(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 454: Real Estate Impacts at BART
This week we’re joined by Abby Thorne-Lyman, Former Director of Real Estate at BART, to talk about BART’s development projects and priorities, and the importance of real estate to BART’s future.
To listen to this episode, visit Streetsblog USA or find it in the archive.
Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of the episode:
Jeff Wood (1m 23s):
Abby Thorne-Lyman, welcome to the podcast
Abby Thorne-Lyman (1m 39s):
Thank you Jeff,
Jeff Wood (1m 39s):
Thanks for being here. I guess I should say welcome back to the podcast. You were here on episode 1 55 of talking headways back in yield times of 2017 Pre covid. Pre covid. For those who might not be familiar with your work, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Abby Thorne-Lyman (1m 54s):
Sure. I’m currently the Director of Real Estate and Property Development at BART and I have been at BART for almost 10 years and I have a background in city and regional planning and I always knew I wanted to do something around economic development and then later I kind of figured out real estate and I used to work with you. That’s true. We
Jeff Wood (2m 14s):
Did. You spoke together.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (2m 15s):
Those were good years and yeah, made the leap into the public sector in 2013 and I haven’t looked back, I guess.
Jeff Wood (2m 23s):
That’s good. So I think last time we talked a little bit about like what got you interested in cities, but maybe I should ask you what you were interested in about cities, real estate, transportation, urban planning, generally. Like what are you interested in these days?
Abby Thorne-Lyman (2m 36s):
What am I interested in these days? Well, I am nearing the end of my tenure at Barton about to switch jobs to be the base reuse and economic development director for the city of Alameda. And a lot of my motivation for switching is that I have increasingly realized I would like to work in a city. I love working on the real estate matters, but I also really just love the economic development aspect and all of the non-real property aspects of what it means to help a city thrive. So that’s kind of where I’ve seen myself headed is towards that with, you know, still a strong grounding in real estate development but also, you know, workforce development. How are we training our workers addressing the income gap?
Abby Thorne-Lyman (3m 19s):
I think that’s just a really fascinating problem that I think has not been as embedded in city planning traditionally as it should have been. You know, where are the workers gonna come from? Who’s gonna train them? How are they going to get that training? How are they then going to get the jobs they need with that training So that just that flow of people just really interests me. So I’m excited to explore that a little bit more in the future.
Jeff Wood (3m 40s):
Yeah, that’s really interesting because I think right now we’re seeing just this overwhelming need for public sector workers and training people to take on those jobs as kind of the wave of retirements happens and even the kind of pandemic kinda accelerated a little bit, but then there’s just this gap I feel like, between the amount of people that are available and the amount of people that are needed for that type of stuff. Yeah. So that’s really interesting. Yeah, so we’re here for the Impact Podcast and I was just thinking about this the other day. I was thinking about like my first impact slash Revolution conference back in Chicago in 2006 and I was wondering like what your first kind of, oh my gosh, experience was and maybe how it’s different now than then.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (4m 19s):
I think for years I had heard about Revolution when we worked together at Reconnecting America and I just remember how involved Gloria Oland was and how cool Gloria was and how cool Revolution seemed as a concept of really trying to stay on the cutting edge, do things creatively incorporate, you know, different kinds of placemaking and public art and just working at the edge of all of these different fields and what a cool thing to have a conference about. I’m trying to think, I, I did not go to Revolution for many years. I’m trying to think what my first Revolution was. It might’ve been LA or Denver, but I think I really, I mean I really dove both feet in when we hosted the conference here in San Francisco, which I think was 2018.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (5m 0s):
Yeah. And that was, that was intense. That was intense. It was a great experience. It was a great learning experience. And then that was when I joined the steering committee for Revolution and
Jeff Wood (5m 11s):
I just remember some really fun karaoke in Pittsburgh. We, we had a lot of fun. Yeah, there and then here too. We
Abby Thorne-Lyman (5m 16s):
Were really good. You’re really good at karaoke.
Jeff Wood (5m 17s):
No, no, no.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (5m 18s):
And we do good karaoke together too, so.
Jeff Wood (5m 21s):
Well, so you’ve been working on some iteration of Todd TOD for about two decades now and I’m wondering how you feel about the concept now, maybe how it’s evolved a little bit in your mind.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (5m 31s):
Yeah, I mean I, I think in general, obviously the field is moving towards transit oriented communities, not transit oriented development. And that is super important because I sit in the seat where my job is real property and and disposition of Bart’s real property. I am very focused on the TOD aspect of this. Like what I do now is largely focused on the joint development experience and the role that BART can play in catalytic efforts on Bart’s property exclusively. But we have a huge team at BART and we have a huge station access team. We have stationary planning and so I personally am very focused still on that TOD piece even though a lot of the policy work has moved to the t o C piece.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (6m 15s):
But you know, BART, when we adopted our new TOD policy in 2016, we jointly adopted a station access policy. So you know, I think we do see the role that that larger area plays in that customer access plays. But here within such a large agency with such a large portfolio of land, you know there are a lot of different people working on different components of this. We do break it down still into its component parts, but we all are great friends and we get along really well and everything like that. So I still am very focused on the joint development piece. I also feel like that is very important to me because of the regional housing crisis and the critical role that public land can play and So that is just a, a problem of you know, trying to remove the barriers to public land development.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (7m 1s):
That I think has been a real focal point for me personally and has been a focal point for the region. You know, a couple of years ago I participated in the CASA effort that M T C hosted, which was really bringing together housing practitioners from all of the different facets of housing market rate developers, affordable housing developers, tenants rights, public agencies, and out came the p threes the production preservation and protection. But one of the 10 core strategies that CASA had settled on was public land. And I think we haven’t done enough around that as a state, as a region. And there’s always new lessons and this is where impact is so helpful is going into the deep dive on the very technical aspects of doing that real property disposition and really getting in the weeds and letting us practitioners in this tiny, tiny field of transit agency land just get together and nerd it out about the very unique issues that we have.
Jeff Wood (7m 59s):
You talk about other transit agencies and maybe other folks that do this. Do you have any examples of like agencies or groups that you look up to in that respect?
Abby Thorne-Lyman (8m 7s):
Oh, we all have like a healthy competition going, I would say particularly the West coast agencies because we share so many of the same issues in terms of you know, the deep focus on affordable housing and our crisis. We have a monthly consortium of all of the California transit agencies who do joint development that gets together. So BART and V T A in particular V T A, they run the portion of BART that goes into the Silicon Valley and they also have light Rail and buses and Jesse O’Malley Solis and and Ron Golum who run that program are very close collaborators of mine. And we are constantly one-upping each other on, you know, who has the more progressive affordable housing policies or who’s doing the more interesting thing.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (8m 49s):
And La Metro as well. We have just a great thought partnership with our, with our fellow agencies. And now one of our former colleagues, Nadine is in charge at Caltrain so we don’t go far. So all the California transit agencies I think because we are under the same state laws, we definitely have sort of a mutual partnership and admiration, but you know, Thatcher at Sound Transit is a close collaborator and when we get together too, we can just go really nerdy on some of this stuff. I
Jeff Wood (9m 19s):
Can imagine. Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit more about BART. Can you give us an little bit of an overview of kind of what’s happened since 2016 since the policy that came out and maybe what’s currently in the development pipeline with BART projects?
Abby Thorne-Lyman (9m 30s):
Yeah, some stuff has happened. A few things.
Jeff Wood (9m 35s):
I mean that pandemic thing happened.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (9m 36s):
Well yeah, the pandemic obviously is really core to what’s happened at BART, but so when we talked last in that podcast I was extolling the many benefits of the TOD guidelines we had just published and within the year one of our board members, Nick Zeitz, championed this effort to bring new state legislation called Assembly Bill 29 23 with David Chu, who was an assembly member from San Francisco and Timothy Grayson who’s an assembly member out in Concord. And this law basically codified that every city that had BART owned property near a station would have to rezone that property to meet Bart’s TOD guidelines by 2020.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (10m 21s):
That if they did not do that then effective in middle of 2022 their property would just be rezoned to meet the guidelines. So. that has been a huge deal for us obviously. And the, the other thing that it did is, you know, California has been doing a lot of work around streamlining for housing projects that meet certain affordability and labor requirements. And AB 29 23 took what the state had done, what Scott Wiener had done in SB 35. It took it one step further and said that those streamlining requirements and streamlining abilities extended to all bar owned property in three counties. So our developers now both have the zoning that they need to do good TOD and they have the ability to bypass any onerous local review process and get it done in 180 days.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (11m 12s):
So that’s been a really big deal for us. It obviously caused a lot of uproar among our partner local jurisdictions that I think just generally have been very angry about stripping of local control and that these are our cities and we know them best and what are you doing? And there was other state law that was going through at the time that did not pass and all of the frustration and anger around that state law was redirected to our legislation that was moving forward. And so we have had to do a lot of deep engagement with our cities to make it clear to them that we are not gonna come in and steamroll you and just go build a project without you having a say. And that’s just not how we work.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (11m 51s):
There’s lots of good reasons that we, we shouldn’t do that. It is really hard to do a project without partnership of a city, even if you have, even if state law says you, you can do it. So we ended up creating a TOD work plan where we were able to just articulate to the jurisdictions, these are the stations we intend to develop in the next five years and these are the stations we intend to develop in the next 10 years. And just got much more transparent about where we were headed and why. And here’s, if you wanna be on this list, here’s what you have to do to be on this list and if you don’t wanna be on that this list, don’t worry about it. We have plenty of partners on our dance card, we don’t actually need to go fight with a city that doesn’t want anything to happen. But the interesting thing was when we went out to talk to, we have 22 jurisdictions with BART land and we went out to talk to them, we found that there were only four jurisdictions that did not wanna see any new development on their land.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (12m 45s):
So 18 of the 22, some of them were very angry about the law, they were angry about the principle of the law. They absolutely wanted to see the development of the land and So that was really refreshing to see that like all the years and years of planning work that the region has funded and the state has funded like that all paid off in dividends because most stations at this point had stationary plans and had political buy-in to do this. So in terms of what happened physically on the ground, one of the big things that happened was when this legislation was going through in 2018, the city of Berkeley, which it was totally taboo, you could not talk about the North Berkeley BART or the Ashby BART parking lots.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (13m 28s):
You just couldn’t speak about development of those giant swaths of surface parking. You, you, you could not raise it. The mayor and like the council member representing North Berkeley and Rebecca Saltzman, who’s our board member for that area, were doing some outreach that year and were discovering that the majority of people they talked to actually were really interested in seeing housing at the North Berkeley BART station. And then that coupled with this state law, I mean it, it felt like it just turned on a dime overnight where you weren’t even allowed to discuss it to like how can we get it done as fast as possible? Okay, So, that was 2018 and we’re here five years later. It took us a while.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (14m 8s):
We did a lot of planning and engagement efforts. Some might say we, I think we over, we overaged I think people got pretty tired at the end there. But we have a developer team for that and we’ve got a, you know, project that’s about 750 housing units, about 50% affordable. And here we sit on the cusp of this development that’s going to be using this AB 29 23. So then all told along the Richmond line, we actually are pursuing development at three stations all at once and could be building upwards of 2200 housing units on one, a single Rail corridor. So it’s pretty wild.
Jeff Wood (14m 44s):
Yeah. And then MacArthur had some development
Abby Thorne-Lyman (14m 47s):
Too. Yeah, MacArthur too. Yeah, MacArthur had been originally planned for, for a couple of mid-rise housing projects, but the city of Oakland, when they were going through the entitlements process with the developer, they did put in an alternative that included a high-rise and lo and behold, suddenly the market worked for high rise at the time that they put that alternative in. Nobody ever thought that MacArthur, which is a station at the very core of Bart’s system, probably has like three or four minute headways given, you know, in any direction. ’cause there are so many trains that converge. Nobody thought that a high-rise was going to work there and then it did. And so BART has its first high-rise at the MacArthur station, 25 stories.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (15m 31s):
So I think there’s 885 units at MacArthur are all told.
Jeff Wood (15m 34s):
That’s pretty cool. Yeah, it’s a big building and it kind of like, it makes a statement when you’re riding the train and you’re coming around the corner and you’re like, oh that’s a big building. Yeah. And that’s something that, you know, you see in, in these pictures of other cities, like we always talked about the Ballston Corridor, right? Yeah. In DC and you see this kind of string of pearls of density. But it’s interesting to see it here
Abby Thorne-Lyman (15m 51s):
And Grace Krank and our former general manager, when she came to BART, she told my predecessor Jeff Norway that she wanted to be able to fly into the Bay Area and tell where the BART stations were just by flying in and she’s getting her wish. Yeah,
Jeff Wood (16m 2s):
It’s pretty cool. Yeah. How have the policy and guidelines aged in that time period too? I mean, are there things that you wish were different or are there things that are being tweaked as we speak? What’s the process like? Yeah,
Abby Thorne-Lyman (16m 13s):
I think the biggest tension for us has been that, you know, I think we have developed a reputation in California that we are very supportive of housing and of affordable housing in particular. But unfortunately I think a lot of developers assume that means we’re gonna give our land away for free. And so of course one of the other big things that’s changed over the last couple years has been that Bart’s ridership is, you know, down to less than half of what it was before Covid. And we really heavily relied on fares for the operating budget. So we had this tension of, you know, wanting to support affordable housing, wanting to do everything we could, but also having a serious budget crisis. And we know we talk at BART, we talk about the fiscal cliff that, you know, come 2024 at the end of 24 or early 25, we won’t have any money to run BART.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (17m 0s):
And so for our real estate department to be negotiating these deals where developer’s coming to us and saying, Hey, you can take no ground lease revenue. You know, the optics of that don’t work for us right now, even though on the one hand we’re supporting affordable housing and that’s great and that’s so needed. But you know, a lot of people say, well, Bart’s a transit agency, BART should be running trains. Why are you bothering to focus on housing at all? And so we did, in 2020 we brought an amendment to the policy to draw a line around financial return and make it clear to everybody that we were willing to give a 30% discount from fair market value, but no more than that. And that to meet that you had to meet certain criteria around, you know, you have to have at least 35% affordable housing and it has to be a pretty, you know, deep level of affordable housing.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (17m 49s):
So that’s been the number one kind of tension for us that we really did have to go back into the policy and revisit because we were so successful at raising the visibility of what we do. Yeah.
Jeff Wood (18m 1s):
Do you expect in the future at some point that those revenues will contribute significantly to Bart’s budget?
Abby Thorne-Lyman (18m 6s):
It depends on how you, how you look at things. Obviously Bart’s budget is, I think it’s a $2 billion budget, right? So in the scheme of things, how much difference is ground lease revenue gonna make? But what BART has always been about and the reason BART has had this program for, you know, upwards of 30 years has been about ridership. And so we’ve done a lot of analysis and modeling and surveying to understand do people who live at BART stations or work at BART stations actually take BART more because they’re buying tickets, they’re contributing faires. And that’s the core of our revenue source right now. And so when we are modeling what we’re gonna bring in, you know, if you look at just the ground lease revenue and our ground lease revenue is pretty, pretty suppressed because for years and years BART was replacing parking.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (18m 57s):
And so $80 million of our land value was infused into building new parking garages at these projects. And you know, we’re just not gonna do that anymore. We can’t afford to do that anymore. But we were able to retain and increase, just really give our, our ridership a big boost by doing that. So if you look at just, just the ground lease revenue, we’re only bringing in about $2 million a year. But you know, $80 million of our value went into garages. But if you look at our ridership revenue, just the riders coming outta those projects, it’s in the, you know, tens, twenties, thirties, millions of dollars per year. So it’s a very different, very different picture.
Jeff Wood (19m 35s):
It’s a double bonus really. ’cause you get both the value out of the land and then you get the value from the ridership as well.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (19m 42s):
Yeah. And that was always the intention. But I think where we do have more work to do post covid is understanding if that ridership differential that like people who live near BART are, you know, two or three times more likely to take BART. Like is that sticking? And most of our projects now have very low, if any parking. So people don’t have a choice, right? They’re gonna leave their house, they’re gonna have to get on some kind of transit or get on a bike or walk. And so one of the things we really need to do is do some new survey work to figure out if it’s true that our TODs are still outnumbering and outperforming everything around them. Yeah.
Jeff Wood (20m 15s):
So there’s such a huge amount of people that are involved in, in BART projects and I think Hillary calls this a partner stack to go with a capital stack, right? Yeah. There’s so many people that are working on these things. What do each of these different entities that you work with to build projects, what do they bring to the table?
Abby Thorne-Lyman (20m 30s):
It it is a partner stack. I really like that it is so many partners. I mean the developer and getting the right developer is just, is everything. Getting somebody who knows how to build that energy and that momentum and that interest is critical because you know, an affordable housing developer, no matter whether you’re near transit or not, you were looking at a dozen sources of funds, right? But when you’re building affordable housing at a transit station, you’re looking at probably twice that because you’re also having to replace parking with or rebuild your bus intermodal or add your, you know, new bike lanes, make street improvements, add more bike parking. There’s so many transportation based functions. So now, and I think this is especially true in California, because California has adopted cap and trade policies, the transportation dollars are flowing to these TOD projects almost as much.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (21m 18s):
Or if not just as much as the housing dollars. So you’re having to bring those transportation partners to the table. Sometimes the developer is eligible for funding, sometimes the city is eligible for funding, sometimes BART is eligible for funding. So the funding’s coming in the door in all the different doors. And then you have to like figure out how you’re gluing it all together to make this project happen and who’s spending it. And then of course the community and like having community champions is just everything. I mean we wouldn’t, we would not be where we are today in Berkeley, if not for the mayor, for Jesse ine. We would not be where we are and with our board members as well. But like having those champions who even through the hard times. ’cause there are hard times.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (21m 59s):
See that vision through. Yeah.
Jeff Wood (22m 1s):
What do the stages of development for a typical BART project?
Abby Thorne-Lyman (22m 5s):
So we have kind of the pres solicitation stage at BART where we’re establishing what our goals and objectives are for the project. Then we go through the solicitation where we’re selecting the developer. The developer, you know, really is leading on, you know, the entitling designing funding financing stage. And for BART that means both helping them with pre-development and with design review and then moving through the entitlements and into the heavy duty legal negotiations for, is it a lease option for us? It’s always a lease option, but lease or sale, what is the transaction into construction? And then beyond. Yeah,
Jeff Wood (22m 43s):
I feel like some people would expect like, okay, you’re gonna build a project, just do it like it’s gonna pop out of the ground. Yeah. And be easily recognizable as a, as a development project. But it’s a lot more work obviously than that. And there’s so many details that go along with it.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (22m 57s):
There’s so much technical work that is going into it. And you know, some of our projects like MacArthur, Fruitvale, Walnut Creek, these are projects that have taken upwards of 20 years to come outta the ground. We can’t wait 20 years. So we’ve been trying to find ways to shorten that process. And I’d say we have it down to probably five to seven years, which, you know, still Director Saltzman, Rebecca Saltzman, who is our Berkeley representative, is like, five is too long, five is too long, you gotta get it down to two. But you know, it, it is so much work, getting that entitlement package together is so much work. And BART is like in its design review, looking at things that you would never think to look at. I mean, right? We’re looking at access and circulation on the site.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (23m 38s):
We’re looking at how are the maintenance vehicles gonna come into the property? Where are the station agents gonna gonna park when they open up the doors at 4:00 AM What’s going on structurally under the ground? And then, oh, by the way, we were built 50 years ago. So there’s all kinds of weird conduit and storm water things that happen in most of our property that we have to untangle and undo. Like at Fruitvale, the, the conduit that was powering the station was also powering the, the lights in the parking lot. And so when they took the lights out, you know, had we not been watching, they would’ve cut power to the station, which would’ve been terrible. So I think nowadays people don’t have to worry about those things, but we have a lot of old stuff we have to watch for.
Jeff Wood (24m 16s):
You also have to think about like who’s developing the projects, right? And and the pro and developers and the folks that think about that. And you all were recently awarded three and a half million dollars from the state to create a loan fund. Yes. How, how is that gonna be used and what exactly does that mean for future projects?
Abby Thorne-Lyman (24m 33s):
Yeah, this is something that I think a couple of different agencies have been, I would say discovering and focusing on this, this pre-development hurdle and Sound Transit has been doing this with Amazon and Marta, you know, has been working on creating a, a fund, I think with Morgan Stanley if I’m not mistaken. And you know, for us, what we realized, this was working with Al Sea, most of our affordable housing projects, most of our projects had been with larger scale developers. And they have different ways of financing their pre-development work because you know, that is a really tough place to be. Like you’re basically running the project along on fumes till you get to construction. ’cause you’re just trying to get your entitlements done and get all your construction loans.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (25m 13s):
But one of the barriers we’ve realized because we do only ground lease our land, is that if a private developer owns a private piece of land, they can use that land as collateral to get a big loan to do all this work. Our land cannot be used as collateral because they don’t control it. So we were realizing that the amount of loans that Al Sea, as a smaller developer who didn’t have these other deep capital sources to go to for this pre-development stage, they were only able to secure small pre-development loans under a million dollars. And you know, by my estimate, I mean keep in mind our projects are enormous, right? We’re talking, you know, 500 to a thousand units, you know, multi-phase projects, right?
Abby Thorne-Lyman (25m 55s):
So it’s a lot of work and a lot more expense and time and So that costs money. And I think our latest estimate was it can cost upwards of five to $7 million to get that done. But if we’re working with community-based developers, if we’re working with smaller scale market rate developers, if we wanna work with black led developers who are a community-based developer who are for-profit, you know, there are so many different partners in the development community who can do amazing work, but they don’t have the same resources to pull. So with the loan, the, the grant we received from the state, this program Reap 2.0. The idea is that BART would be able to help fill that pre-development loan gap.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (26m 36s):
So we’re gonna provide a loan to IAL Sea to get them over the finish line for the Lake Merit project. And it will be a revolving loan. I’ve always envisioned we would create a revolving loan fund where we do a capital stack, we do something bigger, you know, similar to toa, but the amount of money that we have to work with is just not big enough to do that. But it is enough to get us a revolving loan and then evolve, see, you know, when they enter construction, we’ll pay that back and then BART will be able to churn that out into other projects. So it enables us to lower the barrier to developing our enormous projects.
Jeff Wood (27m 9s):
Toa, what’s the acronym there?
Abby Thorne-Lyman (27m 11s):
Transit oriented Affordable Housing Fund. Okay. Yes.
Jeff Wood (27m 16s):
I mean it’s, it’s so interesting because I’m hoping that that’s something that, like you said, is creates a revolving friend that that perpetuates itself, right? That keeps going in the future. And and so you have the seed money and you can actually do this for a long period of time and then they pay you back, right? Like that. Yeah, they take the loan out, they can do the pre-development stuff, but then they can get, get you back later and then that money goes back into the fund again. So you can just keep on using it over and over again. It’s not just a one one-time thing. It feels like a perpetual motion machine. Yeah, as close as you can get to it.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (27m 43s):
That’s the hope. But now BART has to figure out how to loan money. ’cause like, yet again, Bart’s not in that field either, right? So we loan money to ourselves for things, but how do we loan money to a third party and just how do we make this all work? So we definitely have some uncharted territory we’re about to enter.
Jeff Wood (28m 1s):
Is there, there’s work going on trying to figure that out I imagine.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (28m 3s):
Yeah. We’re trying to untangle that right now.
Jeff Wood (28m 5s):
Switching gears a little bit, I’m wondering, you know, we try to have TOD solve a lot of problems and we’ve talked about this a lot, right? Like we try to have it solve our transportation problem. We try to have it solve our affordable housing problem or try to have it fix our parking issues. Sometimes I’m wondering what the priorities are specifically for TOD. For BART for maybe the, the agencies in in the Bay area because you know, we do ask a lot of development near transit.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (28m 30s):
We do ask a lot for development near transit, but we also give a lot of resources to development near transit, at least in California. That is a good question for BART. Number one is ridership always has been, probably always will be. And I don’t really think that’s an issue because if you build a 75 unit to the acre project, you’ve already, well more than replaced that one parking space. Like this is the math we’ve actually done to figure out like what is the minimum density we would need to actually get net gains in ridership. We, we will never build a project that’s not achieving net gains. Number two is probably equity and affordable housing for sure. And that’s just the net nature of the region we serve and what its needs are. And doing this, you know, I mean BART has a lot of issues, you know, quality of life issues in our system that are the result of our homelessness rates.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (29m 16s):
So it’s all connected. Yeah, as you like to say,
Jeff Wood (29m 20s):
As I, as I say, fairly frequently on long walks to sandwich shops, is the real estate team involved in like stationary planning for future stations and for future? I mean we have this huge Link 21 program that’s starting up and, and starting to think about maybe expansions or the future of the system. I’m wondering how much maybe your team or the group that thinks about real estate thinks about those projects and where stations go or what the station looks like. Obviously the station designs are something that I’ve harped on a lot over the years. Yeah. But I’m curious like how that connects to the work that you all are doing.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (29m 58s):
Yeah, we are definitely brought in, but Link 21 does of its own staff and I think it’s important that they do this. You know, they have staff embedded in the Link 21 team who are all about development and land use themselves. Not at this stage. It’s really more kind of the long-term land use planning, right? We’re not to the stage of, oh okay, what, which land are we gonna acquire for this construction staging and how is that strategically gonna be leveraged? We’re not there yet, but Link 21 stole one of my favorite and best staff people. So in that way, yes they’re quite embedded with me. So it’s core to the way that Link 21 is planning and the real estate department, you know, particularly because I also oversee the right of way side of the house.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (30m 41s):
I oversee all the, you know, anybody touches any piece of BART owned property, you know, we’re involved in some way and the right of way. Team has a lot of folks who started at BART during the S F O extension days. And so they came to BART specifically to acquire the land for SS f o and it, it is a very technical skillset that land acquisition and it’s so heavily regulated that I’m really grateful that we still have that knowledge base from the S F O days though, you know, maybe we do stuff different today than we did then, but at least you have to start with that technical foundation or else you, you get down the road with your grand vision and oops, I didn’t realize that was a compliance problem. So I’m grateful that they’re around to kind of help educate us.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (31m 20s):
So we do it right when we get to that acquisition stage. How
Jeff Wood (31m 23s):
Do you feel about the next kind of iteration of Fruitvale? Fruitvale has always been talked about. It’s one of those, it was in the new Transit Town book. Yeah. Originally when Shelly and Hank and those folks wrote it and everybody else. Obviously that was a big contribution from everybody. But you know, it was in that book it was seen as a kind of one of those success stories and now it’s evolving. Yeah.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (31m 43s):
Fruitvale is a really interesting story and it has evolved so much and I think it, it struggled in the early years. I think the retail in particular really struggled. It was hard to make it pencil, you know, it, it operated at a loss for many years. So that, you know, if you wanted the kind of local business that you wanted there, you weren’t gonna accept the Starbucks. You were gonna accept someone who paid a lot less rent than Starbucks. Right. But it feels like actually Fruitvale is, you know, there’s a Native American restaurant in the Transit village now. There’s, there’s all kinds of cool stuff that’s cropping up and it feels like it’s finally hit that point. It’s been like 30 years but it’s finally not 30 years. I think it opened in 2004 So that maybe 20 years.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (32m 23s):
Yeah. But I think it’s finally hit the point where, where stuff is gonna organically happen. But one of the interesting struggles that Fruitvale went through was there was always supposed to be a phase two to Fruitvale Bar owned six acres to the, just to the south of the Fruitvale Transit village that BART sold to the city of Oakland in in 2010. You know, with the height of the recession and everything. There were a couple of different transactions that occurred to save the project. And the Unity Council had always envisioned, and the community had always envisioned that that was gonna be market rate housing. And over the course of maybe the last five or 10 years, even as recently as five years ago, you know, we were still at the height of the housing crisis, but there was always the desire to have some level of market rate housing there as a way of stimulating some additional buying power and encouraging a greater mix of incomes in a community that is, you know, on the lower income level for the Bay Area.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (33m 17s):
And the market would just not come. Like even though we’re in the wealthiest region in the world, like the real estate market would not build market rate housing in Fruitvale. And finally the Unity Council and its partners kind of gave up on the, the notion that this would be a mixed income community and ended up building two pretty large affordable housing developments there. So Casa Arabella opened a couple years ago and it’s 92 units of housing, most of which are geared towards Formerly homeless individuals. And Casa Suenos is about to open and that’s 181 units. It’s one of the larger projects. And so I don’t know what the future of Fruitvale is going to be. I think it will be really interesting to see when you’ve got 207 units of affordable housing there and you’ve got, you know, the transit village next door, like how is it all gonna feel?
Abby Thorne-Lyman (34m 5s):
I don’t know. Yeah.
Jeff Wood (34m 6s):
Do you have a favorite station?
Abby Thorne-Lyman (34m 11s):
Depends on what, what, what do you mean by that? I really do love Lake Merit. I love Lake Merri. I love what Lake Merri I think it’s going to become. I love that Lake Merrit has a skylight, the graphical art that’s in the station, the tiling that’s done there, the little Laney College wayfinding mosaic, the weird sunken plaza with the, the, there’s just all kinds of neat little hidden features at that station. Yeah,
Jeff Wood (34m 37s):
It’s pretty cool. And I’m partial to 24th Street Mission, but that’s just ’cause I live close I think. Do you expect that there’ll be a station at Alameda Point?
Abby Thorne-Lyman (34m 45s):
Oh my gosh, I sure hope so. I Magna do everything I can to make that happen. I think that Alameda is very excited that I’m coming. I think I kind of wonder if part of the reason they’re bringing me over is to send a message to BART that yeah, we’re serious about this. I sure hope so. I’m, I’m worried for Link 21. I feel like this is a region that really needs a long range transportation plan. We’re all kind of hanging our hats on Link 21. All the other stuff happened already or is like already well underway. Like, you know, the BART line to Santa Clara through downtown San Jose. Like that’s gonna happen, right? But where is our long range plan if we don’t have Link 21?
Abby Thorne-Lyman (35m 26s):
And I think we’re really caught in this conundrum right now that Bart’s operating budget is failing and Link 21 is a capital project that you know, is sitting on a couple hundred million dollars. And I think the region’s kind of at a crossroads of like, are we gonna continue to think about long range transit expansion or not? It scares me that, it scares me that we won’t,
Jeff Wood (35m 47s):
Yeah, I think I’m worried about it too because, you know, when, when we think about 2050 and that’s the timeframe, we can’t just get to 2050 and be like, oh man, I wish we would’ve planned for that then. And I feel like we’ve al already had a lot of, so many shortsighted planning exercises and we’ve done, I mean we just opened up b r T on Van Ness. We just started talking about V R T on Geary being actually passed. But it’s like a watered down version of the ideas that people had for the last 20, 30 years. Yeah. And I don’t think we can afford to do that anymore. Yeah. I feel like we need to have something that is gonna get people from one side of the region to the other and connect a larger network of commuter Rail and those types of things. So as somebody who, you know, hopes to live in this region for a really long time, I would be upset if we get to 2050 and we don’t have anything different than what we have today.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (36m 34s):
Exactly. Right. And we’re still growing, we’re still spreading and growing and it’s not like we’ve, population growth has stopped in the Bay Area and what if we’d done that with BART in the sixties?
Jeff Wood (36m 44s):
Yeah. Yeah. And it’s really frustrating. I mean imagine if we didn’t have BART, like what kind of Yeah. Messed up thing we’d be trying to do now. So yeah, I, I’m scared, but it’s there and it’s plugging along. So what do you hope for in the future for BART?
Abby Thorne-Lyman (36m 59s):
I hope BART can find a permanent source of, of funding. I think it’s on everybody’s, you know, it’s the elephant in the room, right? And it’s the number one problem we have to find a permanent source of funding to sustain us, which Bart’s not going to the ballot till 2026. And if we’re not successful, what happens? It’s hard to think beyond that when that’s just kind of the reality you’re staring down. It’s hard, you know, when you’re in that dire situation, how, how do you think about the long range plan? How do you think about the doing the nicer thing? Yeah. And I think that’s really the struggle that we’re all going through right now is everyone wants to be thinking about the big picture of TOD, but TOD without the transit is just odd.
Jeff Wood (37m 42s):
That’s a good way to end the show.
Abby Thorne-Lyman (37m 44s):
We’ve taken it too far, Jeff. We’ve taken it
Jeff Wood (37m 46s):
Too far. We got too far. Thanks for joining us on the show. We really appreciate your time and I’m looking forward to seeing what you doing in Alameda. Thank
Abby Thorne-Lyman (37m 56s):
Thank You, Jeff.
