On Friday, July 31, a family that has spent two decades building a following on Grand Avenue near Lake Merritt opened the doors to a new home at 5897 College Avenue. Two blocks up the street, the parking lot outside the Rockridge Trader Joe's has become the site of a fight that could end with the store gone entirely, replaced by two towers taller than anything else in the neighborhood.
Both stories are about the same half-mile of College Avenue. Neither one is really about restaurants or groceries. They're about who gets to decide what this street looks like in five years, and it turns out the answer depends heavily on which side of a state law you're standing on.
The Bet Enssaro Just Made
Enssaro has served Ethiopian food on Grand Avenue for roughly twenty years, still run by the same mother, daughter, and son team that started it. Leaving a location with two decades of regulars is not a small decision, and the new Rockridge space wasn't treated as an afterthought. The interior was designed by Kalu Gebreyohannes-Royster of Liyu Designs, the same designer behind San Francisco's Meski, co-owned by Draymond Green, and Oakland's own Lucy Blue.
That's a meaningful signal. A restaurant with two decades of brand equity doesn't relocate to a new commercial strip on a whim, and it doesn't hire a designer with that kind of portfolio unless it expects the new location to matter for the next twenty years, not just the next two. Enssaro is betting that College Avenue's food scene has room to grow.
That bet is being placed at the exact moment the street's most reliable anchor tenant might not survive the decade.
The Bet Trader Joe's Might Lose
The Trader Joe's at 5727 College Avenue sits on 1.5 acres owned by Albertsons, the parent company of Safeway. On April 22, a San Francisco-based developer called Align Real Estate filed an application to demolish the store and its surface lot and replace them with a 415-unit senior housing complex split into two towers. Reported heights vary slightly depending on the outlet, from 25 and 30 stories to 31 and 25 stories, though every account agrees the taller of the two would dwarf anything else on this stretch of College Avenue. According to SFist's reporting, the unit mix breaks down into 371 independent-living units, 18 assisted-living units, and 26 memory-care rooms. There is no grocery store, and no ground-floor retail of any kind, in the current design.
To put the scale in perspective: the current height limit on this stretch of College Avenue is 95 feet. Align is using a 20 percent density bonus to justify buildings that run three to three and a half times that height, according to the Rockridge Community Planning Council's own statement on the project. Nothing else on College Avenue comes close to that scale, and the applicant is arguing state law entitles them to build it anyway.
On July 13, hundreds of residents packed St. Augustine's Catholic Church for a town hall with Councilmember Zac Unger and members of Oakland's Planning and Building Department. Most of the people who spoke that night, according to reporting from Piedmont Exedra, were seniors who had lived in the neighborhood for decades, raising concerns about fire safety and the sheer size of the buildings relative to everything around them.
"This is all happening under State Senate Bill 330, which is relatively new and takes a lot of decision-making power out of the hands of local officials. I want to be very clear. I have zero interest in letting this developer cut corners."
That's Unger, quoted by KTVU after the town hall. It's a rare moment of a local elected official saying plainly that the usual tools of local control don't apply here.
Why City Hall Says Its Hands Are Tied
The mechanism worth understanding, whether or not you ever plan to weigh in on a zoning hearing, is SB 330. Also called the Housing Crisis Act of 2019 and sponsored by former Berkeley state senator Nancy Skinner, the law fast-tracks housing developments that meet a city's existing zoning, stripping away much of the administrative review that used to slow projects down. Align's application also invokes AB 130's CEQA exemption, SB 35, and the State Density Bonus Law, according to reporting from SF YIMBY.
Stack those together and you get a project that can bypass most of the discretionary review that would normally let a city council or planning commission push back on height, massing, or use. The Rockridge Community Planning Council isn't opposed to housing near transit in principle. Their own statement says as much. What surprised them was the size of the ask relative to the site's existing entitlements, and the fact that a legal pathway exists to grant it regardless of neighborhood input.
This is the part that rarely makes it into the neighborhood chatter about the project: it isn't really a fight over whether Rockridge gets more housing near BART. It's a demonstration of how much authority state housing law has already taken away from city councils and community planning groups, even in a neighborhood as organized and vocal as this one.
What Actually Changes If the Store Goes
For now, Trader Joe's is still open and still listed among the chain's Oakland locations. The filing is an opening move in what Hoodline describes as a multi-year process, and nothing about the current design is final. But it's worth being honest about what the neighborhood loses if the plan proceeds as filed. The Rockridge Community Planning Council has called this store the only affordable grocery option in the neighborhood, and it was also the first Trader Joe's location in the country to unionize.
The nearest alternatives are a Safeway further down College Avenue and a Whole Foods on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, per the same Hoodline reporting. Neither is a walk for most of the households who currently treat the Rockridge Trader Joe's as a weekly stop on foot. For a neighborhood where daily errands on foot are part of what makes the area work, trading a walkable grocery store for two towers with no ground-floor retail is a real shift in how people would live day to day, regardless of how the housing math pencils out.
The Rest of the Corridor Isn't Waiting Around
None of this has slowed the street's other rhythms. A few things worth knowing if you're walking College Avenue this season:
- The 2026 Rockridge Kitchen Tour is scheduled for Sunday, September 27, featuring eight kitchens and two ADUs, with the planning committee currently recruiting docents according to RCPC's own site.
- Rock-N-Stroll returns every second Saturday, closing portions of College Avenue between Broadway and Alcatraz to traffic for local vendors and live music, organized by the Rockridge District Association.
- Forge, a newer arrival offering American comfort food and Neapolitan pizza, has joined the strip's dining lineup.
- Longtime fixtures like Zachary's Pizza, still running its friendly cornmeal-crust rivalry with San Francisco's Little Star, and Frog Park, the greenbelt path tracing Temescal Creek, remain exactly where they've always been.
That mix of steady tradition and new arrivals is, in a strange way, the point. Rockridge isn't a neighborhood in decline waiting to be saved by redevelopment, and it isn't a museum piece resistant to any change at all. It's a place confident enough to draw a two-decade-old restaurant away from an established location, while simultaneously fighting to keep the grocery store that's been part of daily life here for years.
The Same Street, Pulling in Two Directions
That's the thing to sit with if you live here. College Avenue is currently absorbing a genuine vote of confidence from a business owner willing to bet on it, and a genuine threat from a state law that could reshape three and a half times the neighborhood's height limit without much local say in the matter. Both are true at once, on the same stretch of pavement, in the same summer.
Whatever happens with the Trader Joe's site over the next few years, it's worth watching not just for what it means for one grocery store, but for what it says about how much control neighborhoods like this one actually have over their own commercial character going forward.
If you're curious how changes like these tend to play out over time in Rockridge and nearby pockets of Oakland, Susanne Alexander keeps a close eye on this corridor and is always glad to talk through what's actually happening on the ground. Let's Connect.
