The Loma Prietan
November/December 2004
Sustainable Land Use: Transit Oriented
Development in practice in the East Bay
By Lowell Grattan,
Sustainable Land Use committee
On the last Friday of August, the Sierra
Club, as a founding member of the Santa
Clara County Housing Advocacy Coalition
(HAC), co-sponsored "The Bay Area Rapid
Transit (BART) Land Use Tour".
Our group of 20 housing advocates,
environmentalists, city planning staff, city
planning commissioners and council
members, and state assembly staff from
throughout Santa Clara and San Mateo
counties, arrived at noon at the Silicon
Valley Manufacturing Group's San Jose
office on Airport Parkway. We grabbed a
tour itinerary, box lunch and beverage,
and then walked to a waiting Santa Clara
Valley Transportation Authority (VTA)
low-floor bus for the 40-minute ride to
the southern terminal of the BART line in
Fremont (Alameda County). For some this
would be their first trip on a VTA bus or
BART train.
Shiloh Ballard, the executive director of
the HAC, had planned a "to-the-minute"
tour of developments adjacent to three East
Bay BART stations that were designed to
encourage their residents, workers, and visitors
to use the BART trains and public transit
buses that served them, rather than relying on
private motor vehicles. Known as Transit
Oriented Developments, or TODs, they
often offer "mixed use" and are designed to
encourage walking, bicycling, and other alternatives
to the private automobile.
Fruitvale Village is receiving Bay Areawide
attention for its new urbanism
mixed-use design. It has a mix of commercial
office and residential uses. It was
built on a BART parking lot located in
what must be called a less desired part of
the city. It required heavy subsidization,
by many different agencies. It is planned
to rejuvenate the area. Three agencies
each took 10,000 sq., ft. (a Senior Citizen
project, Library, Head Start) that helped
get the project going. Twenty percent of
the 47 apartments are rented at "below
market rate" (a term based on median
income), which were rented immediately.
The market rate units are renting slowly
and there remains available commercial
space to rent, as it is not an established
commercial area. It has outstanding architectural
design and color scheme, a real
asset to a community in need of investment.
We toured a two-bedroom loft unit
with an excellent view of the interior
plaza that also serves as a walkway to the
BART station from the surrounding
neighborhood, lined by various restaurants
and other retailers.
We wish the project the best as we
acknowledge it may be several years before it
can be declared a success. The difficulty in this
type of mixed-use project is demonstrated by
the fact that the owners of the exciting new
Santana Row in San Jose recently announced
that they would never attempt this type of
project again without government subsidy.
Our group returned to the BART station,
climbed the stairs, and waited for a
"Richmond-bound train" to take us a quick
two stops to the 12th Street/City Center
station.
We left the 12th St. stop and arose into
a vibrant, downtown atmosphere of highrise
office buildings and a splendid array of
restaurants and services catering to the
office workers. This area is known as City
Center and is an outstanding success of
Oakland's Redevelopment Agency. The
centerpiece is the Pedestrian Mall that also
serves as the walkway to another Oakland
success, the Federal Building. Our Oakland
Economic Development Agency guides
explained that Oakland outbid San
Francisco for this building by offering more
free land, which provides more of a core
and supports the total area, which is coming
along fine.
Continuing our walk, we came across a
delightful Victorian restoration known as
Preservation Park, providing a most unusual
clash of old buildings so close to the gleaming,
modern City Center, but all carefully
planned. With not a minute to spare, we
hastily returned to the 12th Street subway station
to journey to our last and final stop.
Four stops and eleven minutes later we
arrived at the Downtown Berkeley station.
We ascended from this subway stop and
walked around the block to the renowned
Gaia Building where our tour guide, Mark
Rhoades, planning chief for the City of
Berkeley, greeted us.
Berkeley is a built-out city that is still providing
new buildings and more housing units.
Mark distributed copies of the award-wining
"City of Berkeley: Infill Housing Infill
Housing Implementation.
The Gaia Building is on a 15,000 sq. ft.
lot with 91 rental units or (250/units to the
acre) of which 20% are low income. This
project received no public subsidy. It is
seven stories high with ground floor retail.
Only 42 parking spaces are provided, but
with ingenious, three-tier mechanized lifts
that must be seen to be believed. The lifts
were imported from Germany, where they
are in common use.
This 'mixed use' building contains
10,000-square feet of retail/office and
6,000 sq.ft. of open space, which includes
the roof patio where we were treated to a
marvelous view of the Bay Bridge and San
Francisco skyline. The management provides
two cars through the City Car share
program for hourly rental, which was new
to us. They seem to be able to get by fine
with the minimum parking.
This project is a clearly a gem. It exemplifies
the best of transit-oriented developments
with its accessibility not only to
BART and AC Transit buses, but the UC
campus and downtown area as well. The
building was built thanks to the City's
granting it special zoning conditions. We
questioned whether Peninsula and South
Bay cities would be as permissive.
This was a great trip planned entirely by
Shiloh Ballard of the Housing Action
Coalition. Her scheduling and timing plans
were flawless. We walked back to the
Berkeley BART station, boarded a
Fremont-bound train for the 50-minute
return trip to Fremont, where we boarded
the waiting VTA bus. We arrived back in
San Jose right around 5pm, as planned!