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OAKLAND — On any given day, International Boulevard teems with life. At its intersection with 53rd Avenue, street vendors hawk horchata and jugo fresco out of silver drums sitting in the back of a pickup truck.

Twenty blocks south, a steady stream of customers queues at Maria’s Market & Deli, where the proprietress, Maria Mohamed, seems to know every customer by name. And back up north at Clinton Park, a group of retirees huddles around a Xiangqi, or Chinese chess board, laughing and joking at each other’s plays.

It’s a street as diverse as it is long, with a rich history as a key commercial corridor connecting Oakland and Fremont, but also one that has struggled with pockets of high unemployment, blight and crime. Now it’s poised for a dramatic transformation.

In December, AC Transit is expected to begin heavy construction on a massive $204 million project to bring a different kind of bus system to the strip. More similar to a light rail than a bus, the rapid transit system will come roughly every seven minutes, traversing a 9.5-mile route from the San Leandro BART station to 20th Street and Broadway in Oakland.

With elevated platforms and more comfortable stations, its own travel lane and forward-facing cameras to ticket motorists who block its path, the bus rapid transit (BRT) will feel a lot different from a typical AC Transit bus, said Joël Ramos, the transportation policy director for TransForm, a transportation advocacy nonprofit.

“It’s hard to understand and imagine until you see it,” Ramos said. “But it’s going to be really transformative.”

Aside from the obvious benefits — faster transportation, improved air quality and lower greenhouse gas emissions from cars — city and transit planners also hope the system will serve as a catalyst, spurring growth in rundown blocks that never recovered from the crack cocaine epidemic, or those plagued by prostitution and crime.

The sleek buses will start their journey at the site of a massive new tech campus under construction at the San Leandro BART station, ferrying students, workers and visitors through nine distinct neighborhoods, including some of Oakland’s lowest-income communities, before terminating at Uber’s future headquarters in the city’s booming downtown.

But some residents, community advocates and business owners fear the same economic development will only accelerate the displacement of Oakland and San Leandro’s most vulnerable residents and small businesses as rents rise throughout the region.

Similar bus systems have been popping up in cities across the country over the past decade. The Institute for Transportation and Development Policy in 2013 found that BRT systems, which are roughly one-fourth the cost of a typical light-rail line, have generated hundreds of millions — and in many cases, billions — of dollars in real estate developments along corridors where the improvements were put in place.

The fear of displacement is compelling evidence of the sheer magnitude of the housing crisis gripping not just Oakland but the entire Bay Area, said Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf.

“There is something really, really wrong when you have people who are afraid of improved bus service — that it is going to gentrify their neighborhood and displace them,” she said.

The question, then, is not whether International Boulevard is poised for change but who will benefit?

East 14th Street — as the boulevard was known until the city of Oakland changed the name of its portion in 1996 — was originally developed in 1893 as a streetcar line. It was the first in the East Bay to carry freight, helping knit together previously dispersed farming communities, said Bay Area historian Dennis Evanosky.

The streetcars connected pockets of small retail districts from Oakland to Hayward, helping to launch a real estate boom along the line and contributing to Fruitvale’s designation as Oakland’s “second downtown” by the 1920s, Evanosky said. The remnants of that era can still be seen in the ornate facades of stately buildings dotting the district, or in the well-kept Victorians in the San Antonio neighborhood.

By the 1960s, however, America’s love affair with the automobile and efforts by gas and tire companies sounded the death knell for the East Bay’s streetcars. AC Transit took over the system in 1959, replacing many of the trolley lines with buses as the East Bay’s streetcar system disappeared.

In many ways, Evanosky said, the bus rapid transit system is a return to the corridor’s origin as a streetcar line. But it remains to be seen whether the BRT system in the East Bay will generate the same developer interest as the boom in early 1900s.

Cleveland installed a similar system along a 9.2-mile corridor that linked major job centers with some of its most blighted downtown neighborhoods, and an initial $200 million investment yielded some $6.3 billion in related real estate development during its first six years of operation.

Jason Hellendrung, a principal at the architecture and land-use planning firm Sasaki Associates, Inc., who helped design the route, said the system was the catalyst for a transformation he called “extraordinary.”

There aren’t any other BRT systems in the Bay Area, though two are under construction in San Jose and San Francisco, albeit with some major differences in San Jose’s case.

Unlike AC Transit’s BRT system, the 7-mile Alum Rock line, which will connect the Eastridge Transit Center to downtown San Jose, has dedicated BRT lanes in just 14 percent of the route, compared with 80 percent in AC Transit’s case.

When buses are out of the way of traffic, they become a much more attractive alternative to the automobile, Ramos said, a factor that grows in importance as development brings more people and jobs to the region. It was also one of the key motivations for AC Transit to explore BRT in the first place, said Chris Peeples, president of AC Transit’s governing board.

In the Bay Area, the closest working example to the East Bay BRT system is MUNI’s T-Third line, which extends from downtown San Francisco into Bayview and Hunters Point, two of the city’s lowest-income neighborhoods with some of its highest crime rates.

Ridership has soared since the light-rail line opened to the public in 2007, from 13,000 passengers in its first year to 42,000 passengers last year, said Paul Rose, spokesman for the SFMTA, though some of those trips can likely be attributed to fans attending Giants games at AT&T Park, which has a station.

At the same time, storefront vacancy rates have steadily been decreasing and revenues from sales taxes are up, says Joaquin Torres, deputy director of San Francisco’s Office of Workforce and Economic Development. Many longtime residents say the extended transit line has made it easier to travel downtown, but residents have also seen their neighbors cash out — or get squeezed out — as property values rise.

“That’s was the first step,” Bayview resident Michael Sturdivant said of the T-Third. “That was when you started seeing all this stuff change.”

But it’s unclear how much the T-Third actually contributed to the changes and how much is the result of the tech boom or south of Market developments planned before it opened, said Sheri Powers, the director of financial empowerment and economic development for the San Francisco Housing Development Corporation.

Powers, who used to work for the Unity Council in Oakland’s Fruitvale, said she has her doubts whether a new bus system could really entice Montclairians to visit a store at 83rd and International.

UC Berkeley professor Daniel Rodriguez, an expert on BRT lines around the world, tempered expectations of an economic boom. The systems can accelerate growth in places already poised for change but don’t necessarily induce it in areas that developers would otherwise overlook, he said.

“If the investment becomes a great alternative for people to use, then it becomes a much stronger magnet for economic development,” Rodriguez said.

While the end goal may be redeveloping the corridor, Al Auletta, a program manager for Oakland’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, said his focus is making sure small businesses can weather the two-year construction that will temporarily close parts of the street. The Oakland City Council and officials at AC Transit have collectively set aside $4 million in assistance for businesses impacted by construction and the implementation of the new bus system.

But some business owners say the loss of parking — roughly 10 percent of on-street spaces to make room for new stations — will entice a different kind of clientele while driving old customers away.

Co-owner Flaviano Soriano of El Palacio de Novias, a bridal shop in the Fruitvale for 16 years, said customers come from far and wide to shop for formal gowns and party wares in the predominantly Latino commercial district. Although AC Transit plans to mitigate some of the lost parking by installing a 21-space lot at 35th Avenue, the business is still thinking of relocating.

“We’re sad, in truth, because of all the years we’ve been here,” Soriano said. “(The BRT) is going to serve a different type of person, I imagine, not the people in this area.”