles the BART system map. The wall art includes colorsaturated abstractions of city landmarks.
“We want to reinforce the theme of Oakland, and that we’re true to the (local) roots,” said Hines’ Kevin Chow.
Such claims can be dismissed as marketing hype. Some neighbors no doubt will see the new buildings as alien forms, especially the Boston Properties tower that has nearly reached its full height on the horizon.
But the forces driving the new popularity of projects on BARTowned land are real, as real as the people moving into them.
For decades, the Bay Area has tried to have it both ways — encouraging a dynamic blend of cultural tolerance and economic innovation, yet doing its best to prevent growth patterns that might alter familiar scenes. The payoff is a uniquely attractive urban region, but with housing prices that only the most prosperous people can afford.
The transformation at MacArthur and other BART stations, the effort to pair economic diversity and transitfriendly locations, is a work in progress. It also responds to 21st century realities — that’s a good thing for the region as a whole.