Encinal Tower scoping session tonight

Remember the tallest building in Oakland? Well, it’s moving through the CEQA process right now, and will have its EIR scoping session at tonight’s Planning Commission meeting (PDF). This is where you go and tell them what issues you want studied in the Environmental Impact Report. If you can’t make it to the meeting, you have until November 17 to submit comments in writing.

In case you missed it the first time around, here’s a brief project description from the staff report (PDF): Read more

Delay everything a year and hope it gets better

My heart sank when I read yesterday that the Oak Knoll project is now on hold. Read more

City Council says no to Ada Chan

Last night, the Oakland City Council rejected Mayor Ron Dellums’s nomination of Ada Chan to fill the seat left vacant by Suzie Lee on the Oakland Planning Commission by a vote of 3-4-1 (Y: Quan, Brunner, Nadel; N: De La Fuente, Kernighan, Reid, Chang; A: Brooks). Lee’s term expired on May 5th. Dellums did not bring a nomination for a replacement Commissioner to the City Council until July 1st (PDF). When it became clear that the Council was unlikely to confirm Ms. Chan that night, the Mayor withdrew the item.

Chan was back on the agenda last night, at the first post-recess Council meeting. Despite having had two and a half months for the Mayor and Ms. Chan to persuade those concerned about her suitability for the position, both declined to make any effort to do so, instead using the time to marshall strident support from union and affordable housing advocacy organizations while shutting out the business community. Read more

Things that annoy V Smoothe

There’s some stuff that I’ve been wanting to mention, but not worth writing an entire blog about. So enjoy this little round-up of stuff on my mind. Read more

Kaiser hospital at design review

So, after a somewhat longer than originally intended summer hiatus, I’m back at the Oakbook, with a report on the discussion of the new Kaiser hospital at Wednesday’s Planning Commission meeting. You should click through and read it, but if you’re too busy, the short version is that both the neighbors and the Commissioners hated the design presented (PDF), and Kaiser gets to come back for a do-over in mid-October.

Ann Mudge and Michael Colbruno got some pretty entertaining (and borderline cruel) digs in about the design (details here), to the point where I thought they may have gone a little overboard. I mean, I’m not in love with the design either, and I do think making Kaiser try again was the right call, but I don’t think it was nearly so awful as they seemed to. But I’m loathe to criticize the Commission for being too harsh, because on the whole, I think we need people in this town to be a whole lot more critical, not less.

Anyway, I was talking to an acquaintance yesterday about the meeting, and his assessment was that the building was just not that bad and that the Planning Commission was being ridiculous. I’m on their side on this one. The way I see it, I’m just happy that we get to build the it at all. If the neighbors are willing to take the damn thing and not fight it tooth and nail like it seems we have to with every other damn project (to be fair, that part did happen, but it’s over now), then the least we can in exchange is ask that the building be as pretty as possible.

I doubt I’ll ever like it all that much (I’ve already discussed how I feel about this particular form), but hopefully Kaiser will come back with something a little more exciting to look at than what they have now, which really doesn’t have all that much going for it beyond the fact that it’s an improvement over the huge concrete wall on the current hospital.

Unlike certain other projects, this is a case where the building is legitimately really big for the neighborhood, and so it seems fair to me to ask Kaiser to make every reasonable effort (demanding that the hospital not have signs, BTW, falls into the category of an unreasonable request) to put together a building that at least minimizes (to whatever extent that’s possible) the visual impact on the surrounding area. I do think that Kaiser should get at least some minor props for producing a much less hideous building this time around than they brought to the Design Review Committee in May.

Anyway, renderings below. What do you guys think? Read more

An alternative CBD zoning update

So the Planning Commission’s Zoning Update Committee (ZUC) will meet today to discuss again the zoning update for the Central Business District (CBD). I’ve written about the zoning update process at length already, and at this point, I’m kind of bored with it all. I’m tired of writing the same things about how this plan is just terrible in every way. It stifles architectural creativity. It does not take into account the demands or realities of the market. Looking at the rules about minimum lot sizes and maximum buildable lot areas, you have to seriously question whether anyone even took a walk around the CBD and looked at what land there is to develop before trying to write rules for it. Read more

Can you make laws about building heights when you don’t know how tall buildings are?

Planning staff seems to think so.

We went over this, already, of course, after a meeting way back in March about the proposed CBD height limits, where a handout (PDF!) was distributed to help illustrate for the audience what these height limits would mean. That is, what does a 300 foot tall building look like, a 200 foot tall building, and so on. The heights on the handout were off, not just a little, but by measures of as much as 170 feet!

Another handout listed existing building heights downtown (PDF!), and the numbers there were wildly off as well. Here’s the breakdown: Read more

Swig project scoping session report

So the Planning Commission had their scoping session on Swig’s proposal for two new buildings on 20th and Webster last night. The Commissioners didn’t have all that much to say - mostly they were all agog that nobody came to speak on the project. Other than that, they mostly limited their suggestions to aesthetic issues, saying they would want to see how the buildings interact with the broader skyline, and that they wanted to be sure the buildings were exciting. Here are the highlights from their comments.

Madeline Zayas-Mart:

We want something beautiful, elegant, we want to keep the competitive advantage of the city, and compete in terms of quality, not low cost.

Michael Colbruno:

My own personal concern is that we don’t build another just big ugly box. The one building’s beautiful and recognizes the curve of the Lake and I just want to make sure we don’t have a big stiff faceless International school building sitting there that does nothing for the skyline…make sure the building’s light and airy, and we don’t have a big, heavy building.

Doug Boxer:

I urge you, let’s make this a signature building.

Sandra Galvez was concerned about Swig relocating the gym in the current mall, and asked that the EIR consider the long-term health impacts of losing the gym.

I took screengrabs of the images from the presentation, which I’m posting below. Read more

The tallest building in Oakland

So tonight’s Planning Commission meeting (PDF!) will have an EIR scoping session for the Kaiser Center Project, which I could not be more excited about. The Swig Company, from San Francisco, owns the Kaiser Center and wants to demolish the commercial space behind it and replace it with the two tallest buildings in Oakland. Awesome! Bye-bye, Longs. Bye-bye, 24 Hour Fitness. Hello, high rises!

So this would basically be right behind the Kaiser Center (386 feet tall, BTW). Swig owns the Kaiser Center, as well as the adjacent garage and “mall.” If the project gets approved, the mall goes. In its place, we would get two new office towers. One would be 34 stories, or 436 feet. The other would be 42 stories, or 566 feet. I can’t remember ever being so excited about a development. 1.47 million square feet of Class A office space right here in downtown Oakland with Lake views. It gives me goosebumps! Read more

Planning Commissioners like Emerald Views

I missed most of the Design Review Committee meeting last night and all the public comment, but did get out of work early enough to catch what Madeleine Zayas-Mart and Suzie Lee had to say. C. Blake Hunstman, strangely, wasn’t there.

Anyway, they pretty much ignored the irrelevant questions in the staff report and it sounds like they’re both on board. Madeline Zayas-Mart talked about how the building would add vibrancy and safety to the neighborhood, and seemed to really like the design and appreciated what it would improve both the streetscape and the skyline. Suzie Lee was a little more pro-garden. She began her comments by saying that after 30 years of living in Oakland, she saw the garden for the very first time last month, and that she asked a bunch of friends and neighbors about it, and none of them had ever heard of it. But she did think that it was beautiful, and that the city made a huge mistake by not accepting the donation offer. She said that she supported the building (but possibly with a smaller footprint) only after any private fundraising efforts to preserve the garden are exhausted.

I just don’t get this talk of privately raising money for the garden at all. I mean - fine, if they can get the money to buy and maintain it, great. I would still prefer to see the site opened to the public, increasing the amount of open space in the neighborhood, and I would prefer to see the building there, but if they had the cash to keep the garden, I’d at least see the point in having that discussion. But we all know that there’s no way they’re raising $8 million to buy the thing, and they aren’t coming up with any land to swap - if either of these were an option, they would have produced them sometime in the 19 months they’re been trying to stop the development.

Emerald Views project goes to Design Review Committee today

So my attempt to not blog this week doesn’t seem to be going very well. There’s just too much going on!

So, in case anyone had any doubts on how anti-development idealogue Dr. No, aka Dan Lindheim, current Director of Oakland’s Community and Economic Development Agency, felt about the Emerald Views project, they can put them to bed now.

Normally a project would go to Design Review after the Environmental Impact Report is completed, but someone has decided that this project deserves preliminary review, except, of course, that the comments staff requests from the DRC aren’t really about design at all. Instead, the report requests the DRC provide comment on 5 subjects, 4 of which they really aren’t tasked with addressing.

Here’s the conclusion to the staff report (PDF!):

Staff recommends the DRC provide preliminary comments and direction on the design of the proposed project subject to the discussion above Specifically, staff wishes the DRC comment on:
1. The demolition of an A1+ historic resources and possible precedent setting implications.
2. The appropriateness of the site given the number of vacant lots.
3. Compatibility with the neighborhood in terms of height/scale and building design/materials.
4. Potential ability to make the required findings
5. Comments from the LPAB

Staff will return to the DRC after publication of the DEIR for final design review comments.

The report seems more focused on the “garden” than it is about the building that’s supposed to be reviewed and features a bizarro-world description of the one large public input meeting on the project.

We have a process to address to address the concerns listed above (except for “appropriateness of the site given the number of vacant lots” - WTF?), and that process, the EIR, is underway. This tone of the report strongly suggests to me that some would prefer we circumvent that process and just kill the project now, and I find that highly disturbing.

And since I know that bringing up Emerald Views and Schilling Gardens will inspire comments on the appropriateness of tall buildings near Lake Merritt, can I just point out one more time that Swig has submitted applications to build two commercial high rises just as close to the Lake as this project, immediately behind the Kaiser Center, one of which would be significantly taller that Emerald Views, and nobody is saying a damn thing about them.

CBD Zoning Update Update

So I’ve complained here plenty about the new downtown draft zoning chapter (PDF!) - the process has been flawed, as is the proposal itself. If you want the short version, you can check out my Novometro story from yesterday.

Anyway, since the last zoning update committee meeting, there has been one more public meeting about the proposal, organized by the Chinatown Chamber of Commerce. The meeting drew over 100 people, more than any previous meeting on the issue, and wholesale opposition to the proposed zoning was near unanimous. Nearly every speaker at yesterday’s meeting opposed to plan as well, and the Committee ended up asking staff to return with a new proposal that does not contain height limits. Frustratingly, they did not direct staff to hold more public meetings. I wasn’t able to attend the meeting, and my correspondent wasn’t in top form, so I don’t know if they want just the height limits gone, or all the bulk and intensity requirements, which, frankly, are the real problem here. People are very hung up on height, but the tower floorplate and length restrictions are much more dangerous.

I also find it disturbing that staff appears completely disconnected from what’s actually happening downtown. For example, Eric Angstadt, in response to repeated complaints about the downzoning of downtown, said several times that the draft zoning chapter is actually upzoning, and that the current zoning doesn’t actually allow the recently approved projects people keep referencing. Angstadt is wrong. The new Shorenstein building at 601 City Center, at 10.5 FAR and 378 feet, conforms perfectly to the C-51 zoning on its lot, as explained on page 4 of the design review staff report (PDF!).

Angstadt later said that people were making too big a deal of the height limits, that they’re higher than any existing downtown buildings, and that “Nobody’s going to build anything close to these height limits anytime soon.” I don’t know what his idea of close is, but, at only 27 feet below the maximum height proposed for Area 5, 601, which will be breaking ground soon, seems pretty close to me. Again, the real issue here is the tower floorplate restrictions. 601 exceeds the maximum tower floorplate size for Area 5, as does the existing building 555 12th Street. We want to build office space that will attract large, high quality employers to downtown. We have plenty of small spaces appropriate for non-profits and smaller businesses. What we don’t have enough of (although recently opened Center 21 helps) is the very large full floor spaces that bigger companies desire. People are always talking about how we need to bring jobs to Oakland - right now, the vogue is to talk about the need for industrial jobs. We need office jobs, too! To restrict construction of the most in demand space makes absolutely no sense if we’re serious about job creation and revitalizing our economy.

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