Bay Space residents are outraged {that a} once-storied racetrack goes to be become an enormous waterfront park at taxpayer value when there’s an ongoing housing disaster.
The 161-acre Golden Gate Fields, alongside San Francisco Bay, has been optioned for buy for $175 million by a non-profit group known as Belief for Public Land, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
After almost 80 years of thoroughbred racing, the previous racetrack closed in 2024. Complicating the acquisition of the property for different makes use of has been the truth that it borders each the town of Berkeley and Albany. The nonprofit group helped negotiate the deal between the landowner and the 2 cities.
The group stated it is going to elevate the funds for the acquisition and subsequent 12 months the land might be handed over to the East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD), who will preserve the location, and celebrated the partnership.
Cash for the acquisition can also be anticipated to return from California’s Prop 4, which was handed in 2024. The poll measure permits for $10 million in bonds for so-called climate-related initiatives, akin to “rising leisure alternatives at native parks” and “used to restore state parks.”
A number of Bay Space residents are usually not thrilled and have taken to social media to slam the concept, saying the very last thing they want is one other leisure area.
“Right here’s a greater concept: substitute this shuttered 160-acre racetrack with 50 acres of ultra-high-density growth, and construct a park on the remaining 110 acres,” one particular person wrote.
“This can meet Albany’s housing ingredient 50 instances over whereas serving to fund the brand new park (and burying the freeway).”
“So it seems like CA taxpayers might be shelling out the large bucks to ‘shield’ 160 acres of land on the border of Berkeley and Albany from any housing growth,” a regulation professor at UC Davis wrote. “Wouldn’t a brand new waterfront park have extra worth if extra folks might stay beside it?”
“We’re hooked on ideology and luxurious beliefs. There isn’t a scarcity of parks and leisure area,” a third particular person continued. “Now we have a scarcity of housing within the Bay Space, however we might relatively do the whole lot else than construct properties.”
“It is a DISGRACE. Right here we’re in the course of an enormous housing scarcity, our children are leaving California in droves to search out an inexpensive place to stay, and we flip this prime housing website over to a different park?” a fourth particular person wrote on Fb, mentioning the proximity of quite a few parks close by. “WE DO NOT NEED MORE PARKS, WE NEED MORE HOMES!”
Nevertheless, not everybody agrees. One resident threw their help behind it on-line, saying that turning the world into one “big waterfront park is gonna be sick.”
Elizabeth Echols, EBRPD board member for Ward 1, stated in an announcement on the park’s web site that the “alternative to transform Golden Gate Fields to a wonderful shoreline park serving East Bay residents and the broader Bay Space group is a dream come true for the East Bay Regional Park District Board of Administrators.”
“If the acquisition is profitable, 161 acres of lovely shoreline will eternally be preserved for parkland for all to get pleasure from.”
Echols added, “Not solely that, restoring the land to a extra pure state will go an extended method to defending delicate shoreline habitat not just for wildlife but in addition as a way to guard coastal residential communities from the impacts of our altering local weather.”
As a part of the acquisition choice, the land should not comprise any above-ground infrastructure when it’s handed over, the outlet famous.
Guillermo Rodriguez, California state director for the belief, stated that they have been “nonetheless early within the course of” and that they “might be partaking group members and stakeholders throughout” the area for help.
The California Publish reached out to East Bay Regional Park District and the nonprofit for remark.
