This is when Lee-Egan’s story breaks with the entirety of the California past. Ever since the Gold Rush, an endless stream of newcomers have been settling down in this beautiful place, falling in love with it and dreaming about ways to keep out the newcomers behind them. So, while the California dream has long included social change — love the people you love and “In this house we believe” — its physical-world corollary has been more about getting your own little piece of paradise, then fighting for the rest of your life against anything and anyone that might change it. But Lee-Egan wasn’t like that at all; because when Lee-Egan, progressive young homeowning Berkeley mother, read that poster, she thought something more like: Wow, apartments. That would be so great.

Of course, another way of looking at Lee-Egan is that she is just like my own mother in 1970, confident about what ails the world and determined to live by her values. Lee-Egan helped start East Bay for Everyone, the YIMBY group that eventually tweeted the infamous picture of a 31-story tower at North Berkeley BART — the very same one that terrified my mother’s neighbors. Egan even avoids Monterey Market, she told me, because without those proposed bike lanes, she can’t get there safely with her kids riding in the front of her electric cargo bike. That anecdote made my mother cry when I told it to her later on — for real, actual tears — seemingly because it confirmed the arrival of a bewildering new generation, pushing for BART apartments and bike lanes, as if they cared not a lick about the Berkeley that we know and love.

And yet, in still another parallel to my mother, Lee-Egan was likewise riding a wave of change aligned with her politics. Those new laws are forcing every California community to follow through on planning for more housing, and while many communities are dragging their feet, Berkeley has recently granted a planning permit for a 25-story apartment building downtown — dwarfing the city’s current tallest high-rise. Berkeley also appears on track to approve two more towers of comparable size and another that, at 28 stories, will be taller than the university’s famous campanile, which, at 307 feet, has defined the city’s skyline for more than a century. All that new construction was on people’s minds, of course, at the meet-and-greet at North Berkeley BART. People my folks’ age, with faint traces of once-hippie identities still visible around their fuzzy, gray-haired edges, gathered facing a man named Jonathan Stern from BRIDGE Housing, one of the nation’s largest nonprofit developers of affordable housing and the lead on the BART project.

Stern lives in Berkeley and dressed diplomatically for the occasion in a red Berkeley High School hoodie. He has also done this countless times, including at other BART stations. Stern reassured everyone that none of the current design plans include buildings taller than eight stories and that all the plans include at least some permanent supportive housing for the formerly homeless, as well as subsidized housing for people making less than $100,000 a year. The rest would be market rate — which could mean $6,000 a month, or even more, for a two-bedroom.