San Antonio BART station is still a fantasy, but here’s what design students think is possible 23%
By Jose Fermoso23%
7/10/2026, 4:02:00 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 22 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Availability Heuristic, and Halo Effect, with Optimism Bias as the most egregious example at 17% saturation with 149 hits. Analysis detected 1,071 faulty-reasoning hits from 879 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 36.1% and a BS Rank of 23% (12,401 of 15,985 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 77.60% of the article peer group.
It’s three miles between the Lake Merritt BART stop and the next stop to the east, in Fruitvale.
For a decade, residents have been advocating for a stop in between, in the neighborhood of San Antonio.
As that process inches forward, slowly gaining the support of regional planners, a group of design students took it upon themselves to envision that future.
That work, by students in a studio design class at San Francisco’s California College of the Arts, required more than imagination alone.
It took conversations with neighbors, historical research, and consideration of budgets and laws.
According to the professor who led the effort, the students came up with designs that offer exciting possibilities.
The San Antonio BART station, a project being pushed by the San Antonio Station Alliance, an advocacy group made up of transit professionals and people who live in or near the San Antonio neighborhood, has been stuck in its nascent stages for most of this decade.
The idea only recently gained verbal support from local and state government officials, who are seeking to include it in a regional plan called Link21.
The plan also calls for a new BART stop on a second cross-bay tunnel between San Francisco and Oakland, which still awaits many stages of approvals and financing.
Neeraj Bhatia, the director of the Urban Works Agency research lab at CCA, was the architecture professor who ran the spring semester studio class.
He asked his students to investigate the complex factors involved in designing a new station atop the existing train tracks and next to the 880 freeway, including how a new station located at the south end of 14th Avenue could serve as a hub for new housing.
“We wanted to take a holistic approach, and the research allowed us to do that,” Bhatia said.
“We were never just looking at the BART station.
We were always looking at larger questions within about a half-mile to one-mile radius from the BART station and understanding that as the entire project.”
The participants were mostly architecture students in the final years of their professional bachelor’s degrees or master’s degrees.
“That’s a really incredible aspect of the two programs because it allows those students to mix, learn from each other, and work together,” he said.
“There aren’t many other opportunities within the program for them to collaborate in that way.”
As research progressed, one of the major questions the student teams encountered was how much land in the San Antonio neighborhood could be affected by flooding.
The 14th Avenue arterial road, they found, is built on top of Brooklyn Creek, which risks overflowing as storms and atmospheric rivers become more frequent.
They found that the embarcadero on the south side of the highway will also be affected by sea-level rise.
“That was something that was very eye-opening, as you have these collisions of water coming from two different directions, with the BART station essentially sitting in the middle of it,” Bhatia said.
In their proposal, Bourne and Applegate imagined a restored creek with a marsh environment that absorbs rainwater, encourages wildlife, and yet appears approachable to pedestrians.
They imagined a widened creek, with small birds wading by, crisscrossed by small pedestrian bridges, and a road for vehicles along the creekbed.
“By opening up the creek and giving it room to return to a more natural state, you allow the water and surrounding land to function more like a sponge,” Bhatia said.
“It absorbs more water over a larger area and reduces flooding pressure.”
On the other side of the freeway, to prevent sea flooding, the students envisioned infill development including a manufactured beach with docks and such amenities as amphitheaters, playgrounds, and community parks.
Some of the sediment removed to restore the creek would be used to fill in areas under the docks, according to their presentation.
Bhatia said the students working on the housing plans near the transit station — Canyon Allan, Berk Kip, Alex Riedel, and Anhelina Rozum — also had to consider sea-level rise.
Many transit stations around the country, including many in California that are being considered in the aftermath of a law that makes it easier to build around them, don't take that risk into account, he said.
“With high flood zones, we need to think through that as part of the larger master plan,” he said.
So this student team came up with plans to stabilize the shoreline and imagined housing that could be built on smaller lots and be resilient to floods.
Rowley said the students incorporated that history and feedback, along with their own research, which included walking tours of the community, into their work.
That informed the types of businesses the plans were designed to include, such as a bookstore, a childcare center, a healthcare pop-up, and places where local food trucks and vendors could sell their wares, rather than storefronts for corporate chains.
Working with the San Antonio Station Alliance, Bhatia said, “allowed us to come up to speed with years of conversations and community outreach, to get a handle on what the community was enthusiastic about, what they were fearful about, and how they were thinking about their neighborhood.”
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