Lafayette Is Zoning for Thousands of New Homes. Here's How Slowly They Actually Arrive

Celia's Mexican Restaurant closed on Mt. Diablo Boulevard in 2015 to make way for housing. Lennar had first proposed a smaller 47-unit townhouse plan for the site in 2013. City and community feedback led to a 66-unit mixed-use design, and the Planning Commission and City Council approved it by 2016. As Bay Area Telegraph reported, construction started years after approval. The work then ran through 2023 and into 2024, slowed by pandemic-era supply chain problems and the complexity of the project. The construction fences came down in late 2025.

In April 2026 the City of Lafayette announced that The Brant was complete. It has 66 for-sale condominiums at 3676 Mt. Diablo Boulevard, ten of them below market rate, above ground-floor space now leased to Hollie's Homegrown and Western Flyer Brewing. About thirteen years passed from the first proposal to completion.

Lafayette is now weighing changes that would allow more downtown housing. If you're comparing Lamorinda towns, The Brant's timeline matters more than the zoning map. New homes in downtown Lafayette come in small batches, several years apart, and each project runs on its own clock. Planned capacity tells you very little about what you can buy in 2027 or 2028.

The gap between capacity and permits

Under its 6th Cycle Housing Element, which runs from January 2023 to January 2031, Lafayette must plan for 2,114 new homes. That target is the city's Regional Housing Needs Allocation, or RHNA. In its 2025 Annual Element Progress Report to the state, the city counted 202 units permitted to date, leaving 1,912 still to go.

Market-rate housing is behind too. Of the 845 above-moderate homes, the category that covers most market-rate housing, 93 have been permitted. That leaves 752. Very low-income homes stand at 27 of 599, low-income at 12 of 344, and moderate-income at 70 of 326.

Permits come before completed homes, and the gap between the two can be years. So 202 permits is an upper limit on what might come next, not a count of homes ready to buy. To see what is actually arriving, look at the projects one at a time.

Five downtown projects, five different timelines

The two finished projects added 86 for-sale homes in the same month. The next batch is Oak Hill. Lamorinda Weekly reported that Oak Hill is a seven-story building with 74 market-rate and 11 below-market-rate homes, targeted for completion in summer 2028. In a June 25 report, Bay Area Telegraph said no prices had been announced and that sales were expected to begin during construction. Its September 17 follow-up described construction as underway and did not mention pricing.

So downtown Lafayette's new condo supply arrives in uneven bursts: 86 homes in spring 2026, possibly none in 2027, then 85 in 2028.

An approval doesn't lock in the building

The project at 3458 Mt. Diablo Boulevard shows that even an approved building can change before construction starts. The developer, OUTDO Lafayette LLC, filed a preliminary application under Senate Bill 330 in April 2025. It followed with a State Density Bonus application in July 2025 for a six-story building with 30 condominiums.

The review that followed, according to the October 5 staff report, went like this:

1. On February 9, 2026, the Design Review Commission recommended denial. It cited concerns about waivers, setbacks, building height, massing, and fit with the area's semi-rural character.
2. On March 2, the Planning Commission recommended that the City Council approve the project.
3. On March 23, the City Council approved it, including the State Density Bonus concession and waiver requests. The approval described the project as having 31 for-sale units.
4. In August, the developer proposed changes it described as "Technical and Building code, Fire Life-Safety, Financial and Market Driven Revisions, and Livability and Amenity Improvements."

The revised plan is a seven-story building, 71 feet tall, with 30 for-sale homes, 56 on-site parking spaces, and one fewer commercial space. The added height comes from reworking the unit layouts, including split-level homes across the sixth and seventh floors. The Planning Commission voted 6–0 on October 5 to recommend approval. The City Council makes the final decision.

Here a fully approved project went back through hearings because "financial and market driven" factors changed after approval, and the redesign has one fewer home.

The Terraces: won in court, still waiting on grading

The Terraces of Lafayette is the largest project on the list and the oldest dispute. A citizens group sued to overturn the city's approval in 2020. The Superior Court and the Court of Appeal both upheld the approval, and on March 15, 2023, the California Supreme Court declined to review the case. That cleared O'Brien Land Company to build.

According to the City's project page, construction drawings went to plan check in 2024 and are still under review, and the developer expects mass grading to begin in 2027. In June, the City Council voted 3–1 to uphold a parcel map merging ten parcels into one. According to the meeting minutes, the map made no changes to the approved design, and at that point only the initial grading permit had been issued. Three years after the last court ruling, the project's 315 homes are still a few steps from grading, and all of them will be rentals.

The upzoning that would add capacity

The upzoning goes back to a settlement earlier this year. In June 2026, Lafayette settled a lawsuit from the Housing Action Coalition, which had alleged that the city's Housing Element did not comply with state housing element law. The city agreed to consider upzoning about 130 acres and to pay $120,080 in attorney fees. The City's project page lists the main proposals:

• Raise the maximum density in the existing West End Commercial, East End Commercial, and Downtown Core designations from 60 to 65 homes per acre
• Create new 45-homes-per-acre districts along both sides of Mt. Diablo Boulevard
• Raise allowable building heights and set minimum densities
• Redesignate about two acres of the DeSilva South site for high-density multifamily housing, at up to 35 homes per acre

Contra Costa News reported that the Planning Commission was scheduled to take up the package on Monday, October 19, at the Lafayette Library and Learning Center. The City expects the City Council to consider it in November. If the Council adopts it, the city would have more room on paper. Based on the projects above, the first homes built under the new rules are likely years away.

What this means for a condo shopper

For scale, MLS data from the Contra Costa Association of REALTORS showed 40 Lafayette condo and townhome sales in the 12 months ending September 30, 2026. The median price was $1,272,500, down from $1,425,000 a year earlier, and the median time on market was 40 days. Detached homes over the same period sold in a median of 10 days. Those figures don't separate new-construction closings from resales. They do show that 86 new condos finishing in a single spring is a big addition for a segment that size.

Detached homes are a much larger market. The September 9 recorded-sales list in Lamorinda Weekly showed 16 Lafayette transactions, ranging from $1,250,000 to $4,800,000. None of the projects in the table adds a detached home.

In practice, if you want a new downtown condo near BART, your realistic options are resales at Blue Oak and The Brant now, Oak Hill when sales open, and 3458 Mt. Diablo if the Council approves the revised plan and construction starts. A buyer who waits for the upzoning to produce more choices is waiting on projects that haven't been proposed yet.

Quick answers

Does the upzoning add homes right away? No. It changes what owners may propose. Each building still has to go through applications, review, permits, and construction, and The Brant took about thirteen years from first proposal to completion.

When could Oak Hill homes be available? The developer is targeting completion in summer 2028. Earlier reporting said sales were expected to begin during construction, and no pricing had been announced in the reports from June and September.

Will The Terraces add for-sale homes? No. The project's 315 homes are rental apartments.

When to buy a downtown Lafayette condo now depends more on where each project stands than on what the zoning allows. If you're deciding between a resale today and a new unit in 2028, or wondering how a finished project nearby might affect your own sale, Gallegos Boaman Group follows each of these projects from hearing to opening. Give Us a Call Today.