The houses are coming

On Thursday night I tweeted out about this update on the lawsuit filed by former Fire Chief Kapler against the City of Alameda:

On fmr Fire Chief Kapler case, appellate court rules in favor of City of #Alameda & awards attorneys fees http://t.co/42iWD8iD

— Lauren Do (@laurendo) September 7, 2012

I’ll tackle all the details tomorrow because it is a big deal, because tonight’s Planning Board agenda is super important.

First, a small update on the Historic Advisory Board meeting, for anyone that was wondering about the Historic Alameda High School fence, the HAB will be taking up the issue at their next meeting because the representative from the school district was not available to give an update last Thursday night  to the HAB, so if you are interested, keep an eye out for the next HAB meeting.

So, the Planning Board will get a first look at what the residential portions of Alameda Landing is supposed to look like.  And by first look I mean there will be no votes on the issue only that they will be able to make lots of comments on the Alameda Landing residential.  Here is the overall plan concept map:

And to quickly run through the numbers:

• 278 housing units
  • 238 market rate units
    • 120 attached
    • 118 single family
  • 40 affordable units (all attached)
    • 24 very low- low income rental units
    • 16 moderate income units (for sale, I believe)
• Overall project density: 12.5 du/ac

All the attached units will either end up being on Stargell or on Fifth Street.   Stargell will be home to the 24-unit affordable housing project with units for rent.   Did I mention that the developer is getting a waiver to Measure A and not just for the affordable income units?   Yeah, and they’re not even using the multifamily housing overlay that folks were getting their knickers in a twist about.

Some other details, they are using the back loading garage style a la Bayport.   While I like it-ish because it cleans up the front of the houses, what this tends to do is just drive all the activity to the garage lanes, so…you know, makes the streets nice, but I don’t know how much it actually activates the streets all that much.   But it is nicer than the old “welcome to my garage” style development.   So what is not clear from the maps is that I believe the detached single family homes will front on to paseos aka non driving streets, which will be interesting but also challenging from a parking stand point.  Because believe me, parking is always ALWAYS an issue.  Even when people know what they are getting into.   Plus car circulation is going to be weird if the developer doesn’t shift the garage alleys a bit more, the way it is now, they’ll be used as cut throughs which is not — at least I don’t think it is — the point of the garage alleys.

But on the the fun stuff, renderings of the single family homes, nothing too architecturally shocking, they look eerily like Bayport homes, at least the first two do.

Six-plex on Fifth Street:

There are more floor plans here which are hard to dicpher at first, but fun to look at.

I will note one big potential problem which is the possibility of making the street called “Street A” into a through street connecting to the Target.   The road that “Street A” would potentially connect to on the other side of Fifth Street runs along the frontage of the Target building, which will be full of pedestrians crossing willy nilly in that parking lot because that’s how people are in shopping parking lots and the weirdness of the front of the design of the Target store sort of begs people to cross really anywhere they can.  The last thing that the developers want to encourage is to make that lane a cut through from Mariner Square Loop to the residential portion: