Alameda poised to sell 89K sf warehouse at former naval air station

The City of Alameda is preparing to sell an 89,000-square-foot warehouse on a former naval air station on Alameda Point.

The East Bay island city is readying for sale the 3-acre site at 650 West Ranger Avenue, in the city’s adaptive reuse district, the San Francisco Business Times reported. An asking price was not disclosed.

The property sale is part of a new site-by-site approach to the city’s commercial buildings at the former Naval Air Station Alameda, selling some and leasing out others, to pay for infrastructure.

To sell Building 92, the city must approve a $831,470 payment for terminating its lease with the building occupant, Alameda Point Collective. The homelessness nonprofit signed a 59-year lease in 2010 for the warehouse building, now the site of the Alameda Food Bank.

In March, Alameda adopted the “site-by-site” policy to guide the commercial deals at the nearly 900-acre Alameda Point.

It opted to lease some properties to raise money for building maintenance, and sell others to pay for more than $700 million in infrastructure repairs needed at the former World War II-era base that closed in 1997. The infrastructure would support new businesses and residents.

Alameda will likely seek a minimum of $2 million per acre for properties it decides to sell, Lisa Maxwell, the city’s director of base reuse, told the Business Times last fall.

Given that calculation, the city’s Building 92 could seek $6 million – or $67 per square foot.

A consultant for the city said in March that Alameda should maximize its prices given the high cost of infrastructure work. 

The building sale would transfer an entire block within Alameda Point’s adaptive reuse district to private hands. It could also spur private investment at the former base, according to a city report, plus draw job-generating businesses.

Alameda, working with private developers, has helped usher in the base’s first construction of new homes. Alameda sold several commercial buildings in the reuse district before the case-by-case policy.

The city has cultivated a small but growing nucleus of commercial tenants, many of them in the aerospace industry. Some of those tenants, including Astra Space, have expressed interest in buying their facilities at Alameda Point, according to the Business Times.

— Dana Bartholomew