You know too much

So I’d been saving this until after the election was over because I didn’t want to detract from the election. So at the Planning Board meeting last week, former City Council member Doug deHaan (who I am guessing is now seriously contemplating a run in 2016) decided to comment on the Del Monte project issue.  Remember this is someone who used to sit on the City Council and would have had plenty of training on conflict of interest and Brown Act laws etc.

He decided to chuck in this tidbit at the end of his public comment period.  Oh, by the way, did you know if you are a former City Council person you don’t have to pay attention to the time limit for public comment.  Yeah, you just get to keep going on and on and on.  True story.

So here’s the straight knowledge that he laid down before the Planning Board:

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.

Signs, seals, delivered

Looks like the entry signs for Alameda Point got a fresh new design but it’s not a whole lot better.   It has a very Disneyland land feel with the super saturated colors and the mix of materials.   But if it’s a question of selecting between this new sign and the old one, this one is a whole lot better

 

And the close up shot with shadow hipster for reference:

Somewhere, beyond the sea (of parking)

It appears that most of the commenters about the Del Monte project were concerned about not turning Alameda into Berkeley or San Francisco because the parking.  Because apparently in order to not turn Alameda into those two terrible cities of OMG Berkeley or horrorofhorrors San Francisco you must have AT LEAST two parking spaces per unit.

There was some talk about “competing and conflicting studies”, personally I have never read any studies about how endless parking is great for traffic mitigation, but I’m always open to seeing these conflicting studies.

Anyway, I feel like all these people are ignoring two thing that were brought up by a commenter the other day.

(1) Awesome Estuary Crossing shuttle that has a stop that takes people to and from the Bart station for commuting purposes which takes cars off the road

and

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

There will be no white flag above my door

I’ll be the first to admit, I’m horrible with visualizing the size of things in my head.  You tell me something is x number of feet long beyond the size of a normal human person and I won’t be able to picture it in my head.  So when someone asked me, hey did you know that the entry sign for Alameda Point being proposed by the City is 48 feet long, I knew it was large but I couldn’t figure out in my head how large that really was.

And then I saw the renderings, the first graphic shows where it’s going to be.  Looks big but not that big:

 

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.

Bays front

So, I said I wasn’t going to get excited about anything at the Del Monte building again, but, I guess I lied.  Tim Lewis Communties’ proposal for Del Monte is all kinds of interesting.   It took me a while to get to it because the video from the Planning Board meeting where it was first introduced took a while to get uploaded.   But here is the full file.   I’ll pull out some renderings that I think are particularly notable.

First, here are inspiration example (not necessarily designed by the architect) but the direction that they are going in for the Del Monte project.

All mixed-use up

So remember that public meeting way back in August about the Oak Street property near the Boatworks project?  Well the developer, City Ventures, has finally put something forward to the Planning Board and it looks a little different than what they were proposing in August.   As a reminder, here’s the site:

That’s EIRie

Planning Board meeting tonight, first one of the year and it’s a doozy of one.   Smaller, but still an item of interest is the cross Stargell crosswalk at Webster street which will (hopefully) keep pedestrians from darting across Stargell to access the remnant lot (aka the In N Out parcel).  Given that you can’t pull up a web page without reading about some pedestrian getting plowed down by a car these days, hopefully this crosswalk will help pedestrians not get hurt while crossing the street.

I guess I should add that if you are still interested in killing the In N Out project this really would be your last chance if you can somehow muster up enough votes on the Planning Board to vote against it since the approval of the In N Out (and other businesses) in the remnant parcel is contingent on getting this crosswalk approved.

The big item on this agenda will be the vote to recommend to the City Council that they adopt the EIR for Alameda Point.  For those interested in going the City of Oakland route and insisting that Alameda solve a problem that Oakland has deemed completely unsolvable you may be interested in coming up with rebuttals to these arguments which Alameda has already offered in response to Oakland’s traffic contentions.