Construction crews started work soon after building permits were issued for the five-story residential development at 685 9th Street in Downtown Oakland, Alameda County. The infill is replacing a vacant commercial structure and parking with 117 homes, including some affordable housing. Riaz Capital is the property owner.
685 9th Street mural corner, rendering by LDP Architecture
685 9th Street Elevations via Levy Design Partners
The 65-foot tall structure will yield 66,700 square feet. Parking for 46 bicycles and no vehicles will be included, promoting public transit in the area. Residents are less than ten minutes away from the 12th Street Oakland BART station on foot and fifteen minutes away from the Oakland ferry terminal, connecting with Alameda, San Francisco, and South San Francisco. Of the 117 new homes to be built, 82 will be priced at market rate, and 35 will be affordable housing.
Levy Design Partners is the design architect, with CFLA as the landscape architect. The facade materials include cement plaster, stone, and composite panels. LDP writes that the design “takes advantage of the angular shape of the site and is a modern rendition of the classical base, middle and top. The building base is designed to be a stone or tile material, and the top of the building is elevated with a parapet.”
685 9th Street aerial perspective outlined, image via Google Satellite
The property is located between 8th and 9th Street along Castro Street. Residents will also be close to I-980, two blocks from Lafayette Square and a nine-minute block from the 12th Street BART Station.
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Nice plan for the apts. Please include security for tenants in your plans. I don’t go out at night in my ‘hood, the Foothill/Fruitvale area. It is not safe. I wouldn’t walk from the BART 12th St. station to these apts. at night, not by myself.
Spot the typo…
The property is located between 8th and 9th Street along Castro Street. Residents will also be close to I-980, two blocks from Lafayette Square and a nine-minute block from the 12th Street BART Station.
117 units and zero parking for cars?! I will bet that at least half of those new residents will be parking on the street making the neighborhood even more congested. This will be good for car burglars, so there is a bright side.
Since there is no parking for cars, it will bring the market rate units less desirable and so they will be more affordable. It is not the worst area but I would need a place with parking. I would pay $50 – $150K extra for a unit with parking.
I like the design. It is a little different from what they are building today and as they said designed for the shape of the parcel.
I get the “…base, middle…” but there is absolutely no “top”….. just an extension of the “middle”…… and the “base” is far from “classical”. Such BS.
Great that more housing is being created near public transit.
This is a pretty decent project design-wise, but I am very excited for the location. I feel that this side of Downtown Oakland is a great spot for more dense housing, and there are so many empty lots/surface parking lots in the area. More housing here will really help liven up Old Oakland!
As a resident on this block, I am very unhappy about this project not including parking. It is already almost impossible to park here with street cleaning every other side of the street, every single night. There are only 6 spots per-night on my block as it is; I can’t imagine adding 100/200 more cars into the mix…it’s going to be a nightmare. And it’s not close enough to public transportation for people to be safe. It’s not a safe neighborhood at night.
We are trying to decide whether we will stay in the neighborhood or not because it will become impossible to park.
Other than that, I welcome more housing, with a drizzle of affordable housing… Of course, that is a good thing. It’s just very shortsighted to not consider parking in this super congested, almost impossible to park neighborhood.
As somebody who lives in this neighborhood, I feel like it’s such a piece of white move on the development groups part by not including Parkin or considering the parking congestion that will take place with all these units. Parking in out neighborhood is SCARCE, and the city doesn’t give our particular block parking stickers for 2hr parking zones.
I knew I smelled something horrible coming once I saw them taking down the old warehouse that used to stand there..
Another deli per stack on low budget, uninspired box studios as dense as they can to make some money and disguise it as a public service.
I’d like to point out that of the 6 comments on here, 3 of them are complaints about the same issue–the absurd exemption of a minimum parking requirement for these high-density multi-family development projects. I will be the 4th person to complain about this. Let me also add that removing these parking requirements HAS NEVER put downward pressure on the rents these investors plan to charge! This is California folks–our lives and our paychecks are reliant on our cars! You can survive without a car using public transit or a bike sure, if you are elderly, disabled or unemployed. But if you have a job, or have children, or have a life outside of your work, you need a place on site where you live to safely park your car! I’m not a civil engineer but I do know that with 100 new dwelling units will come 100 additional vehicles to the traffic patterns in and around the new building. You get more emissions, more pollution, more congestion and more hazards. We need MORE parking, not less! Quit pandering and believing what these developers keep feeding you! The reality is that in 2010 at 5pm, rush hour leaving downtown Oakland lasted maybe 15 minutes and was over near the Coliseum. Today you will be in bumper2bumper traffic for 2 hours before you get to Livermore.