Faster track for housing
BART’s oft-delayed trains look downright speedy next to the painful pace of housing development around its stations. Take the affordable-housing complex Casa Arabella, the second phase of which broke ground on a parking lot near Oakland’s Fruitvale Station last week. The occasion, as The Chronicle detailed, arrived nearly a quarter-century after plans for the area transit village took shape.
Housing around BART stations and other masstransit hubs, as it turns out, isn’t so different from housing throughout California: disdained by surprisingly plentiful, powerful and vocal constituencies and therefore in all too short supply. And yet neighborhoods served by train stations are among the most logical places for high-density housing development that won’t compound traffic and pollution.
Promising new legislation by Assemblymen David Chiu, D-San Francisco, and Timothy Grayson, DConcord, seeks to address the relative scarcity of BART-accessible housing by requiring the system to adopt zoning standards that promote residential development and forcing cities to go along with them. The bill, AB2923, also would mandate that developers devote at least 20 percent of projects to affordable housing and, in a potentially counterproductive concession to organized labor, pay union-level wages.
BART’s board has set a goal of producing 20,000 housing units on its parking lots and other properties by 2040, but opposition from commuters and communities has hampered such ambitions. Controversy and delays have also dogged developments near stations such as MacArthur and Coliseum in Oakland, Glen Park in San Francisco, and Walnut Creek. Of course, more such development will require BART to replace surface parking or ensure that stations can be easily reached by bus and other alternatives to driving.
Sen. Scott Wiener, DSan Francisco, has introduced a broader and more contentious bill to speed transit-friendly development. SB827 would overrule local zoning restrictions to allow denser residential development up to half a mile from BART and other commuter rail stations and within a quartermile of frequent bus service, affecting large swaths of the Bay Area and beyond. Wiener recently announced amendments to the legislation designed to protect existing affordable housing from demolition.
Both measures take on the difficult but necessary task of countering shortsighted local opposition to the sort of smart housing development the region and state desperately need.