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Oakland is trying again to build housing on a beleaguered, city-owned site by Lake Merritt, where dozens of homeless residents currently live in temporary tiny homes.
The city council voted unanimously Tuesday to move forward with two affordable apartment buildings at East 12th Street and 2nd Avenue. The move comes four months after councilmembers, fed up with years of construction delays, scrapped prior development plans for the site. Proponents cheered the step toward bringing badly needed low-income options to a region struggling with an intense affordable housing shortage.
“We are closer to a community vision of 100% affordable housing on both portions of the East 12th site, urgently needed in a working-class neighborhood that has experienced and continues to face the threat of intense displacement,” City Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas said in a news release.
More than 5,000 unhoused people live in Oakland — up nearly a quarter from 2019 — and numbers are up throughout Alameda County, as well as in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties. In Oakland’s East 12th Street neighborhood, nearly three-quarters of residents are people of color, and almost half of households in the area made less than $50,000 in 2019, according to Bas’ office, which has advocated to “use public land for public good.”
Council members on Tuesday voted to enter into an exclusive negotiating agreement with the East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation (EBALDC) to build 91 apartments for low-income residents on the East 12th Street site. They also voted to start working with Satellite Affordable Housing Associates (SAHA) on a second affordable apartment building at the same location.
The property, known as the “East 12th Street remainder” parcel, has a long and controversial history. It was created in 2013 when the street was realigned, after which developer UrbanCore bought the land to build market-rate housing. The sale was scrapped in 2015 under the state’s Surplus Land Act, which requires cities to prioritize building affordable housing on public land. UrbanCore then partnered with EBALDC and came back with a new proposal for a two-tower, 360-unit project, of which 30% of the apartments would be affordable.
The city approved the plan, but critics continued to object to the construction of any market-rate housing on city land. And the project languished as the developers struggled to fund it. After granting five extensions, the city council in March declined to grant a sixth, killing the project.
The development never broke ground, and instead turned into a homeless encampment as the number of unhoused people living in Oakland surged. In November, the city opened a tiny home village on the East 12th Street site, where about 80 people live in small, pre-fabricated units while awaiting permanent housing.
The units, which have electricity but no plumbing, were always intended to be temporary, and residents will be forced out when construction starts. The tiny homes already have faced multiple hurdles since opening, including a fire that burned several units, disruptions from protesters, and a leadership shakeup that ousted one of the nonprofits helping to run the site.
Both affordable housing projects proposed for the East 12th Street site are in very early phases, particularly the one by Satellite Affordable Housing Associates project, which is just starting discussions with the city. It’s too soon to know how many units the building will have, how affordable the units will be, how much it will cost or when it will be completed, said SAHA CEO Susan Friedland. But she’s sure the project will turn out differently than the ill-fated attempt that predated it.
“SAHA is confident that we can deliver an affordable housing project to the community,” Friedland said in an email, “as we have been successfully developing affordable housing in Oakland for almost 60 years and have a strong track record in utilizing all the different funding resources that we would be tapping for this project.”
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“EBALDC is excited to partner with the city to bring 91 new, 100% affordable homes to Parcel 1 at East 12th Street,” Andy Madeira, EBALDC executive director, said in a news release. “Today’s decision preserves millions of dollars in subsidy for affordable housing and transportation infrastructure improvements the state previously committed to the city of Oakland, AC Transit, BART, and EBALDC.”
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