If you've walked or biked the Ohlone Greenway past the El Cerrito Plaza BART station this year, you've seen the fencing go up around the old surface parking lot at the corner of Richmond Street and Central Avenue. Crews broke ground there in November 2025, and BART, the City of El Cerrito, and developer Related California held a formal groundbreaking ceremony on March 5, 2026, marking the start of what's been described for years as a 743-home transformation of BART's underused parking lots.
That number, 743 homes across six buildings, is the one that's been circulating since BART first started talking to the community back in 2019. It's a real number. It's also not what's actually happening on the ground right now.
What's Actually Under Construction
One building. That's it. The six-story structure rising at 515 Richmond Street, known in planning documents as Parcel A South, is the only phase with construction crews on site. It will hold 70 units of 100% affordable housing for individuals and families earning between 30% and 60% of the Contra Costa County area median income, built partly with off-site modular construction to speed up the timeline. The city's own project page targets completion in spring 2027, while Related's own release for the same building says Q1 2027, so plan on early-to-mid 2027 rather than a specific month.
The other five buildings are not under construction. They're not funded. According to the project's own groundbreaking materials, the full 743-unit build-out splits into three separate financing tracks, each moving at its own pace:
- Related California is advancing three affordable phases totaling 233 units, all restricted to households at or below 60% of area median income.
- Holliday Development is handling two market-rate phases totaling 392 units.
- A joint venture between Related and Holliday will build one phase of 118 "missing-middle" units, a category that sits between deeply affordable and full market rate.
Only the first of those six phases has broken ground. The rest need their own funding rounds, their own approvals, their own construction starts. The city's TOD page describes the full project as six phases over approximately four years, which puts the finish line somewhere around 2029 or 2030 if every subsequent phase secures financing on schedule. A separate report on the groundbreaking put the full six-building completion at 2029. Either way, the honest answer for anyone walking past that fence today is that you're looking at roughly a tenth of the promised housing, with the remaining nine-tenths still on paper.
Where The Money For Building One Came From
Parcel A South got built first because it had a funding path nobody else in the project has secured yet. The California Strategic Growth Council put in $39.1 million through its Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities program specifically for this phase, and the Bay Area Housing Finance Authority added a $2.4 million loan early in the process to help the project compete for that larger state award. Layer in money from the county, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, HUD, and the city's own Affordable Housing Trust Fund, and you have a stack of public financing that took years to assemble for 70 apartments.
That's worth sitting with for a second. If one 70-unit affordable building required that much public money and that many partners to reach a groundbreaking, the market-rate and missing-middle phases, which don't have access to the same subsidy programs, are working from a different playbook entirely. There's no public announcement yet for when Holliday's 392 market-rate units or the joint 118-unit missing-middle phase will start.
The Library Is Still Just An Idea
Buried in the master plan is a detail that's easy to skim past: the project includes a potential 20,000-square-foot public library, but the city's own project page describes it as something that will happen only "if the City can identify funding." Compare that to Parcel A South, which had a fully assembled financing stack before a single shovel went into the ground. The library has no equivalent commitment yet. Neither does the 22,000-square-foot public plaza planned to run along Fairmount Avenue from Liberty Street to the BART station, though that's listed as part of the master plan's public infrastructure rather than a separate funding ask.
El Cerrito Mayor Gabe Quinto framed the groundbreaking as proof of what a "Pro-Housing City" designation can produce, calling the project a way to expand housing at a range of income levels near transit. That's a fair description of Phase One. It's a preview, not a guarantee, for the library and the rest of the master plan.
What This Means For Your Next Few Years At The Plaza
If you shop at Target, Trader Joe's, Barnes & Noble, or Ross at El Cerrito Plaza, or grab dumplings at New Dumpling nearby, the shopping center itself isn't going anywhere and isn't part of this construction footprint. The farmers market that runs Tuesdays and Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. operates in the plaza proper, not on the parking lot being redeveloped, so that rhythm should hold through construction.
The piece of your routine most likely to feel the work is the Ohlone Greenway itself. The construction site sits right where the trail meets the El Cerrito Plaza BART station, so expect fencing, temporary detours, and construction traffic at that junction for as long as Parcel A South is active, and again whenever the next phase breaks ground. The project's funding docs also mention bike lane and street parking improvements tied to the TOD, though those upgrades are scheduled alongside construction rather than delivered up front.
Parking at the BART station itself will eventually improve. The full master plan calls for a new garage with 145 spaces reserved for BART riders, replacing capacity lost to the surface lots being built over. That garage isn't part of Phase One, so if you park at the station for your commute, the tighter lot you're navigating today is likely the reality for at least the next construction phase or two, not just this one.
The Read For Anyone Who Lives Here
The headline version of this story, "743 new homes coming to El Cerrito Plaza," isn't wrong, but it's the kind of number that makes a four-year, six-phase, three-developer project sound like a single event with a single finish line. What's actually happening is more incremental and more fragile than that. One building has cleared every funding hurdle and is on track for delivery in early 2027. Five more are still waiting on financing, approvals, or both, and the public amenities most people would actually notice, the plaza and the library, sit even further back in that queue.
If you've been wondering when the fence comes down and what replaces it, the honest timeline is: one 70-unit building by early 2027, and a longer wait, likely stretching to 2029 or beyond, before you know what the rest of the site becomes.
City 1st Realty tracks projects like this across the East Bay because it changes what daily life looks like around a station long before it changes anyone's mortgage. If you want a straight read on how a specific development affects a specific block, or you're weighing what a neighborhood like this means for your own plans down the line, reach out to City 1st Realty. We're here, we're paying attention, and we're happy to talk through what we're seeing on the ground.
