Why Rockridge's Loudest Fight and Its Quietest Transformation Are Playing Out at the Same Time

Everyone on College Avenue is talking about the same handful of things this month: Enssaro's move, the line at Bad Walter's, whether Forge takes reservations yet. Those are real stories, and worth knowing if you live here. But they are not the story.

The story is that two very different kinds of institutional money are reshaping this neighborhood at the same time, on the same short stretch of road, and residents are only fighting one of them. A nonprofit spent seven years quietly converting a former ice cream company's headquarters into a Jewish community campus, and almost nobody showed up to object. A for-profit developer filed paperwork in April to replace the neighborhood's only Trader Joe's with two residential towers, and it packed a Catholic church with hundreds of frustrated neighbors within three months. Both sites sit an easy walk from the Rockridge BART station. Wildly different receptions.

The Building You Pass Without Noticing

For decades, the low brick complex at 5957 Chabot Road was headquarters for Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream, later absorbed into Nestlé. Moses Libitzky and Nathan Petrowsky bought the 83,000-square-foot, nearly three-acre property in December 2019 with a different use in mind, and what's emerging there now is the East Bay Jewish Community Campus, a three-acre hub meant to house the JCC of the East Bay alongside as many as 20 other Jewish nonprofit organizations.

The scale is real: more than 128,000 total square feet, 84,000 of it building space, funded through a $125 million campaign. The campus will include a kosher café, a teaching kitchen, a wellness studio, a library, a teen center, and a performance venue built for more than 200 people, all inside renovated versions of the existing administrative buildings rather than new construction.

The first piece opens this month. The campus's Early Childhood Education Center starts with roughly 70 children in late August, according to Oaklandside's reporting, on its way to a planned capacity of 120, double what the program currently serves at the JCC's longtime home on Walnut Street in Berkeley. A full ribbon-cutting for the rest of the campus is expected in September, by which point the second and third floors should be filled with offices for the incoming nonprofits.

None of this required a public fight. It required a purchase, a permit, and seven years of patient renovation of buildings that were already zoned for the use they're getting.

The Fight Down the Street

Compare that to what's happening at 5727 College Avenue, where the neighborhood's Trader Joe's currently sits on a 1.5-acre lot near the BART station. In April 2026, San Francisco-based Align Real Estate filed a proposal with the city to replace the grocery store and its surface parking with 415 units of senior housing split across two towers, one rising 31 stories and 352 feet, the other 25 stories and 294 feet. The unit mix breaks down to 371 independent living apartments, 18 assisted living units, and 26 dedicated to memory care. The land is owned by Albertsons, the parent company of Safeway, a Trader Joe's competitor.

The reaction was immediate and loud. On July 13, 2026, hundreds of residents packed St. Augustine's Catholic Church for a town hall with City Councilmember Zac Unger and Oakland planning staff, many of them longtime residents who worry about losing the neighborhood's most affordable full-service grocery option. The Rockridge Community Planning Council has pointed out that this particular store was also the first Trader Joe's location in the country to unionize, which has become part of why people are fighting to keep it.

Tom Dolan, an architect who has lived in Rockridge for 45 years, told a reporter the plan "is just an insult to the neighborhood."

Why One Project Sailed and the Other Can't Be Stopped

Here's the part that actually matters if you live in Rockridge and want to understand what's coming, not just what's already here.

The JCC campus moved through the process quietly because it didn't need state intervention to get built. It was a straightforward purchase-and-renovate project on land already zoned for institutional use, backed by donors willing to fund a multi-year buildout on their own timeline.

The Trader Joe's towers are a different animal entirely, and the difference is written into California housing law, not into anything specific to this developer. Align's application invokes the state's Density Bonus Law along with an AB 130 CEQA exemption, SB 35, and SB 330, the 2019 Housing Crisis Act authored by former East Bay state senator Nancy Skinner. Those laws were built to make it harder for cities to slow-walk housing, and they're working as designed. City officials told the July town hall crowd, according to Local News Matters, that Oakland has limited legal ground to block a project that qualifies under this framework, whatever the neighborhood thinks of a 31-story tower on a street lined with two- and three-story storefronts.

Unger has said he's pushing the developer to keep Trader Joe's on the ground floor of whatever gets built, and according to Unger, Oakland's Economic and Workforce Development Department is working to keep the grocer somewhere in the neighborhood if the College Avenue location doesn't survive. Neither outcome is guaranteed. No hearing date had been set as of early August 2026.

Here's the side-by-side, because the contrast is the point:

While the Big Decisions Sit Unresolved, the Small Ones Are Happening Weekly

None of that stops the neighborhood from eating well in the meantime. Enssaro, the Ethiopian restaurant that spent roughly two decades on Grand Avenue near Lake Merritt, opened its new location at 5897 College Avenue on Friday, July 31, still run by the same mother, daughter, and son team, with an interior designed by Kalu Gebreyohannes-Royster of Liyu Designs, the same designer behind Meski in San Francisco and Oakland's Lucy Blue, according to Oaklandside's Nosh coverage. A restaurant with that kind of customer loyalty choosing College Avenue over its old block is its own small vote of confidence in the corridor.

A16 Rockridge at 5356 College Avenue keeps its wood-fired pizza oven going with a daily happy hour from 5 to 6pm. Forge has settled into the American comfort food and Neapolitan pizza lane with a patio built for brunch. And Bad Walter's Bootleg Ice Cream, tucked next to Starter Bakery at 5800 College, has spent the summer drawing the kind of regional media attention that turns a counter line into a neighborhood landmark.

Two Dates Worth Writing Down

If National Night Out block parties on August 4 caught you off guard, here's what's left on the calendar for the next seven weeks:

• Saturday, August 22, 2026, 11am to 4pm — Rock-N-Stroll turns the one-mile stretch of College Avenue between Alcatraz and Broadway into a walkable festival with more than 50 local artists and over 20 bands, without closing the street to traffic
• Sunday, September 27, 2026, 12:30 to 5:30pm — the 16th annual Rockridge Kitchen Tour opens the doors of eight kitchens and two ADUs, tickets available now through the Rockridge Community Planning Council

The Actual Takeaway

None of the restaurant news changes the character of Rockridge in any lasting way. New places open, some close, the street keeps its rhythm. What will actually determine what this neighborhood looks like in five years is playing out at two addresses most people drive past without a second look: a former ice cream factory that nobody protested, and a grocery store that state law may not let anyone save. If you care about what Rockridge becomes, that's where to pay attention, not the ice cream line.

We spend a lot of time in rooms like the one at St. Augustine's, because understanding how a neighborhood actually changes, block by block and permit by permit, is part of how we help people make good decisions here. If you're thinking through what any of this means for your own plans in Rockridge or elsewhere in the East Bay, DiMaggio Betta Group is glad to talk it through. Get in Touch.