OAKLAND — Get in your car, or better still, walk or bike south on Broadway starting near 31st Street, and you’ll pass Sprouts Farmers Market in a brand-spanking-new retail complex with a Sleep Train, Chipotle and a sign on an empty storefront alerting the public that Starbucks is coming soon. Nearby, a 435-unit apartment complex — one of the largest new buildings to break ground recently — is under construction at the site of a former Chevrolet dealership. Continue and you’ll spot two Mexican restaurants, Calavera and Agave Uptown. Just blocks apart, both specialize in Oaxacan cuisine.
A little over a year ago? None of these places existed except in the minds of their creators. Yet with amazing speed, a recent explosion in development is transforming Oakland’s main commercial street. New housing, shared working spaces, restaurants and bars, cafes, a bookstore, shops, art galleries, a jazz club and theater spaces have all sprung up in the last two to three years. The changes are both physical and cultural.
“I don’t even recognize it,” said Thelma Simmons, a retiree who lives in the Oakland hills. “I go out and eat in loud restaurants and sit next to people who are my grandchildren’s age.”
This is definitely not your grandmother’s Broadway. The historic Sears building — Uber’s future Uptown Station headquarters — is covered in a white plastic tarp as an extensive rehab occurs within. It may be the most heralded recent Broadway development. But there’s a lot more going on that reflects the tectonic shifts in Oakland as a whole.
“In the last few years, it’s really escalated much more quickly than I would have thought,” said Rachel Flynn, director of the city’s building and planning department. “This is a really exciting time for Oakland.”
Some of the most intense activity is concentrated from Grand Avenue to Interstate 580 in the Broadway-Valdez corridor, which city planners have been trying for years to turn into a retail destination. It encompasses Auto Row, a once-thriving economic area before auto businesses started pulling out, leaving empty showrooms and storefronts. There are also hot pockets further down, near Jack London Square, and on upper Broadway in Rockridge, where the 127-bed Merrill Gardens assisted living complex for seniors is under construction across from Safeway, which is undergoing its own multiphase expansion. Flynn said both higher residential rents and the willingness of companies to pay much more to lease office space downtown has fueled the building boom. The city has reaped the benefits in increased sales tax revenues, and local businesses are profiting from people spending money in Oakland.
Yet those are also the very same forces that have fueled fears of displacement among smaller businesses, nonprofits and people whose incomes aren’t enough to afford rents that are among the highest in the country. The homeless people panhandling outside new upscale restaurants shows the glaring contrast between the haves and have-nots.
“You’ve got folks who ride their bikes cuz it’s hip, and you’ve got folks who ride their bikes because they have to,” said Ashara Ekundayo, chief creative officer at Impact Hub Oakland, a community co-working space. Part of Impact Hub’s mission is to bring people together to help create solutions to issues such as the lack of affordable housing and the increasing lack of diversity in the city.
It was the first tenant to move into the Hive, one of several major projects by Signature Development Group. It’s a bustling cluster of shops, offices, restaurants and market-rate housing about four blocks up from Uber’s future home. A 459-square-foot studio apartment in the luxury Mason at Hive development rents for $2,527 a month.
The eclectic collection of businesses there include Numi Tea, Firebrand Artisan Breads and the Peoples Barber & Shop, where clients can sip bourbon while they get haircuts. The biggest draw is Drake’s Dealership, a sprawling beer garden and restaurant. Inside, you’ll find patrons — many from cities outside Oakland — throwing back Denogginizers and other signature brews from Drake’s Brewing.
“Hundreds of thousands of square feet of businesses that were vacant are now occupied, and that has put tens of thousands of people into the Broadway corridor,” said Michael Ghielmetti, Signature’s founder and president. “Foot traffic is key to this, whether it’s folks who live down here or who are visiting the office buildings that are filling up.”
The roots of the current boom began with the 10K Plan launched in 1999, when Gov. Jerry Brown was Oakland mayor. His ambitious goal was to bring 10,000 new residents downtown to create a lively, 24-hour downtown scene to replace the near ghost town that existed there after dark. There have been ups and downs, but since about 2012-13, that area has experienced a second rapid growth spurt.
Sonoma County restaurateur Octavio Diaz opened Mexican restaurant Agave six weeks ago on the ground floor of the Kapor Center for Social Impact, which had its grand opening in July in a unique, curved brick building at the intersection of Broadway and 22nd Street. The building had been vacant off and on for years.
“Business has been really excellent,” Diaz said. “We have to do some work with hiring and training people, but that’s the nature of the business.”
Kanna Perrot, store manager at the new Sleep Train, said she’s thrilled the mattress center has opened its first Oakland store. “There’s a lot of people walking around the streets, and it’s starting to feel more like the Oakland I used to visit as a child,” she said.
But Perrot has to commute from Hayward, because she can’t afford Oakland’s high rents. “That’s the unfortunate downside,” she said. “It’s a domino effect.”
Contact Tammerlin Drummond at 510-208-6468. Follow her at Twitter.com/Tammerlin.
