If you want to see how diverse the Bay Area’s new housing can be in 2021, there’s no better place to start than at Delta Coves.
In a region that increasingly emphasizes dense housing along centrally located mass transit, the project is nestled against the microscopic downtown of Bethel Island, a happily remote piece of Contra Costa County that is as close to Sacramento as it is to San Francisco. The island has no bus stop, but each of the newcomer’s 494 homesites comes with a dock along the shore of a 145-acre lagoon.
And if a project like this sounds like something from another time, there’s a reason. Delta Coves was approved by the county’s Board of Supervisors in … 1976.
“It was a little terrifying to step in,” admitted Nick Taratsas, executive vice president of DMB Development, which took over the oft-stalled project in 2017. “But everyone realized something like this wasn’t likely to be permitted again in our lifetimes.”
The project has seemed cursed since it was proposed in 1973, and not just by the gusty Delta winds that pound an island with 2,000 residents that is connected to the mainland by a single two-lane bridge. The first developer never recovered from a nine-year lawsuit with the county that he eventually won. Another developer revived the plans in the early 2000s, carved the huge lagoon, and lined it with shiny metal docks — which then sat vacant after the collapse of the project’s financier, Lehman Brothers, the financial giant whose demise triggered the 2008 recession.
After DMB was hired by yet another owner, construction began in earnest. The first batch of homes was ready at the end of 2019.
Bad timing.
“Things were getting going and then COVID-19 hit,” Taratsas recalled during a tour of Delta Coves earlier this month. “I thought, can this poor troubled project really take another torpedo?”
Now, though, 75 homes are built or under construction. Buyers have signed contracts for another 40. The Island Camp clubhouse complex features a large lap pool, two fire pits, and an electric Duffy boat that was converted into an onshore bar. Houses start at $800,000, dock included, and there’s a “community ambassador” on staff.
As for the 32 current homeowners, around half are full-time residents.
Paul Kuroda/Special to The Chronicle
The first to arrive, moving from San Bruno in November 2019, were Terry Chew and his wife.
“I had heard it might be coming years ago, and I’ve always dreamed of having waterfront property,” Chew said. A retired first responder, he fished the Delta with his father as a child.
As a San Francisco native, any problem with temperatures that last week reached 108 degrees?
“If it’s really hot, you just jump into the water,” Chew said.
Another convert is John Sandhu, who owns a logistics company in Hayward with his wife, Joti. The dock was not the lure — they didn’t own a boat — but they wanted to be near the water and reasonably close to Joti’s parents in Livermore.
Driving east to see the models, exiting Highway 4 to navigate neighboring Oakley’s patchwork of orchards and subdivisions, John Sandhu admits his first reaction was, “Wow, it’s farther out than I thought.”
But the couple liked their destination, moved in October 2020, and now own a boat. They visit the Hayward office once a week. When they feel like a nice dinner out — “being so far away from any real city was concerning to me,” John Sandhu admitted — downtown Walnut Creek is 45 minutes away.
Chew stays closer to home. “We’re discovering there are a lot of places to reach on the water,” he said. “The only thing that would make this place better is if you could pick it up and drop it into Hawaii.”
Chew is such a fan, in fact, that he and a friend will greet new neighbors not by knocking on their door but by pulling up in the back.
“We’ll jump on my boat, bring beer and a bottle of whiskey, and head to their dock,” Chew said. “Tell them, ‘Have a beer, have a shot, welcome to the neighborhood!’”
He isn’t the only gregarious resident.
“The water attracts personalities,” John Sandhu said. “These people are living their lives at the moment. If you see somebody having a party, you just go in.”
Paul Kuroda/Special to The Chronicle
“Lifestyle communities” such as these might be old news in Arizona, where DMB is based, but they’re nothing like the multistory housing projects that are the norm today in cities closer to the bay. Delta Coves’ centerpiece — the lagoon created by breaching Bethel Island’s levee — was an out-of-favor notion by the 1980s, when Contra Costa officials tried to revoke the developer’s approvals and prompted the lawsuit that the county eventually lost in 1989.
After the project came back to life in 2003, many Bethel Island residents tried again to stop it. But the legal decision left the county no wriggle room.
Now that Delta Coves is becoming a reality, the controversies have receded.
“Most people were scared about the breach of the levee, but it was well done,” said Jamie Bolt. She runs Bethel Harbor, a marina on the island. “Most of the residents seem older and really nice, and the houses are beautiful. It’s good for the island.”
For Tracy Venable, whose family owns the Sugar Barge marina and restaurant near Delta Coves, there’s a palpable relief in seeing construction workers come and go each weekday.
“We’ve been waiting for this since we bought our place” in 1995, Venable said. “We’d see things revving up and get so excited, and then everything would fall apart.”
Back in 2019, Taratsas paused while showing off the project during construction to describe his model buyer: Kid Rock but a little older, with a wife and young kids.
Has that worked out? The developer shrugged.
“They’re a bit more upscale, not so much the cut-off ways,” Taratsas said. “Give them a year to settle in. They’ll be casualed-up soon enough.”
John King is The San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic. Email: jking@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @johnkingsfchron
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