[Includes audio report]

Excerpt:

This month may be the moment of truth for six Bay Area communities. Each one is vying to be the new home of a high-profile national research center. But when it comes to development in the Bay Area, there are no easy answers.

Oakland, Alameda, and Berkeley, Emeryville, Albany, and Richmond are the six cities in the running for what you might call the 2012 Cadillac of Bay Area Development Projects: A new, second campus for the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Will Travis – who, until recently, headed the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, a state agency that regulates building around the bay – says, sure, big development projects happen all the time in the Bay Area. But Lawrence Berkeley labs is what he calls "a platinum level, marquee" project.