Oakland Pushes Ambitious Downtown Housing Plan

Few cities have the political will and financial resources necessary to build more affordable housing. But there’s one notable exception: Oakland, which has gained national recognition for overcoming obstacles to major urban residential development.

In this Bay Area city, officials are working to provide 7,600 new units to meet Mayor Jerry Brown’s goal of attracting 10,000 residents downtown by 2002. The new units will be a mix of apartments and condos, with one in four set aside for affordable housing.

“In our case it was a matter of making it known to the building industry what the opportunities were for building housing in downtown Oakland,” said William Claggett, executive director of the city’s community and economic development agency. “The mayor was able to draw attention to Oakland by the force of his personality and his experience.”

Once it recruited developers and helped them find sites to build on, the city worked to speed up its building permit process by creating a one-stop permit center.

Here, special coordinators are assigned to each project to ferry it through the system, a departure from the past when developers had to escort their projects to each city department for review.

“We had to hire additional staff,” Claggett said. “We have 62 major housing projects going on right now--two years ago we had 12.”

About 5,000 units are in the pipeline, compared to less than 1,000 two years ago, he added.