Oakland votes to move ahead on turning police building into at least 600 homes

Oakland, a city that’s met only a fifth of its affordable housing goals, approved plans to seek a developer to turn its police headquarters into a mixed-use project with at least 600 units.

The City Council voted 8-0 on Tuesday to let developers submit plans for the 267,000-square-foot building, on a parcel bounded by Broadway and Sixth, Seventh and Washington streets. The structure is in “grave need” of capital improvements to meet building code standards, Vice Mayor Rebecca Kaplan, the resolution’s author, and Councilmember Carroll Fife, its co-sponsor, wrote in a Feb. 7 memo.

The city tried to upgrade the 60-year-old building in 2006 to meet seismic safety standards, but it couldn’t complete it due to budgetary constraints, the memo said. Several essential city services call it home, including the office of the inspector general, the office of the chief of police and the police department’s crime lab.

The property and the Alameda County courthouse and sheriff’s department buildings next door are among the last remaining large development sites near Oakland’s core, real estate consultant Lydia Tan told the San Francisco Business Times. Its transformation into housing would move the city closer to its regional housing target, which now stands at 22 percent, according to Fife’s and Kaplan’s Feb. 7 memo.

About a third of the units would be restricted to lower-income households. Ground-level commercial uses would also bolster the pedestrian corridor from Old Oakland into downtown.

The police services could be moved to a new multi departmental center at the site of the Oakland Coliseum, about six miles south of the property, according to the Business Times. The move hasn’t been proposed and would need the approval of the Oakland A’s, which owns half the stadium.

Kaplan’s resolution directed the city to work with the African American Sports and Entertainment Group to incorporate the project into the group’s larger vision to transform the city-owned part of the Coliseum site. The group has talked with the city about doing so and is open to the idea, partner Alan Dones told the Business Times.

Oakland isn’t the only big city looking at redeveloping a police facility. In Austin, the Texas capital, a recent design competition produced ideas about what could be done with its police headquarters should it be decommissioned, freeing up 2.5 acres of prime downtown real estate. One envisioned five floors of market-rate offices, two floors of affordable housing and room for shops and restaurants. Another would have 266 multifamily units, more than 100 of them affordable, almost 100,000 square feet of retail and offices and an events facility.

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San Francisco

Oakland City Council selects African-American Sports and Entertainment Group to develop Coliseum site