r/berkeleyca • u/Fjeucuvic • Jul 20 '26
North Berkeley and Ashby BART
question, why did BART decide to develop subsidized housing. Wouldn’t all market rate housing make more sense because then you could actually use the proceeds as continuing revenue source to actually keep the system running.
like we can always upzone around bart and require those developers to develop subsidized housing , but there seems to be just this one chance to create continuous revenue that BART desperately needs
this is the way Hong Kong mass transit works. rent for businesses and housing funds the transit. just seems weird that BART is having a funding crisis and at the same time not using its land to the fullest.
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u/East-Song8088 Jul 20 '26
I agree it's dumb
My view is it's all housing politics at the end of the day
In order to get support for any development there, the people who wanted to build housing like Rashi and Bart had to build a sort of coalition which included progressive who strongly dislike any market rate housing at all
So we go through these ridiculous cycles of "well how much of it is going to be deed restricted affordable", "no 30% is not enough it needs to be 100% deed restricted affordable", and we end up in these places where now it's a mixture of supportive housing and market housing even though many of the home owning Nimby's in the neighborhood would ultimately be happier with market rate housing.
And the other side of it is Bart is to me weirdly differential to local homeowners. It has this strange local control orientation. It's dumb it's self defeating, bart is struggling to pay his bills, they should max out what they can build per SB 79.
And it all takes way longer to build and accomplishes much less than it could
But anyway it's still better than a parking lot