Ain’t nobody’s business

Last week I had a post on the residential developments at Alameda Landing, today will focus on the retail and commercial developments.  If you have swung by, as John P. noted in the other post, the commercial side is going up pretty fast.   Safeway’s shell is nearly complete and it appears that they are really pushing for that October opening date.  Anything before the holidays would probably be a huge boon to Safeway.  Although we had been told that shops such as Corner Bakery and Which Wich were supposedly contenders for space, they are not currently on the list of signed tenants.   According to the most recent iteration of the leasing document here are the retailers:

• Safeway
• Michaels
• Habit Burger
• Unleashed by Petco
• Sleep Train
• Sprint
• Famous Dave’s BBQ

A tenant “in negotiation” is an unnamed credit union and a bunch of other corner spaces are currently in negotiation as well.

Map here:

Place your Bettes

The Planning Board on Monday night has lots of neat renderings to look at, so I’m breaking this up into two posts to get the full graphic goodness. The first set of plans are for Alameda Landing’s affordable housing development which was handed off to veteran non-profit housing developer RCD to take the lead on.

If you have not visited the Alameda Landing side of the island recently, you will not have noticed the construction going on at both the residential housing site and the retail side. Close to the Target, Tri Pointe homes is chugging along and has the frames of one of its larger buildings erected. Safeway’s exterior metal shell has been built up giving you a clear idea of the massing of the eventual building. The smaller units fronting Fifth Street have also started going up as well. At the remnant parcel, the underground storage containers have gone in for the gas station.

Landing leasing

In case you don’t drive in and around the West End, you may not know that active construction is now taking place at the In N Out/Chase Bank/Safeway gas site.   At the last Planning Board meeting, staff noted that CalTrans had finally approved the crosswalk at Stargell and Webster.

According to a press release sent out by the City yesterday, In N Out is slated to be completed by the end of the year and both Safeway and Michaels are due to be completed by October.  Looks like they are on the same timeline that Target was, just a year later.

In addition to the known retailers that have already committed: The Habit Burger Grill and Sleep Train — although the press release did not mention Corner Street Bakery and Which Wich which (heh) were also on the initial list of retailers, maybe it means that they both are out — two new retailers have been added to the list: Unleashed by Petco and Famous Dave’s BBQ.

Here’s an updated site plan:

West Enderos

So if you couldn’t guess the proposed street names for the Alameda Landing residential project are all kinds of yawn worthy.   Here they are in list form (and alphabetical order):

• Ardent Lane
• Bennington Lane
• Cheyenne Lane
• Constellation Street
• Freedom Lane
• Hartford Lane
• Langley Lane
• Lassen Street
• Mason Lane
• Mercy Lane
• Mitchell Avenue*
• Mosley Avenue**
• Olympia Lane
• Patriot Lane
• Porter Lane
• Princeton Lane
• Randolph Lane
• Rushmore Lane
• Shiloh Lane
• Singleton Avenue*
• Yorktown Lane

When the votes align

I’m super behind on writing about Planning Board meeting tidbit because (1) one meeting was posted really late and (2) I’m just behind.   So this is about the meeting on the 24th of March where one big item was on the agenda, the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) and a smaller agenda item (Alameda Landing residential colors) led to some really inconsistent voting.

First off, the Alameda Landing residential colors, I mean, they are colors who really cares right?  But yet there was push back about the colors not being bright enough or possibly not matching with the brightness of the Target and Safeway buildings.  First of all, there’s kind of a conflict in wanting everything to be matchy matchy and then complaining that the colors are not saturated enough.  You can have both I guess, but that gets into subjective territory about whether neighborhood should look identical.   I seem to recall a lot of complaints about housing developments being too “cookie cutter” if they trend toward cohesiveness, so apparently there is no way to please everyone in Alameda.   Second, there is no prohibition that the homeowners can’t just opt to repaint their houses whatever color they want to, so all this is moot.

Good eats

Something light to take you into your weekend, have you all checked out Bambu?   It’s the newest dessert shop located on Park Street (next to Angkor Grill) it’s really near because it’s all Vietnamese style desserts and I was super excited to see that they even left the menu largely in Vietnamese with English descriptions of what is inside the dessert for the non Vietnamese readers.   They have pretty good Yelp reviews right now too.   It’s definitely in the unusual and unique category but most people may just file it under the “just another Asian restaurant” category and pooh pooh it as un-creative and therefore just another ho hum Asian joint.

Also, you’ve heard that the big building on Park Street across from Starbucks is finally getting a tenant in the form of a “Speakeasy” type restaurant called Capones Speakeasy.  I think I saw some letter to the editor that was complaining about some aspect of Capones, but geez, considering how long that space has been vacant, shouldn’t we all give the joint the benefit of the doubt before we whine on and on about it?  There was also some pearl clutching thread on Alameda Patch a while back too.   I know I raised an eyebrow about the name, but the name Capone does really evoke an immediate sense of time and place which I imagine is what the owner wanted to do.

Walk the crosswalk

It appears that the crosswalk slated for Stargell at Webster Street is moving forward.   At Monday night’s Planning Board meeting, City Staff announced that CalTrans has given preliminary approval for this plan and it will come before the Planning Board in January:

The Two Towers

More in development-y stuff but not Alameda specific, there are plans to build not one, but two towers in Oakland’s Jack London Square, residential towers to be exact which will affect egress and ingress via the tubes.   The developer, Ellis Partners at one point in time had planned for one of the sites to be retail and office space.  The other site was supposed to be a hotel.   Now they are both going residential because, well, because that’s what’s going to sell.  And because San Francisco (more on that later)   From SF Business Times:

Ellis Partners LLC is revamping its plans to transform Jack London Square with a proposal to build up to 665 housing units.

The developer submitted an application to the City of Oakland to amend a previous development plan. The new plan calls for two housing towers of more than 20 stories on sites currently entitled for office and retail development.

Black Thursday

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving holiday. I managed to escape relatively unscathed this year with the exception of a small battle wound from Thanksgiving prep the day before. Fortunately it happened at the end of the day when the bulk of the work had been done.

This year instead of waiting for the next day a lot of big retailers decided to open on Thanksgiving night instead of being civilized and waiting till the next morning for people to kill each other over some super low priced deals. Target was one of those big retailers but I heard that the South Shore retailers all allowed their employees to continue to enjoy Thanksgiving.

Forgot the title!

Two days ago the City put out a press release that was pretty shocking because they really didn’t mince around with words about the topic, here’s the click worthy headline:

Stupid Flier & Facebook Page Aimed at Scaring West Alameda

Here’s the whole thing:

There is a flier and Facebook page being circulated in Alameda “warning” people that a US Customs Examination Station is coming to the West End.

This is NOT true.