A $300,000 boulder, a $10 million loan, a 28 million-year-old landscape, seven years and one passionate Austrian.

The apartment complex at 801 Alma St., which opened in 2014, is one of a just a handful of multi-family developments that have been built near the downtown Caltrain station in recent years.

The Best Picture nominee Train Dreams features a rarity in Western fiction: a protagonist with little agency and even less interior life. Where most stories, especially American stories about men, the ...