This story aired in the January 13, 2026 episode of Crosscurrents.
If you visit the Lake Merritt or Walnut Creek BART stations right now… you’ll see construction on mixed-income apartment buildings.
These are referred to as “transit oriented developments.” They are designed to create more housing near transit hubs. They’re projects that require cooperation across multiple state and city agencies.
One of these developments in East Oakland is called Coliseum Connections.
But on New Year’s Eve 2022, there was a major flood there that deeply affected the residents. And still now, three years later - residents say none of the agencies involved have taken responsibility.
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Story Transcript:
REPORTER: On December 31, 2022. Dream Braggs wasn’t really paying attention to the weather.
DREAM BRAGGS: ‘Cause I was getting ready for New Year’s Eve, and when I walked outside to go downstairs, they were like, “Oh, you can't go into the elevator. I’m like “What are you talking about?!”
REPORTER: Braggs' neighbors told her the garage had flooded and put the elevator out of service. So she went outside to get to her car. And she was stunned by what she saw.
BRAGGS: The water in the garage was calf high.
REPORTER: She had to climb into her car window to keep the water from flooding in.
BRAGGS: It was almost like a movie. Other people were running down to go get other people's cars. And then as we were going in, there was water just rushing into the garage.
REPORTER: Just three years earlier, Braggs was one of the first residents to move into Oakland's Coliseum Connections.
BRAGGS: It was beautiful. It was brand new. Everything was great.
REPORTER: Coliseum Connections is built on land owned by BART. It's what’s called a Transit Oriented Development - a residential community, strategically built near a transit hub.
In 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom staged an event outside Coliseum Connections to sign a number of housing bills. He was joined by many local and state officials including then Oakland Mayor Libby Shaaf.
LIBBY SCHAAF: Oakland, California and the entire Bay Area are ground zero for both the problem and the solution.
REPORTER: Governor Newsom congratulated everyone assembled that day for working hard to address housing shortages across the state.
GOVERNOR GAVIN NEWSOM: It means a lot to me, and I hope to all of you, to recognize not only their leadership, but to reconcile our collective responsibility to meet this housing crisis and this affordability crisis head on.
REPORTER: Oh, and Michael Johnson was there too.
MICHAEL JOHNSON: Good morning everyone, my name is Michael Johnson. I’m the President of UrbanCore Development.
REPORTER: Urbancore is a Bay Area-based real estate development firm that has won contracts for publicly funded construction projects around the state.
President and CEO Michael Johnson was entrusted with 57 million taxpayer dollars from city, county, and state agencies to build Coliseum Connections on land owned by BART.
But within months of moving in, residents noticed that things seemed off. The property couldn’t keep managers –– Braggs says one of the managers pulled a gun on the postal worker –– and other troubling incidents prompted them to contact Johnson.
BRAGGS: And so we emailed him and called him on things that were happening in the community of Coliseum Connections around like why are we going through so many people.
REPORTER: But according to Braggs, Johnson was difficult to reach.
Resident complaints about Urbancore started piling up with the city.
Then, after weeks of heavy rain, the building’s underground parking garage flooded on New Year’s Eve 2022.
BRAGGS: I'm right in the middle of doing my makeup and our lights shut off because a PG&E guy came down.
REPORTER: Braggs says the PG&E technician drained a clogged sewer and shut off the electricity.
BRAGGS: So now the whole entire property is without power.
REPORTER: She went from getting ready to party to scrambling in the dark to pack an overnight bag.
She says it wasn’t clear where she and her neighbors would go because initially Johnson and Urbancore staff were unresponsive. After hours of calling and texting management, Urbancore finally booked hotel rooms for them. What residents thought would be a temporary situation stretched on for days and then months.
City and state leaders who were eager to take credit for pushing through projects like Coliseum Connections now seemed to balk at taking responsibility for displaced residents when it flooded.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, took months to accept disaster claims. Residents struggled every day to get answers and support.
They showed up and called into any and every official meeting that they could. They even staged a protest action outside Johnson’s home.
Here’s Braggs at a February 2023 BART board meeting:
BRAGGS: You ain’t even came down there and smelled anything, you haven’t been in my apartment, you haven’t been down there in the garage. FEMA told me this morning Godzilla would gag if he walked in there!
REPORTER: Urbancore stopped footing residents’ hotel bills, so the Oakland City Council stepped in to cover the costs.
This isn’t the first time Urbancore left a city holding the bag.
In 2005, Urbancore received a loan of more than 5 million dollars from the city of San Francisco to revive The Fillmore Heritage Center. It included opening an SF location of the famous Yoshi’s jazz club.
But in 2014, Yoshi’s closed and now the center sits empty. The city sued Johnson for defaulting on the loan.
Urbancore did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Actually, it shouldn't be a surprise that Urbancore’s Coliseum Complex in Oakland flooded.
JULIAN PARK: Interestingly, that building was built in a floodplain.
REPORTER: Julian Park is an organizer with the Tenant and Neighborhood Councils, a housing advocacy collective that helped organize Coliseum Connections residents after the flood.
PARK: If you look at the city's own data and maps showing where they expect major floods to happen, that entire area around Coliseum is understood to be at risk for flooding. So that's public information that the developer and the city and the county –– everyone –– would have had access to. It’s also, I should say, some of that’s going to be underwater when sea level rises. So people know that it’s risky to develop there.
REPORTER: Park blames the Coliseum Connections disaster on a culture that simultaneously commodifies basic human needs like housing, while also rewarding financial risk-taking.
PARK: But the thing is, it’s also set up so that the people who pay for the risks are the tenants. In this case, the tenants of Coliseum Connections. The people who decided to take that risk were the developers, the city, and the county who knew that there was a possibility of this in this place.
REPORTER: He suggests a different model for local control.
PARK: Maybe it should be run by the tenants because they're the people who are having to make sure that they're getting their needs met. And so that would be, you know, maybe [a] pie in the sky hope would be that, “Okay, let's cut Michael Johnson out of the picture.” Since, you know, he has, you know, a track record of cutting and running.
REPORTER: No one ever really took responsibility for what happened to the Coliseum Connections residents, and eleven months of displacement took its toll: students struggled to focus at school or had behavioral issues; some residents left California altogether; Braggs suffered a miscarriage. She says another resident committed suicide.
BRAGGS: I feel like being a leader and having a strong community around me, I can…I'm okay, right? Even through my miscarriage and all that stuff. I feel like a lot of people didn’t. And I feel like a lot of my community is, they're holding that. It’s still there. No matter how much they try to suppress it, that [expletive] is still there. Whenever you go to the Coliseum or drive by in East Oakland, it's like a historical monument for a lot of us.
REPORTER: Coliseum Connections is now in dire financial straits. Oaklandside reported that Urbancore may sell the property to the Oakland Housing Authority.
Meanwhile, BART is partnering on more Transit Oriented Developments in places like Lake Merritt, North Berkeley and Walnut Creek. And California just passed legislation to make it easier to build this kind of housing.
Which begs the question: as climate change increases the frequency of flooding and other severe weather events, are these public agencies and private developers prepared for another Coliseum Connections?
Or will they leave future residents stranded and seeking answers once again? In a statement, a BART spokesperson said the agency has now hired someone to monitor developments built on BART land.
Despite everything, Braggs does credit the experience for one thing:
BRAGGS: There’s lifelong friends I have now that I would have never known if the flood wouldn’t have happened.
Perhaps that’s the biggest takeaway, studies show that people who know their neighbors have a higher likelihood of surviving a natural disaster.
Braggs survived and is trying to move on. The day we meet, she shows me around her new building’s roof deck.
BRAGGS: So over there, you got the whole San Francisco Bay. I wake up to that view every morning.
For this one resident at least, the sky is looking a little brighter.