One more try

All right, quick Alameda Landing update.   At Tuesday night’s meeting, City Manager John Russo pretty much spilled the beans on the proposed burger joint for the entry parcel at Alameda Landing.   He mentioned that if the business comes in then his spouse will no longer need to drive to the Oakland Airport weekly to pick up burgers for their teenage boys.   The only chain burger restaurant that can’t be found anywhere but at the Oakland Airport is In N Out.  Oh wait, I guess it could be Wendy’s too, but few people get excited about a weekly trip to Wendy’s.

As I mentioned yesterday one of the big new items to come out of the meeting was an announcement by Harbor Bay Isle Associates aka Ron Cowan and friends to move the existing Harbor Bay Club to North Loop Road which sits in the middle of a flight path and a bunch of commercial buildings.  Most recently was offered up as part of a land swap deal for the Mif Albright parcel.  Previously was the site where Ron Cowan wanted to build a bunch of housing units under a flight path.

After the Harbor Bay Club is fully moved to the North Loop site, which is going to be “state-of-the-art” and “sustainable”, key buzz words if you are going to do anything these days, HBIA will be building 80 units on the old Harbor Bay Club site.

After their announcement at Tuesday’s meeting they immediately sent out a mass email with a link to their construction blog.

So, while this is obviously a better plan than the whole Mif swap thing, as usual HBIA overplayed their hand, again, and insisted in their letter to the City Council that:

The courts have determined that Harbor Bay Isle Associates has the indisputable right to  build an additional 227 units. Harbor Bay Isle Associates is agreeing to develop only 80 of the remaining 227 units as its final residential development for Harbor Bay Isle, which represents a 65% reduction and ceding 147 homes to which it’s entitled.

Which is sort of true that they have the right to build the additional 227 but that doesn’t mean that the City has to bend over backward to make that happen.   JKW wrote about this issue a while back with reference to the lawsuit:

What the court said is that the Settlement Agreement between the City and HBIA was valid. This settlement, approved 3 to 2 by the City Council, reaffirmed HBIA’s right to build the original number of houses (up to 3200) that they were entitled to build through a Development Agreement signed in the late 80s. It in no way addresses the issue of where these houses can be built, and in no way it covers the City with having to approve additional housing.

Here’s the problem with the position HBIA is coming into this whole business.   The City can still say “no way” given that Harbor Bay Club site is not zoned residential.   So, HBIA still needs to come, hat in hand, to get the land rezoned to actually build the 80 units.    To pretend like they are doing us all a favor by only asking for 80 units instead of 227 is rather laughable.    At this point Ron Cowan better make sure that new club is so fricken awesome that it placates the traffic adverse Bay Farm residents so that they don’t come out en masse to oppose the residential project.