If you have lived in El Cerrito for any length of time, you know the two versions of San Pablo Avenue that get talked about. One version is the empty Marshalls, the shuttered Joann, the wide crosswalks that always seem to be waiting for something to happen. The other version is the one you actually walk through on a Wednesday night, where music is spilling out of a grocery store annex and a new Sichuan place has quietly filled a storefront that used to sit dark.
The gap between those two versions is smaller than it looks. What you can hear from the sidewalk this summer is the early evidence that El Cerrito's center is drifting off the Plaza parking lot and onto the corridor itself. Below is a resident's read on what changed in the first half of 2026 and what to keep an eye on before the leaves turn.
The Plaza is finally a construction site
For years, the El Cerrito Plaza BART station has been a place where nothing was happening on the surface but a great deal was happening on paper. That flipped on March 5, 2026, when the City, BART, and Related California held a groundbreaking on the first vertical phase of a project that has been in planning since at least 2018.
The building going up right now is Parcel A South at 515 Richmond Street, at the corner of Central Avenue and the Ohlone Greenway. It's a six-story, U-shaped structure designed by PYATOK, with 30 one-bedrooms, 20 two-bedrooms, and 20 three-bedrooms above a ground-floor podium, and the upper five stories are being built with factory-based modular construction. The 70 apartments are reserved for households earning between 30% and 60% of the Contra Costa area median income, and completion is anticipated in 2027.
That first building is the point of the shovel. The plan behind it is much larger:
| Element | What's coming |
|---|---|
| Total homes across six buildings | 743 apartments, roughly 47% affordable |
| Public plaza | 22,000 sq ft, running from Liberty Street along Fairmount Avenue to the station |
| Potential public library | 20,000 sq ft |
| Ground-floor commercial | Up to 2,100 sq ft |
| BART riders' parking | 145 spaces in a new garage |
| Secure bike parking | About 1,100 spaces, including cargo/family bikes |
Full build-out is expected by 2029. The development team is a joint venture of Holliday Development, Related California, and Satellite Affordable Housing Associates, with funding stacked from the California Strategic Growth Council's AHSC program ($39.1 million), an early $2.4 million loan from BAHFA, and additional dollars from HCD, MTC, Contra Costa County, Enterprise Community Partners, and JPMorgan Chase. Mayor Gabe Quinto framed the project as advancing El Cerrito's designation as a Pro-Housing City, and Councilmember Rebecca Saltzman, who worked on the project as a former BART director, called it transformative for a small city.
If your commute passes through Plaza station, expect crane sightlines and closed parking rows for about two more years on the first building alone.
The retail story the vacancies obscure
Look up from the fencing on Richmond Street and the empty storefronts still dominate the eye. The City's own read, in its 2026 San Pablo Avenue strategy, is that retail vacancy in the plan area sits at roughly 10%, which is within what planners consider a healthy range. The reason it feels worse than that is composition. Two very large, very visible boxes went dark, the former Marshalls and the former Joann. A handful of big empty windows will always outweigh a dozen small spaces that are quietly leased or in turnover.
The other structural piece the City calls out is condition. Roughly 36% of the corridor's retail inventory is classified as older, lower-rent space. Cheaper rent is exactly what draws an independent operator, but an aging storefront often needs new electrical, accessibility work, plumbing, and a kitchen buildout before anyone can open a door. That is the friction sitting between a "For Lease" sign and a soft opening. The City's strategy explicitly identifies experience-driven uses, fitness, dining, and entertainment, as the more likely tenants for the older big-box footprints. Crunch Fitness taking over the old Barnes & Noble space is the example planners are pointing to.
One jurisdictional quirk worth knowing if you're ever confused about who to call about a curb or a patio: parts of the west side of San Pablo, especially around the Midtown stretch, are actually within Richmond city limits even where the sidewalk is in El Cerrito. That's why outdoor dining rules and streetscape improvements sometimes require both cities to coordinate.
A Wednesday night on San Pablo
The clearest sign that the corridor is doing something new isn't a lease sign. It's the sound coming out of 10387 San Pablo Avenue on a Wednesday evening.
The Annex Sessions is a free live-music series held from 6 to 8:30 p.m. inside the El Cerrito Natural Grocery Company's Prepared Food Annex. It launched in April 2022 and is now in its third year, co-produced by Javier Navarrette Music Productions and Amer Burdyer of the SunJams Foundation, with a DJ set from Jose Ruiz. There is no cover. Donations at the door go to SunJams, which funds music programs in under-resourced public elementary schools. You order at the Annex counter, take a seat, and the band starts.
The 2026 lineup has stayed remarkably eclectic:
- March 25: Silvestre Martinez Quartet, Latin jazz rooted in Oaxacan coastal rhythms
- April 1: Los Bahianatos, Colombian cumbia and vallenato with button accordion
- April 29: Pedro José Pastrana Trio, Puerto Rican Cuatro-led Latin jazz
- July 22: Sones de las Dos Orillas, flamenco with Bay Area icon Melissa Cruz
- August 5: Oaktown Jazz Workshops' Performance Ensemble, followed by The Shadow Band's Arabic Free Groove set
The Annex itself is the more interesting part. Inside the same building you have a cafe, juice bar, deli, and a small wine and beer selection, with prepared food built from the same organic inventory the grocery stocks. The building is powered largely by on-site solar, using reused materials from the pre-existing structure. It functions as a de facto community room disguised as a lunch counter.
Standing in the Annex parking lot on a Wednesday night, you are about a five-minute walk from the BART station construction site. That geography is not incidental.
Tasty Sichuan and the small-storefront theory
The other new thing on the corridor this spring is Tasty Sichuan, which opened around March 17 at 10675 San Pablo Avenue. The menu runs from handmade dumplings and hand-pulled noodles into Chinese-American comfort territory, General Tso's chicken included. It's a small, independent operator taking over a storefront that reads like exactly the type of older, lower-rent space the City's retail strategy describes.
A single new Sichuan restaurant does not remake a corridor. But it fits the pattern the planners are watching for: an independent making the buildout math work on a smaller footprint while the bigger vacancies are still slow to fill. It also expands what a Wednesday night on San Pablo can plausibly contain. Music at 10387, dumplings at 10675, both walkable, both new within the last twelve months.
What to do with this if you live here
A few practical takeaways for the rest of the summer:
- If you drive to BART from the Plaza side, treat the current parking configuration as temporary. The eventual garage will hold 145 rider spaces, but you'll live through construction to get there.
- The Ohlone Greenway will feel more like a spine and less like a shortcut over the next two years. New crossings, sidewalks, and bike lanes tied to the Del Norte and Plaza projects are being added around the corridor.
- Wednesday is now a viable neighborhood night out without leaving El Cerrito. Show up at the Annex by 5:45 for a seat, or plan on standing room after 6:30.
- If you have out-of-town guests this summer, the walk from El Cerrito Plaza BART, down the Greenway, across San Pablo to the Annex, and up to Tasty Sichuan, is a real itinerary now in a way it wasn't in 2023.
The next 24 months on your walk to BART
The through-line for anyone who already lives here is that the corridor is being knit together in small pieces before the big pieces finish. The Plaza TOD won't be complete until 2029, and the first building alone won't wrap until 2027. In the meantime the neighborhood is quietly assembling the ground-floor version of what that finished project is supposed to feel like. A grocery store hosting free jazz. A Sichuan spot filling an older storefront. A former big-box gym pulling weeknight foot traffic. A construction fence with a rendering behind it.
If you close your eyes on Fairmount and Liberty two summers from now, the picture the City has been drawing on paper is going to look a lot more like what you can already hear at 10387 San Pablo on a Wednesday.
When you're ready to think about how any of this affects your home as a place to live and as a long-term asset, The Lederer Team works across Contra Costa and the wider East Bay, and we're happy to talk through what these corridor changes mean for your block specifically. Get in touch for a tailored home strategy.
