The City of Oakland has embarked on a citywide update of its commercial and residential zoning regulations. On December 9th Grand Lake Neighbors held a town hall meeting on the commercial zoning proposals. As a direct result of questions and feedback from the 50 neighbors who attended, there were important changes to the city’s proposed zoning for Grand Avenue near the Piedmont border.
This Thursday, March 4th we will hold another town hall meeting covering the residential zoning proposals. It will start at 7:15pm in the Family Room at Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church, 3534 Lakeshore Avenue. City staff will be on hand to present the zoning maps and answer questions.
Why should you care? City staff is actually doing a remarkably good job of making the proposed zoning match the buildings that exist on each block. But they aren’t perfect. I walked around my immediate neighborhood with the zoning map this afternoon. Most of the blocks were exactly right. But mysteriously there are a couple of blocks filled with single family houses that are zoned for multistory apartments.
I suspect that many of you will want to come to the meeting and check out the proposals for your block. Although there will be quite a few meetings throughout the city, we are one of the first, and ours is the one that will focus specifically on 14Y and 16X.
To see the proposed zoning map and supporting documents, check out these links. Note that these are draft documents. Some details may have changed by the time we convene our meeting on Thursday.