Alameda’s building boom
Housing projects rise on city’s old naval base
In the 10 months since Paul Washington moved into the Corsair Flats in Alameda Point, he hasn’t just watched a new apartment building come out of the ground nextdoor. He has seen a whole new neighborhood pop up on the western edge of the island city.
Washington, a 68yearold retired truck driver and Air Force veteran who was one of the first to establish residency at Alameda Point’s first new residential building, has watched the sidewalks get built. He observed traffic islands and jogging paths materialize. He tracked the construction of a wedgeshaped grassy open space and a children’s playground. Condos have opened to the east. To the
west a highend rental complex is days from welcoming its first residents. A new ferry terminal has been completed, although its opening has been delayed by the pandemic.
“I’ve seen this place come up from scratch,” said Washington. “I was lucky to be one of the first residents to move into the neighborhood.”
After 23 years of debate, study, planning and political wrangling, the Alameda Point Waterfront District is coming to fruition. Over the last 10 months, the 68acre portion of the former Alameda naval base has seen the completion of Eden Housing’s 60unit affordable Corsair project, which includes housing for 28 formerly homeless veterans. Trumark has been building out its 120home condo project, while in April, Cypress Equity will open Aero, a 70unit nauticalthemed apartment building with views of the San Francisco skyline.
Eden Housing is also a few months away from delivering a second affordable building — 70 familysized apartments. The first building had more than 500 applications.
Demand for all three types of housing — the affordable units, $1.2 million condos, and $3,500amonth apartments — has exceeded expectations, according to Michael Sorochinsky, the CEO of Cypress Equity, which, in addition to building individual apartment buildings, is the master developer for the whole project.
While the island’s south shore has a row of gardenstyle apartment buildings, new multifamily buildings are banned in most of the city.
“We have certainly proven that housing is very viable here,” said Sorochinsky. “There really has not been any apartment development in Alameda in the last several decades. We really are the only game in town.”
The $500 million first phase of the military base reuse plan includes 673 units, of which about 320 are done or currently being built. The master developer is also spending $80 million on infrastructure, which includes a $10 million contribution to the new ferry terminal, a block away from the Aero building. The base was closed in 1997 and the master developer selected in 2014.
“It amazes me every time I am out there — it’s like, “Whoa, this is really actually happening,’ ” said Alameda Mayor Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft. “It’s exciting when you have looked at sets of plans on paper for so many years and then all of a sudden it’s coming up out of the ground faster than you could have imagined.”
Alameda Point is on one of seven mothballed Bay Area military facilities that are in the process of being redeveloped. For those trying to tackle the region’s housing shortage, the projects are a necessary gamble. On the one hand they tend to be large and ambitious, with the potential to deliver huge amounts of new homes along with jobs, open space and public transit.
But they also can be treacherous. These sites often involve cleanup of toxic land, which can cost hundreds of millions to remediate and derail development for decades if the contamination is bad enough, as it was in the case of the Hunters Point Shipyard in San Francisco. Or they can run aground due to local politics, as was the case with the Concord Naval Weapons Station, where the City Council required that the developer sign a projectwide labor agreement.
The combination of having to pay for infrastructure, affordable housing and transit improvements can sink these projects, said Matt Regan of the Bay Area Council, a probusiness group
“There is a general perception that these base reuse projects are cash registers about to be opened and everyone sticks their hand in,” Regan said. “But these projects have to be economically feasible.”
The Alameda Point project, however, has several things going for it. Its historic hangars are already thriving — home to spirits makers, breweries, a massive gym and sports complex, a rocket testing company, an underwater drone developer, a piano restorer and other businesses. It is also in the core Bay Area, which means that rents and home prices will be higher than more remote former bases like Concord or Mare Island in Vallejo.
The challenge for developers in Alameda has been traffic — most people drive through an oftencongested tunnel to get on or off the island. The ferry, which will get to San Francisco in 20 minutes, will help alleviate that problem.
“The ferry system is going to be the lifeline for that project in the longterm,” Regan said.
Beyond the 800 units that will likely be completed in the next three years, it’s unclear how much additional housing will be built at Alameda Point. The current plan calls for the rest of the base — some of which has serious contamination issues — to be used for commercial space.
Sorochinsky said that his group is talking to the city about adding more housing to the plan as well as other options, including biotech.
Washington, the retired truck driver, is looking forward to the ferry opening so he can cruise over to San Francisco for lunch or a ballgame. And while he welcomes the arrival of more neighbors, he likes it just fine the way it is.
“It’s nice and quiet,” he said. “At my age? Coming from Oakland? What you want is peace and quiet.”