Blanca Torres

Reporter-San Francisco Business Times

In the next year, construction crews will start work on several hundred apartment units in Lafayette and Walnut Creek. The projects set to break ground promise to inject the East Bay cities with a heavy dose of urbanism — higher density buildings close to transit that promote pedestrian activity.

Projects in Walnut Creek include Laconia Development’s 157 units with 23,000 square feet of retail at 1500 N. California St. and Mill Creek Residential Trust’s 126-unit redevelopment of a motor lodge.

One BART stop away in Lafayette, KB Home recently scored a green light to move forward with 82 condos adjacent to the city’s BART station.

“Walnut Creek is a suburban market, but it’s really going beyond that,” said Paul Menzies, head of Laconia Development. “You have a lot of youngish people interested in living in a downtown environment, but not necessarily in downtown San Francisco.”

Laconia’s project is just one among a number that developers have proposed in Lafayette and Walnut Creek, two Contra Costa County cities that are no strangers to apartment communities but are newbies when it comes to transit villages and pedestrian-oriented developments.

Menzies said his firm’s projects and others are building on what the cities already have — downtown retail, restaurants, and BART stations — that people want to live near.

Laconia expects construction to start next fall with completion in early 2015.

Mill Creek Residential plans to break ground in May.

“The greater Oakland metropolitan statistical area had among the highest rent growth in the country last year, and we believe there is still an opportunity for rent growth over the next few years,” said David Fiore, who is leading the project for Mill Creek.“In certain submarkets, the market continues to be supply-constrained and employment trends are moving in the right direction.”

Other projects are also in the works in Walnut Creek. BRE Properties is about a decade into developing a 600-unit transit village on BART surface parking near the Walnut Creek station. CenterStreet Development proposed 141 units at 207-235 Ygnacio Valley Road. Essex Property Trust is working on a 49-unit mixed-used project with 38,000 square feet of retail space at 1500 Newell Ave.

In Lafayette, O’Brien Land Co. LLC continues pushing forward to entitle a 315-unit apartment complex on a 22.7-acre site.

KB Home secured entitlements for its condo project late last year.

The fact that projects are going forward is progress, said Jeffrey Heller, principal of Heller Manus Architects, which designed KB Home’s Lafayette project. He said the project took several years to entitle and garnered the typical resistance from residents opposing change. But it also gained support from people who wanted housing options besides single-family homes on large lots.

“We went through a lot of design work to make sure the building would fit in well,” Heller said.

via Contra Costa to get dose of urban density – San Francisco Business Times.