This story aired in the April 20, 2026 episode of Crosscurrents.
The Bay Area was once home to a rich tapestry of wetlands. But today, more than 90% of the Bay’s salt marshes and wetlands have been developed for agriculture, industry, or housing.
Cities along the Bay Area shoreline are trying to restore wetlands to help mitigate floods and fight climate change. But as housing prices in the Bay skyrocket cities are also looking to that empty land to build housing.
This is all coming to a head in Newark. The city recently approved the Mowry Village housing project. It would build almost 200 homes in an area that borders industrial salt ponds and the San Francisco Bay. But environmentalists say that’s the wrong place to build.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Jana Sokale’s favorite time to walk along the bayfront trails in Newark is around sunset, when you can see the Palo Alto hills from across the bay and hear the frogs and birds start their evening song.
Sokale is an environmentalist who’s worked for years to protect Newark’s shoreline — a rich tapestry of tidal wetlands, freshwater habitat, and saltwater coming in from the bay.
Like trees, wetlands can absorb and capture carbon. They also protect against floods and are home to lots of wildlife. “Wetlands are essentially a nursery for young birds, young fish, young amphibians, the frogs,” says Sokale. “So they’re a really rich habitat, and I think a good portion of that is because there’s water!”
Hundreds of years ago, the entire Bay Area shoreline — from San Francisco to Newark — was covered in wetlands. But over the years, more than 90% of the Bay’s salt marshes and wetlands have been developed for agriculture, industry, or housing.
That development is in Newark, too. Much of the area’s historic wetlands were turned into industrial salt ponds and an auto wrecking yard called Pick-n-Pull.
And today, Newark’s shoreline is facing yet another development: a housing project.
Last fall, the city of Newark approved plans for the Mowry Village Project, a bayfront housing project that would convert Pick-n-Pull and nearby empty land into nearly 200 single-family homes.
Pick-n-Pull isn’t technically a wetland anymore — but it used to be. It sits right on the water and is adjacent to wetlands, which is why Jana thinks Pick-n-Pull could one day be restored back to a one.
But today, she says adding more development, like housing, is a step in the wrong direction.
“Imagine two, three-story buildings, street lights, house lights, all of that shining into the immediately adjacent wetlands,” says Sokale. “How will wildlife respond to that?”
The Citizens Committee to Complete the Refuge, Sokale’s organization, started a petition against the project. They wanted Newark to say no to the project and restore Pick-n-Pull into park space, instead. But a housing project would keep the land developed.
The petition against the project collected more than 3,000 signatures. But Newark officials still voted in favor of it.
Like most other cities in the Bay Area, Newark is in dire need of housing. The Mowry Village project would build 193 single-family homes and 31 affordable housing units.
For a city that only has 50,000 residents, this isn’t nothing. Newark is right next to Silicon Valley and was once a more affordable alternative to San Francisco or San Jose. But today, the average home price in Newark is 1.4 million dollars.
Nick Valencia is third generation Newark resident and a strong supporter of the Mowry Village Project. He regularly shows up to city council meetings to give public comments in support of new housing projects, because he thinks more housing will help solve Newark’s affordability problem.
“The Mowry Village Project brings a lot of housing into Newark, which to me, hopefully, is a good way to kind of start to quell the soaring prices,” says Valencia. “Because just, I mean, across the entire Bay Area, prices keep rising.”
Valencia has lived in Newark his whole life and over the years, has watched many of his friends and family move away. “My grandma has six children, and out of those six, there’s only one more that’s remained in the Bay Area,” says Valencia. “And that's more often than not just a correlation of the high expense to stay in the Bay Area.”
Like Valencia, Cara Madden grew up in Newark and raised her own family in town. But now that her sons are heading off to college, the affordability problem has become personal.
“My younger son really wants to stay in the Bay Area and doesn’t see a path forward for that right now, given the current costs of housing,” Madden says. “My older son has given up on the idea of coming back to the Bay Area because the housing costs are so high.”
Still, Madden is opposed to the Mowry Village Project — not because she’s against housing, but rather because she’s against where the housing project will be built. “The site just isn't suitable for building houses,” says Madden. “It is in a historical part of Newark that floods.”
Madden lives close to the proposed development and the shoreline.
“Even recently with the King Tides, that whole area was inundated with water, including the edges of the pick and pull sites,” she says.
In 2023, during an unprecedented rainy season, Madden piled sandbags in her backyard—just to mitigate any flooding.
Because Newark was so susceptible to flooding, the city provided free sandbags for residents. “I went to the Newark facilities yard and filled them up and brought them here and then piled them up all along this back corner,” says Madden, pointing to the corner in her backyard that still has sandbags stacked against it. “There’s a vent right here that I wanted to prevent water going into and then all along my back door right here. And where we’re standing was about two to three inches of water.”
Madden’s own experience with flooding has made her worried for future Mowry Village residents. “Is this going to happen more in the future for this neighborhood and does it make sense to put people in harm's way even out further into land that tends to flood?” she says.
FEMA has labeled the current housing site a moderate flood zone, which means it could see temporary flooding during storms. Madden says “modeling is showing that in 50 years, with sea level rise, groundwater issues, and storms, that a big portion of this land is modeled to be underwater.”
In response, the developers plan to artificially raise the site by a few feet.
“But the fact is we just don't know how much we're going to be impacted. We don't know if that's going to be enough,” says Madden in regards to the raised development. “We also don't know if the water that gets displaced by this raised up development is then going to inundate other parts of Newark and hurt other residents.”
And sea level rise could hurt the wetlands too, potentially turning wetlands into completely open water.
As sea levels rise, wetlands could adapt by migrating upwards, but not if they push up against development—like a housing project—in a process called coastal squeeze.
“If this land all gets developed, it's going to come up against a hard edge, it will all drown, and then eventually we won't have wetlands,” says Jana Sokale. “Nor will we have all the animals that are associated with that habitat.”
Sokale says if the city restores Pick-n-Pull back into natural space, wetlands would have somewhere to migrate to. “The land has been recognized for, you know, 40-50 years by scientists all around the bay that the best possible use of this land is to protect us from the future,” says Sokale.
In response to the housing project’s approval, the Citizens Committee to Complete the Refuge is suing the city of Newark.
Cities need to complete an Environmental Impact Report, or EIR, before building a project that could have a significant environmental impact. Newark’s current EIR finds that the Mowry Village Project won’t have a significant impact on the environment. But the lawsuit claims the city’s EIR didn’t predict those impacts well enough.
“They don't acknowledge it, they don't talk about the impacts the development will have on that adjacent area and on the species, so it fails to disclose to decision makers and to the public what the full impact is,” says Sokale.
A lawsuit like this could take up to two years. But in the meantime, the project developers are going through a permitting process with the city. They’ll also begin to remove the auto wrecking yard and clean up any toxic chemicals or waste.