490 40th Street Oakland

Plans to convert the former Temescal Safeway and A&F auto parts store at 490 40th Street in Oakland into 19 live-work lofts have been drafted and submitted to the city’s Planning Department for review.

And if approved, the proposed plans for the site, which is a block from the MacArthur BART station, would include building a new three-story commercial structure on the parcel’s parking lot fronting 40th Street with space for six different businesses.

We’ll keep you posted and plugged-in as the plans for the site progress.

10 thoughts on “Proposed East Bay Live-Work Lofts on Aisle Five”
  1. this site should be 15-20 stories being a block from macarthur station and the macarthur transit village, which I believe will have at least 1 20 story mid rise. No reason this should not be denser in this area.

    1. 20 stories? that’s taller than the hospital down the road. no thanks. 7 stories – so you can build it out of 2 levels concrete and 5 levels wood framing to keep it economical – that’s a much more reasonable demand.

      1. Agreed. Love how the peanut gallery screams “WHY NOT BUILD A 15 STORY TOWER!!!!” while completely failing to understand the underlying economics of a particular site & location.

    2. You seem to be believing incorrectly, though it’s possible the project has changed in scope (many of the sites describing it use phrases like “TO BE BUILT IN 2013” so I won’t vouch for their accuracy)

      P.S. I don’t think anyone outside of NYC, Hong Kong or, maybe, Dubai would call a 20 storey building “mid rise”…certainly it’s not an Oaklander’s POV.

      1. I read that and other links and I dont see it, but I swear I saw something a while back that said there was going to be a 20ish story building in this plan, but maybe I’m mixed up, or they dropped that idea out of the plan at some point.

        I still think it makes sense to have a couple or handful of 20ish story buildings at that area (regardless of what you want to call them, its just semantics)….you have the mcarthur maze / 980/580/24 interchange, you have the Broadway/Valdez corridor that will start building upward in that same general height range, and you have a major transit station right there, and two major streets, and its very central and undeveloped!. It all makes sense.

        I know that area very well. The freeway interchange alone will offset the size of a few towers, but really this should be zoned up due to the very rich transit and centrality.

        Regarding the construction cost comments….I thought you could build wood / cement up to 9 stories??? Regardless of that, thinking of the way downtown density is moving up broadway and telegraph, i dont understand how 20 stores inst obvious.

  2. The taller building proposed for the transit village needs a zoning variance, I think, and may or may not happen. (But then I don’t believe anything at the transit village until I see it built.) And a tall proposal here would probably suffer death by a thousand shadow studies. But 19 units? That’s just ridiculous. The site’s a huge waste of space now and this level of underbuilding would make a huge waste of space later, too. The Planning Department should throw it back and demand way more density. It’s not like Lynette Gibson McElhaney lives next door.

  3. is this project for a 3 story commercial structure (fronting 40th) PLUS 19 units (presume ably in the rear)? because in that case, it doesn’t seem all that underbuilt. i definitely support commercial spaces at this major intersection, which squeezes the amount of space available for units.

  4. Oakland Lover, you’re correct – there is a proposal (however uncertain) to upzone the transit village parcel immediately north of the parking garage (and not fronting 40th) to allow a much taller building – this was a Dan Kalb idea, maybe; I heard him talk about it very sketchily a year or so ago at a community meeting, and saw some draft proposals at another meeting at Beebe Memorial a month or two ago. The usual panicked and change-averse residents were in attendance freaking out (about shadows on the freeway) but were pleasantly outnumbered by mostly young YIMBY’s. It would be a great place for an Oakland-level high rise. (I think it was in the 200-250 height range, don’t know how many stories.)

  5. I’ve always thought the autodealer building would make a great Trader Joes… The rest of the lot could be parking with housing above. 3-6 stories above street level parking perhaps. Definitely not a high rise (10 stories for a Bay Area, 30+ for rest of the World) as that should be reserved for the former subgrade parking lot near MacArthur Bart. And why not? Hwy 24 overpass at points is already almost 10+ stories at points…

    1. No way they put a grocery store there with much more affluent Rockridge having one only 15 blocks up.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *