Councilman says plan would hurt East Oakland.
Oakland Councilman Larry Reid is concerned about a plan to impose “impact fees” on new housing developments, saying the mechanism — used by many cities to generate money for affordable housing, transportation and infrastructure — would hurt his East Oakland district.
“I don’t want my district to be the district where all the affordable housing is thrust upon,” Reid said at a meeting Tuesday. “There needs to be some balance of where affordable housing gets built throughout this city.”
City officials have worked for two years to calculate the fees, which would be levied on every new structure, from single- family homes to high- rise apartment buildings. The idea is to either prompt developers to include affordable housing in their projects or charge them a fee so that the city can build affordable housing.
Four council members — Lynette Gibson McElhaney, Annie Campbell Washington, Abel Guillen and Dan Kalb — introduced what they thought was a balanced strategy to phase the new fees in over two years. Their plan, presented Tuesday at the council’s Community and Economic Development Committee, called for a graduated fee scale that would extract more money from projects in the city’s downtown corridor, and less in the low- income areas of East and West Oakland.
To that end, the plan divides Oakland into three geographic zones. Developers in Zone 1 — downtown, Uptown, Lake Merritt — would pay $ 7,000 per marketrate unit starting in September, increasing to $ 24,000 per unit by July 2018. The fee in Zone 2 — which includes West Oakland and parts of North Oakland — would start at $ 5,550 per marketrate unit in September, increasing to $ 19,250 in July 2018.
There would initially be no fees imposed on any development in Zone 3, east of 23rd Avenue. The “target” fee for that area would be $ 13,000 in July 2019.
“As I see it, the issue before us is not about a fee, it’s about how do we best address the housing crisis we now find ourselves in,” said McElhaney, urging her colleagues to approve the plan and push it to the full council.
But Reid, who chairs the committee, took issue with the fees, saying they would impede development in his East Oakland district.
Whereas the city’s Uptown and downtown areas are swarming with high- priced real estate and tech offices, East Oakland has the opposite problem, Reid said. His district has plenty of affordable housing projects in the pipeline, but it’s starved for marketrate projects.
Reid persuaded his colleagues to punt their impact fee proposal back to the city’s Planning and Building Department, whose staff will deliver a revised version to the committee sometime in the next few weeks. He said he would support a plan that delayed impact fees for two years in East Oakland.
Campbell Washington told The Chronicle on Wednesday that she hopes the revised plan will closely resemble the one she and her colleagues presented at the committee meeting.