Downtown Richmond is the old center of

Richmond, California Richmond is a city in western Contra Costa County, California, United States. The city was municipal corporation, incorporated on August 3, 1905, and has a Richmond, California, City Council, city council.

. The area is roughly bordered by 6th street to the west, 23rd Street to the east, Barrett Avenue to the north, and Macdonald Avenue to the south. The area once featured major

department store A department store is a retail establishment offering a wide range of consumer goods in different areas of the store under one roof, each area ("department") specializing in a product category. In modern major cities, the department store mad ...

s and other chains such as J.C. Penney,

Macy's Macy's is an American department store chain founded in 1858 by Rowland Hussey Macy. The first store was located in Manhattan on Sixth Avenue between 13th and 14th Streets, south of the present-day flagship store at Herald Square on West 34 ...

, S. H. Kress & Co., and

Sears Sears, Roebuck and Co., commonly known as Sears ( ), is an American chain of department stores and online retailer founded in 1892 by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck and reincorporated in 1906 by Richard Sears and Julius Rosen ...

before Hilltop Mall was built in the 1970s.The area is currently undergoing a revitalization effort by the city, which has included the Richmond Shopping Center anchored by a supermarket. The Richmond Transit Village—coined Metro Walk by the developers, the Olson Company—has also been built, along with remodeling of the Richmond BART and Amtrak station and a bus transit center served by

AC Transit AC Transit is the main Public transport bus service, bus transit operator in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, California. AC Transit is the third largest bus operator in California, serving the western portions of Alameda and C ...

and

Golden Gate Transit Golden Gate Transit (GGT) is a public transportation system serving the North Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area in California, United States. It primarily serves Marin County, Sonoma County, and San Francisco, and also provides limited ser ...

. A

Kaiser Permanente Kaiser Permanente (; KP) is an American integrated delivery system, integrated managed care consortium headquartered in Oakland, California. Founded in 1945 by industrialist Henry J. Kaiser and physician Sidney Garfield, Sidney R. Garfield, the ...

hospital and a

Social Security Administration The United States Social Security Administration (SSA) is an Independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, U.S. federal government that administers Social Security (United ...

processing center provide for a majority of the jobs in the area.

Metro Walk

Metro Walk is a transit village in downtown Richmond.Transit VillageMetro Walk, City of Richmond website.
Accessed January 2012. a half-built sixteen-acre planned community. The first phase was built on an empty lot and parking lot on the west side of

Richmond Richmond most often refers to: * Richmond, British Columbia, a city in Canada * Richmond, California, a city in the United States * Richmond, London, a town in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, England * Richmond, North Yorkshire, a town ...

BART Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) is a rapid transit system serving the San Francisco Bay Area in California. BART serves List of Bay Area Rapid Transit stations, 50 stations along six routes and of track, including eBART, a spur line running t ...

and

Amtrak The National Railroad Passenger Corporation, Trade name, doing business as Amtrak (; ), is the national Passenger train, passenger railroad company of the United States. It operates intercity rail service in 46 of the 48 contiguous United Stat ...

Capitol Corridor The ''Capitol Corridor'' is a passenger train route in Northern California operated by Amtrak between San Jose, California, San Jose, in the Bay Area, and Auburn, California, Auburn, in the Sacramento Valley. The route is named after the two ...

station.Providing Creative Housing Solutions to California Cities
, Olson Company, access date 27-12-2011 This has 132 homes on an eight-acre site with a housing density of 16.5 du/acre.

Layout and pricing

The floorplans of these cluster homes are from 1,395 to 1,615 ft² (130 to 150 m²).Homes feature BART at doorstep
Richard Paoli, ''

San Francisco Chronicle The ''San Francisco Chronicle'' is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. It was founded in 1865 as ''The Daily Dramatic Chronicle'' by teenage brothers Charles de Young and M. H. de Young, Michael H. ...

'', 14-03-2004, access date 28-11-2011 When sales began in 2004 the homes sold from the $300,000 range and up. Three models were built in phase I: bungalows, villas, and career homes. The later come with a ground floor space that can easily be used as a business or live/work space and came with a business license from the city to do so. The monthly community fee was reported as $200 in 2004.

Public works project

It has single-family houses as the primary housing units, instead of more traditional

condominium A condominium (or condo for short) is an ownership regime in which a building (or group of buildings) is divided into multiple units that are either each separately owned, or owned in common with exclusive rights of occupation by individual own ...

s. It was built on the former parking lot and an adjacent vacant parcel of the

and

(

) station. It is a mixed-use project spearheaded by the Richmond Redevelopment Agency, in partnership with a large consortium of local, state, and federal agencies. Some of the most notable of these agencies include the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, BART, and the Olson Company. The project consists of multi-level row houses, some of which come with a ground floor area with a free business license, in addition to commercial space, a planned parking garage, parks, and a greenway path connecting the station with the downtown area, in particular the

building and Kaiser Hospital. The plan also included the remodeling of the approach to the station which was seen as antagonizingly suspicious and met with apprehension due to the recessed entry which is being presently replaced with a more modern escalator-driven, well-lit entrance with a police substation to provide peace of mind to passers-by.

References

* *
Palo Alto City Council minutesBerkeley Daily PlanetBerkeley Daily PlanetBerkeley Daily Planet

External links

Map and overview from Metropolitan Transportation Commission

rom Richmond For Business {{Coord, 37.93767, N, 122.35525, W, region:US-CA, display=title Buildings and structures in Richmond, California Neighborhoods in Richmond, California Transportation in Contra Costa County, California