SFGate, San Francisco, CA 9/28/22
Hundreds of Bay Area residents to be displaced as SF-to-LA bullet train nears
FRESNO — In 2012, Brady Matoian was in his office in downtown Fresno when he got a bizarre call from a friend. Matoian’s business, OK Produce, appeared to be directly in the path of a new high-speed rail line that would run through the city’s center, the friend told him.
Matoian assumed his friend was pranking him, but when he looked up a map of the line’s proposed route, he saw it was no joke: The tracks were set to cut right through the heart of the building that had housed his family’s wholesale produce business for more than 50 years.
“We had 16 doors, and the high-speed rail line was going to go down door eight, so we’re talking dead center, like a field goal,” Matoian told SFGATE. “It wasn’t going to just clip the side or anything, it was going to go straight through.”
The building that housed OK Produce was one of several hundred structures in California’s Central Valley that the state purchased and demolished to make way for the 500-mile high-speed rail system that may one day connect Los Angeles to San Francisco. . . .
