You can't get a latte, a bouquet or a bag of chips inside Balboa Park BART station.
Retail, a basic revenue-generating component and rider amenity of modern transit systems around the world, has been absent from the station for three years and has been something of a struggle for BART to manage.
There are no plans to fill Balboa Park BART's sole vacant shop or permit new ones to be built. However, BART's elected Board of Directors wants retail in the mix.
The brutalist station, unique for its indoor-outdoor train platform, has not offered riders stellar retail over the years.
Pigeon-ridden, and rated 3.3/5 stars on Yelp, the station was close to getting a Peet’s Coffee & Tea. In 2007, a permit was issued to Terry Goggin, who set up shops at Montgomery, Embarcadero, Downtown Berkeley and Pittsburg/Bay Point stations. The former state assemblyman took investor money to expand to other stations, including Balboa Park, but financial troubles led to a federal grand jury indicting Goggin in 2017 on multiple counts of money laundering and fraud. He pleaded guilty the following year.
While the station's thousands of daily riders never could buy joe on the go, they did have a flower shop. But The Flower Shop, formerly Elegant Flowers, vacated the station's concourse in December 2023 over slow business. Unlike retail at other stations, the shop was in the paid area, behind a literal barrier to business.
"Given the low ridership levels, the business could not be profitable, so they decided to close after 10 years under that ownership," BART spokesperson Chris Filippi told The Ingleside Light. "We currently don't have plans to fill the retail space, as expanding retail has been on hold at BART post-pandemic."
The station once had a roach coach parked beside the K Ingleside track snaking between the station and the Curtis E. Green Light Rail Center. But now the closest thing to retail available is a free short story dispenser, and that's all that will be there for the foreseeable future.
"Given market conditions with Bay Area retail, and the impacts of remote work on transit ridership, BART has no immediate plans to advance a station retail program."
This reporter wrote an exposé on a questionable contract BART awarded to one company to control leasing retail at every station in the system. It went sideways.
Janice Li, who represents the station on BART's board of directors, said "[T]he board has been very vocal in pushing staff to activate our station retail spaces, and it's something I want to see, but I want to make sure it's sustainable for BART and the business."
Li also said BART staff will do some "clean-up and small-scale but impactful enhancement work" in the near future.
The station recently joined the modern age with free Wi-Fi. At least you can shop online with ease.
