El Cerrito's Ohlone Greenway Has Two Very Different Builders Right Now

Walk the Ohlone Greenway through El Cerrito this month and you will hit a chain-link fence right where the path curves past Central Avenue and Richmond Street. Behind it: foundation work, a crane, and the beginning of a six-story building that did not exist a year ago. Keep walking another mile north, past the BART tracks overhead, and the trail quiets down into something that looks almost untouched, a stretch of wetland grasses and a frog habitat that a handful of volunteers have kept alive since before some of today's dog walkers were born.

Both of those things are true on the same 2.7 miles of pavement at the same time. That is the story of the Greenway right now: one end is being rebuilt by a public-private machine with tens of millions of dollars behind it, and the rest of it is still being shaped, plant by plant, by people who show up on weekends with pruning shears.

What's Actually Rising at Richmond and Central

The fenced site is Parcel A South, a six-story, 100% affordable building at 515 Richmond Street, right at the corner where the Greenway meets Richmond Street and Central Avenue. Related California broke ground with a public ceremony on March 5, 2026, though construction on the site had already started that November, and as of this spring, crews were pouring foundations for a building designed by the architecture firm PYATOK. It will hold roughly 70 apartments, a mix of one, two, and three-bedroom units, for households earning between 30 and 60 percent of the Contra Costa County area median income. Part of the building will go up using factory-built modular construction, a method the state is betting on to build affordable housing faster than site-built framing allows.

The city's own transit-oriented development page lists completion for early 2027. That is the first of six buildings.

"The project will be transformative for our small city," City Councilmember Rebecca Saltzman said after construction began, pointing to the housing, bike and pedestrian upgrades, and a possible new library the project could eventually bring.

The Six-Building Plan Behind One Construction Fence

What is happening at Richmond and Central is one phase of a much larger plan. Once all six buildings are finished, likely around 2029, the site will hold 743 apartments total, replacing what has mostly been surface parking lots since BART opened the station in the 1970s. Related California is building three affordable phases totaling 233 units. Holliday Development is building two market-rate phases totaling 392 units. A joint venture between the two will add a final phase of 118 units aimed at the "missing middle," the kind of housing that sits between a studio and a single-family home. Altogether, BART's own project page puts the affordable share at 47 percent of all units.

The parts most relevant to anyone who already uses this trail:

• A new 22,000-square-foot public plaza, roughly half an acre, running along Fairmount Avenue from Liberty Street to the BART station itself
• A possible 20,000-square-foot public library next to that plaza, contingent on the city finding the funding to build it
• Up to 2,100 square feet of new commercial space
• 145 parking spaces reserved for BART riders in a new garage, alongside roughly 1,100 secure bike parking spaces across the full site

That last pairing is worth sitting with. For every parking spot set aside for a BART rider's car, the plan sets aside more than seven bike spaces. Whatever else this project turns out to be, it was not designed around people driving to catch a train. It was designed around people already walking or biking the way most Greenway regulars already do.

The Rest of the Trail Was Built by Hand, Not by Developers

None of that explains why the rest of the trail looks the way it does. That part has a different origin story, and it has nothing to do with BART, the state, or a development team.

According to the El Cerrito Historical Society, El Cerrito's stretch of the Greenway "had exactly one tree, until someone cut it down" in the early 1990s. Everything that exists today, the shade, the plantings, the sense that this is a place worth walking rather than a strip of asphalt under train tracks, came later, and came from volunteers, a city contract arborist, and city staff working section by section.

That work is still visible if you know where to look. The city's own facilities listing describes the Greenway as home to 24 acres of natural habitat within El Cerrito, including a frog habitat and wetland restoration areas tucked along the path. Near the corner of Manila and Kearney, the Richard Itaya mini-park adds play equipment for younger kids, a small, deliberate addition to a trail that otherwise runs straight under the elevated tracks for its full 2.7 miles through the city.

None of this is what gets a press release. It is what gets tended.

A Free Walk Through the Trail's Own History, November 15

If you want the version of this story told by the people who actually did the planting, the Historical Society is hosting a free guided hike on Sunday, November 15, 2026, from 10 to 11 a.m. The walk meets at the Greenway at Fairmount Avenue, directly across from the El Cerrito Plaza BART station, the same intersection where the new public plaza is planned. From there it is a flat two-mile walk north to the Del Norte BART station, led by Steve Price, the volunteer who organized much of the section's restoration, and Steve Batchelder, the city's former consulting arborist. Along the way, the walk passes what the Historical Society calls the "Dinosaur Forest," one of several small landmarks scattered through the corridor that most people who drive past never notice.

It is a small, specific thing to put on a calendar three months out. But it is also the clearest way to understand what this trail actually is before a construction crane changes the view at one end of it.

What It Adds Up To For Anyone Who Uses This Trail

The Greenway you walk today is not going to look the same in three years. The corner at Richmond and Central will have a finished building where a parking lot used to be, and eventually a plaza and maybe a library where BART riders used to park for free. That part is being built with state tax credits, a $39.1 million grant from the California Strategic Growth Council, and coordination among more than half a dozen public agencies. It is a big, funded, official kind of change.

The rest of the trail, the part that already feels finished, was never built that way. It was built by people who noticed there was only one tree and decided that was not good enough. Both versions of the Greenway are true at the same time, and for the next few years, you will be walking through both of them on the same afternoon.

If you are watching how a neighborhood like El Cerrito changes, block by block, and want to talk about what that means for a home you already own or one you are thinking about, the DiMaggio Betta Group has spent years tracking exactly this kind of shift across the East Bay. Get in touch when you are ready to talk it through.