The East End's Newest Waterfront Neighborhood Ends at a Chain-Link Fence

Walk east along Clement Avenue past Grand Street and the transformation is hard to miss. Townhomes with rooftop decks catch the afternoon light. A five-story apartment building wraps around a courtyard with a pool and a fire pit. Signs point toward a marina, a dog park, a stretch of new waterfront trail. This is Alameda Marina, and by most measures it has delivered on what its renderings promised years ago.

Keep walking toward Entrance Road and the story changes without warning. The sidewalk ends. A chain-link fence appears. Behind it sits 32 acres of cracked pavement, old pilings, and, as of this year, rows of parked electric vehicles waiting for their next assignment. This is Encinal Terminals, and it has looked roughly like this since 2010.

Both parcels sit inside what real estate listings label the East End's waterfront corridor. Both were marketed with the same language: marina access, waterfront parks, a walkable mixed-use community. Only one of them exists yet. If you're evaluating a home in this part of Alameda, the gap between those two outcomes is the thing worth understanding before you write an offer.

What Actually Got Built

Alameda Marina's first residential phase, a 98-unit townhome community called Island View, sold out by late 2025. Floor plans ranged from about 1,462 to 2,389 square feet, and final available units priced from the high $800,000s to just over $1.4 million. The builder has since opened a second phase, Waterside, with listed starting prices in the low $1.3 millions as of this summer.

Next door, Launch Apartments brought hundreds of rental units online at 1777 Clement Avenue, built by Johnstone Moyer under a project overseen by Alameda Marina LLC and its townhome partner, Landsea Construction LLC. The Dutra Group handled the seawall work that makes the whole waterfront edge usable. The full master plan for this 44-acre site calls for up to 760 housing units and a 529-slip marina, a number that grew after community feedback led the city to approve additional housing beyond what was originally proposed.

That is the delivered half of the corridor. Concrete has been poured, families have closed escrow, and the marina slips are real.

What's Still Just a Fence and a Permit

Encinal Terminals tells a different story, and the timeline explains why.

Tim Lewis Communities acquired the 32-acre site at 1521 Buena Vista Avenue in 2013, along with the neighboring Del Monte warehouse property. The city approved a master plan for Encinal Terminals in October 2018, then approved a revised version in January 2022 by a 4-1 council vote. That plan allows up to 589 homes, 80 of them affordable, along with a marina of up to 160 slips, more than three acres of public open space, and 30,000 to 50,000 square feet of commercial space.

Getting to that approval took longer than usual because part of the property sits on public trust tidelands, land that state law reserves for maritime and public use rather than housing. Clearing that obstacle required the city, the developer, and the California State Lands Commission to negotiate a land exchange, and that exchange needed its own act of the state legislature. Assemblymember Mia Bonta authored the bill, AB 1706, which Governor Newsom signed on July 27, 2023, more than a decade after the developer first bought the land.

The development agreement that came out of this process gives the developer up to 15 years to finish the housing, a window that stretches toward 2037. In January 2025, the city council voted to modify the project's intermediate milestones, a procedural step that pushed pieces of the build-out timeline further out. Then, on March 23, 2026, the Alameda Planning Board approved a new twist: a two-year interim use permit letting the site operate as outdoor storage for electric vehicles while the housing plan waits. The applicant of record, Bayview Landing LP, also received approval to demolish two existing structures and add new fencing near Fortman Marina to accommodate the temporary use.

City estimates put the interim use at roughly $54,000 a year in revenue, according to reporting ahead of the May 5, 2026 council meeting where the plan's operating conditions were finalized. One resident who spoke at the March hearing raised a concern that still-industrial trucking on Entrance Road would undercut years of progress toward making the area walkable. The board approved the permit anyway, treating it as a way to keep a fenced industrial lot from sitting entirely idle while the larger project finds its financing.

None of this means Encinal Terminals is cancelled. The master plan is still adopted. It means the site is, right now, a parking lot for cars rather than a neighborhood for people, and it is contractually allowed to stay that way for years longer.

Same Waterfront, Two Different Products

Why One Half Delivered and the Other Didn't

The gap isn't random, and it isn't really about the land. It's about who holds it and what they intend to do with it.

Entitling a large waterfront parcel in Alameda is slow, expensive, and full of legal complexity, as the tidelands exchange for Encinal Terminals shows. Once entitlements are secured, a developer has a choice: build the project out with its own capital, or sell the entitled land to a builder with deeper pockets and move on. Tim Lewis Communities did the second thing with its other North Shore property. After winning approval for 380 units at the old Del Monte warehouse in 2017, TLC sold the entitled project to Wood Partners, which announced in December 2019 that it would convert the historic warehouse into 372 apartments under the name Alta Buena Vista, now open as Alta Star Harbor.

Encinal Terminals took the other path. The entity holding that entitlement kept it rather than flipping it, and years later the site is still fenced pavement leasing space to parked cars instead of homes with closed sales. An approved master plan tells you a city has agreed to let something get built. It tells you nothing about whether whoever holds that approval has the capital and appetite to build it on any particular timeline.

What This Means If You're Looking at an East End "Waterfront" Listing

If a listing in this part of the East End leans on nearby marina access, a promised park, or future retail as part of its value story, a few questions are worth asking before those amenities factor into your offer:

• Has the specific parcel behind or beside this home broken ground, or is it still an entitlement on file with the city?
• If the amenity is part of a phased master plan, which phase is it in, and has that phase started construction?
• Is there a special assessment or CFD tied to future improvements that haven't been built yet?
• What does the city's own planning record say about the parcel's current permitted use, not just its long-term zoning?

The Alameda Marina and Encinal Terminals story is a useful test case precisely because the two sites sit across a fence from each other and are frequently described with the same marketing language. A buyer who assumes "waterfront community" means the same thing on both sides of Clement Avenue is pricing in amenities that may not exist for another decade.

A Short FAQ

Is the Encinal Terminals housing project cancelled? No. The city's approved master plan for up to 589 homes remains in place. The 2026 interim use permit for electric vehicle storage runs for two years and does not replace the housing entitlement, though it does confirm vertical construction isn't imminent.

Does this affect resale values in the finished parts of Alameda Marina? It's a factor to weigh rather than a red flag. Buyers there already own delivered infrastructure, a working marina edge, and completed townhomes. What they don't yet have is the full neighborhood scale the original master plan envisioned, since Encinal Terminals sits just past the property line and remains unbuilt.

How do I check the real status of a specific parcel before making an offer? The City of Alameda's Planning Division maintains a public list of major projects with current status, and individual permit files are searchable through the city's Legistar system. For anyone comparing East End listings against promised future amenities, that record is more reliable than a marketing rendering.

Understanding which promises in a listing are already built and which are still paperwork takes local familiarity with how Alameda's approval process actually moves, not just what the site plan shows. If you're weighing a home along this corridor, or anywhere else in the East End, Friedrich Homes Group can walk through the permit history parcel by parcel before you write an offer.