El Cerrito Discovers Key to Infill Planning
- Josh Stephens
- Nov 27, 2019
- 7 min read
San Pablo Avenue may not be the Champs-Elysees, but it does have a few things going for it.
Running nearly 20 miles from Hercules to Oakland, San Pablo is essentially the main street of the East Bay — reverently described by writer Abraham Woodliff as the "one street that seems to guide you through the East Bay’s many shifting realities." It’s a wide boulevard, with a median in some streches, and it parallels the Richmond BART line. It has some built-out stretches and some historic architecture, especially near its southern terminus. Otherwise, it is also an infill developer’s dream, with abundant parking lots, strip-malls, and undistinguished one-story buildings begging to be redeveloped.
It’s the type of place where, with the right sort of infill development, the East Bay can meet regional housing and transportation goals and discourage driving — but progress has been slow.
“It’s like, ‘Come on, East Bay!’ We're so progressive, but we’re so auto-oriented,” said Ann Cheng, interim co-executive director of TransForm and former mayor of El Cerrito.
In true Bay Area form, though, many of the cities through which San Pablo Ave. runs do not exactly welcome density or new housing and have been content to let San Pablo be little more than a thoroughfare. The City of El Cerrito has taken a different approach — with dramatic results.
In 2014, El Cerrito adopted the San Pablo Avenue Specific Plan (SPASP), governing its three-mile segment. The plan is ambitious, seeking to dramatically increase densities along the avenue and accommodate significant residential growth. The plan area covers roughly 200 developable or re-developable acres along a two-and-a-half mile stretch of San Pablo Ave., which it divides into Uptown, Midtown, and Downtown sub-areas.
While such plans can often take decades to come to fruition, developers have flocked to the avenue. The first phase of the SPASP is already spoken for, with roughly 1,800 housing units built or in various stages of development across 23 projects. Every project but one consists largely of residential units, with most projects falling between 50 and 170 units for a total of 1,238 market-rate units and 862 affordable units. Nearly 40,000 square feet of commercial space is included as well.
“Our redevelopment and city council goal was for a long time, since our general plan update, to transform the corridor into a more vibrant place,” said El Cerrito Community Development Director Melanie Mintz. “We’ve tried to help people see what these projects are going to look like, and they really are a significant upgrade from what’s existing."
This rapid growth has exhausted the number of units covered by the plan’s initial programmatic environmental impact report, which was drafted to be deliberately much smaller than the anticipated build-out of SPASP so that the city could amend the plan and adjust it as needed.
The city is currently updating the PEIR to accommodate a second phase.
“We didn't want to assume that every space gets built-up. We wanted to take what we thought was an ambitious number…I think it’s happening a little sooner than we expected,” said Mintz. The phasing enables the city to "update traffic studies and look at it from a fresh perspective now that it’s real."
The PEIR itself has been one of the keys to the plan’s success thus far. Under the PEIR, developers are required to complete a checklist to demonstrate that their respective plans and their impacts conform with the PEIR. Beyond that, no environmental review is required, and all of the entitled projects in the plan area have been approved under the PEIR checklist.
As well, by planning for a relatively large area, development has been spread out and the city does not feel like it’s under siege by developers.
“One of the challenges is that because it's not collected in one area, it doesn’t totally transform the area all at once,” said Mintz. “What’s nice about that is that it’s spread out, so the impacts and opportunities are spread along the entire corridor.”
The early success of SPASP, say supporters, has depended as much on its technical details as on El Cerrito’s civic spirit. To a large extent, the mere existence of a density-friendly, transit-oriented plan anywhere in the Bay Area could probably be enough to attract developers. But El Cerrito’s planners went to considerable lengths to ensure that the plan would serve the city and developers alike.
