Oakland’s City Council has postponed their vote which was expected to approve an upscale 23-story residential building to rise on a city-owned parcel at the corner of East 12th Street and 2nd Avenue, overlooking Lake Merritt and its estuary.
As proposed by developer UrbanCore, the Lake Merritt Boulevard Apartments project would yield 298 units, ranging from studios to two-bedroom penthouses, with market-rate rents projected to average $3,000 per month.
And while the original development deal with the City didn’t originally include any below market rate units, UrbanCore has since agreed to make 30 of the units affordable as neighborhood opposition and fear that the development will lead to a rise in area rents and accelerate the gentrification of Oakland has grown.
The proposed development includes parking for 209 cars, a 2,000-square-foot café on the ground floor of the building, and landscaping improvements to the City-owned stormwater treatment basin (“park”) that’s adjacent to the development site as well.
If approved by the City Council, the East Lake development site, which is across from Oakland’s shuttered Convention Center which is slated to be redeveloped, will be sold to UrbanCore for $5.1 million and construction will take around two years to complete once the ground has been broken.
The next City Council meeting and tentative project vote is scheduled to occur in two weeks time.
Since when did “market rate” become an obscenity?
Since market rate for an apartment around here hit 100% of income for your lower middle class types.
Approve it. One building does not a neighborhood make or break.
There is a saying, a long night yield many unpleasant dreams.
Approve it. Oakland needs more of a middle class – it has more than its share of the Regions poor public housing people.
Please write your council member and our mayor showing support of this market rate project. Oakland needs the income from the sale and the perpetual property tax income. The yearly property tax alone could pay for seven OUSD teachers… every year!
We already have too many housing projects in Oakland paying $0 in property tax even though those projects consume a lot of our city’s resources. We can’t keep going down this path -we’ll go bankrupt. We need to counteract the myopic affordable housing advocates. They lie and bully because that’s what they’ve learned works in Oakland.
The truth is there are over 100 single family homes on the market in Oakland that are affordable to any family with two working class incomes. The truth is you can still easily rent a two bedroom in Oakland for under $1700.month. Stop the BS. Stop the bullying. Don’t let this parcel be given away and then cost our city every in lost revenue and spent resources. Clear minds need to prevail.
Matt, I’m not sure you can rent 2 bedroom’s in Oakland that’s decent for $1700. I just rented my 2/1 unit in North Oakland for $2515. Gone after 1 showing with 14 applications. Probably could have got $200 more truth be told…
Willow, you’re not looking in one of Oakland’s affordable neighborhoods.
You don’t understand. Everyone should be subsidized to be able to live in Piedmont. Otherwise, no new construction!! Ever!
seems like a good project, other than the exceptionally banal design.
The welfare crowd is committed to failure. They don’t want to live near successful people, they want the standards to be lowered, not raised. These people are professional victims and couldn’t stomach watching their neighbors leave for work early in the morning and return late in the evening to their semi-luxury building. If you got rid of all of the lazy, envious people in Oakland, there’d be about 30,000 very productive people left.
That’s one heck of a troll post. Over 121,000 Oaklanders have a bachelors, which is a higher percentage than the state average.
UPDATE: Land Deal For Controversial Oakland Tower Approved