Alisa Shen

BART and Berkeley representatives discussed zoning drafts at the Ashby and North Berkeley BART stations and community concerns during a community workshop Saturday.

After five years of community planning and more than three months of discussion, a final recommendation on the Adeline Corridor will be made to the Berkeley Planning Commission in September.

By the time Richie Smith was 13, she was used to being told to enter through the back door of a restaurant. So when her family moved from Oklahoma to South Berkeley in 1949, Smith was amazed by the vibrant Black community she found.

On Saturday, Berkeley city officials held their most recent public workshop to discuss community members’ visions for a newly developed Adeline Corridor neighborhood.

Pasting pictures of bikes and buses onto printouts of city streets, community members began imagining the potential future of the Adeline Corridor — a historically low-income area set to undergo a number of city revitalization efforts in the face of growing market pressures — on Saturday.

South Berkeley residents are mobilizing around a city project to revitalize their neighborhood, which some worry could spell displacement and proliferate patterns of gentrification seen across the Bay Area.