When it comes to the future of Oakland, a good amount of the development that will change the city has one thing in common: the transit station nearby.
Bay Area Rapid Transit has committed to an ambitious plan to build mixed-use transit-oriented developments around its stations throughout the Bay Area, and a number of those projects will be in Oakland.
Already, the transit authority has started to transform land around MacArthur Station in the northern part of the city as well as Fruitvale Station to the southeast. Construction is underway on Coliseum Transit Village from UrbanCore Development and Oakland Economic Development Corp.
Future plans call for continued development on those sites and projects to go up around downtown BART stations.
BART’s transit-oriented development policy states that the agency will only move forward with future developments in cities that have adopted station area plans, and Oakland has been at the forefront, BART’s Sean Brooks said. Brooks, the department manager of real estate and property development for BART, will speak about TODs at Bisnow’s The Evolution of Downtown Oakland March 13.
Projects already underway have required upzoning, and the city also has been progressive about parking requirements, Brooks said.
“The city has kind of bent over backwards to help and advance some of these projects,” he said.
Case in point: the planned development for West Oakland, which got through the planning commission in record time, he said. The project was helped along in no small part because of the affordable housing it is bringing to the city.
Read more at Bisnow Oakland
