For the first time in some twenty years, the City of Oakland has initiated a comprehensive reassessment of commercial, residential and industrial zoning. Not too many people seem to be paying attention despite its potential to resolve existing problems or quite possibly, create entirely new ones.
How might rezoning impact the Grand Lake District? For starters, the area between Lakeshore and Grand below Mandana that consists of a mixture of apartments and single-family residential homes is currently zoned R-70. The proposed RU-3 designation would increase the base height limitation from 40 feet to 60 feet which could be extended to 90 feet via a Conditional Use Permit.
Upgrading zoning on all or a portion of the commercial strip above the Grand Lake Theatre is another possibility. If your immediate reaction is “Who Cares?”, you’re probably fairly typical. Nonetheless, you might be singing a different tune if you knew that earlier this year, a mental health clinic serving adult parolees was poised to sign a lease for a 4,000 sq. ft. building on Grand Avenue.
Virtually everybody agreed that this would be totally inappropriate for Grand Avenue, but the consensus at the time was that nothing could be done to stop it. Why? Because such a facility is fully permitted under current zoning and there was no legal basis for objections.
Contrast this situation with the one five years earlier when McDonald’s was prepared to convert Kwik Way into a high-volume, drive-thru restaurant. To do so, a Conditional Use Permit would have been required and it became quickly apparent that neither the community, the City Council or the Planning Commission was inclined to grant it.
In order to increase community awareness of the issues that are involved and to allow your voice to be heard, Grand Lake Neighbors has scheduled a Town Hall for December 9 beginning at 7:00 PM. It will be held in Barnett Hall, which is adjacent to Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church, 3534 Lakeshore Avenue.
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The tone of this post is sadly very NIMBY.
You’ve got “virtually everybody” agreeing that a clinic would be inappropriate for Grand Ave, which I totally disagree with. Where else would a clinic be appropriate, other than a large central street relatively well-served by public transit? Also, you seem to be cheering the denial of a conditional use permit for the Kwik Way five years ago, which has been sitting dead and vacant ever since.
I wish I was available to come to the meeting that night, I’m interested to find out whether the only people who bother to show up for such things are suburban conservative reactionaries afraid of an extra 20 feet and a few paroled mental patients.
Michal,
Thanks for your comments–even though I couldn’t disagree more.
You ask, “Where else would a clinic be appropriate?” Answer is downtown where they actually ended up looking. You say “a few”, but we’re actually talking about large numbers of Federal Department of Corrections parolees. Grand Avenue merchants are struggling to survive. Just in the past year, we’ve lost Micio Mambo and Cultural Crossroads–both the kind of small, locally-owned businesses most of us want to see in our neighborhood shopping district. At a minimum, a clinic such as this would be unlikely to benefit surrounding businesses and most certainly wouldn’t serve neighbors. The more serious concern is that it would have seriously hampered efforts to revitalize Grand.
As for MacDonald’s, that was an exercise of democracy in action. Over the course of eight days, 3200 neighbors signed petitions and then 600 turned up at a community meeting and none spoke in support of a MacDonald’s drive-thru.
Only regret we have is that the mixed-use development that was subsequently planned for the Kwik Way/Serenader properties was ultimately scuttled by the property owners. The owner of Somerset is currently planning to restore the Kwik Way building and introduce a restaurant that will not include a drive-thru–a key consideration in keeping with efforts to improve the pedestrian link between Lakeshore and Grand.
That said, I’m the first to admit that in many cases there is no clear-cut answer as to which zoning designation is the most appropriate–particularly since commercial property owners, merchants, homeowners and renters all come to the table with differing perspectives.
That’s why Grand Lake Neighbors feels so strongly about the need to offer stake holders an opportunity to become better informed and voice their opinions.
I’m sorry that you won’t be able to attend on the 9th, but I’m assuming that Planning Department staff will be monitoring this dialogue.
Hi Ken,
It seems like the Grand area could help itself by accepting all comers, acting more like a downtown and less like a suburb, e.g. the clinic. I live on the other side of the Lake, between a cafe and a five-story residential hotel / halfway house that I have a lot of affection for. I vastly prefer the variation in the kinds of people we have here to living in a more conventionally “cute” neighborhood.
The thing with the Kwik Way reminds me of the recent Mission district American Apparel dustup (my office is over there). Neighborhood residents banded together to democratically revoke a signed lease and prevent AA from moving in. The justification: a new AA *could* lead to a new Gap, though both required conditional use permits. The result: persistent vacancies on Valencia, local AA-protesting hipsters ironically forced to travel elsewhere to buy the AA clothes they wear anyway. It was immature and embarrassing.
I’m now incredibly suspicious of any neighborhood advocates suggesting that there’s a “kind of business” they want to see in their area, and one they don’t. Certainly no one ever cops to wanting a McD’s, and you’ll never see 3200 people show up to a community meeting in support of a drive-thru burger place. Still, the burger place will find a market that the long-abandoned shack and parking lot won’t. Clothing stores, nail salons, mental health clinics – they all respond to economic need even if they’re not the picturesque bakery, cafe, or boutique people prefer for aesthetic reasons.
It’s completely understandable why people don’t want mental health clinics for parolees in their neighborhoods, but on the other hand I don’t think that ghettoizing social service providers in neighborhoods with less vocal (or at least less politically powerful) activists is much of a solution. In the long run I think that all neighborhoods in Oakland are better served if social service providers are spread more evenly around the city, because (a) poor and/or blighted neighborhoods aren’t unfairly burdened with additional poverty and blight, and (b) wealthier neighborhoods aren’t completely sheltered from the city’s problems, and therefore have more of a stake in helping to solve them.
More generally, raising the height limit of buildings along Grand sounds like a good way to encourage new development and attract new apartment-dwellers, who will then spend their money in the ground-level stores, cafes, bars and restaurants. Grand and Lakeshore, in my opinion, would both be healthier commercial strips, and have fewer vacant storefronts, if the buildings were mixed-use and taller, instead of being mostly one- or two-story commercial properties.
As for the Kwik-Way, I’m also reminded of the effort to keep the Out of the Closet thrift store out of the vacant GapKids storefront on Lakeshore early last year. We heard a lot about how it wasn’t a “good fit” for Lakeshore and how people wanted a “more desirable” store that would attract people “with disposable income” (those are all quotations from CM Kernighan). Almost two years later, that GapKids storefront is still empty, and as I pointed out on my blog, Out of the Closet ended up filling a vacant property on East 18th Street instead. It seems as if Grand Lake residents routinely shoot themselves in the foot by trying to micromanage who occupies properties on Grand and Lakeshore—as Ken Katz points out, businesses on Grand are struggling to survive and several have gone out of business recently. How does it help matters to discourage a wide variety of people and businesses from coming to the neighborhood, if the “small, locally-owned businesses” are unable to survive? As someone who lives on the outskirts of the neighborhood, about halfway between Grand Lake and the East 18th/Park area, I find the insular attitude pretty unwelcoming and unappealing.