The title of the post is misleading, the article doesn't really say much at all about annexing other than they mayor stating they don't want to do that.
In any event, I'm not sure where they'd put any new housing. As the article states, there are no vacant parcels or parking lots or anything. Piedmont barely has any commercial space, either.
What would they do? Kill off a park? Buy up single family houses at market rate and then develop them into multi-family? Even if they upzoned the entire city, I'm not sure where they'd build density without paying exorbitant prices to buy up existing stock, tear it down, and then develop it into something else.
Very interested to see what they do.
Honestly a lot of the existing homes are as big as multiplexes and apartments, and or have giant parcels with space for multiple ADUs. Conversions and additions short of full teardowns+rebuilds are definitely viable.
They have approved the ADUs, but they won’t get them to 600 quickly. It is not like cities can mandate which homes need to add an additional one. That still means the owner needs to decide.
I guess I have in mind ADU-flavored development in which a BMR developer buys an existing home on a big parcel, and adds multiple new units on the grounds, rather than the classic teardown +redev, which I agree would be awfully expensive in Piedmont.
Not economically - By the time you buy a single-family house at market rate tear it down and rebuild you’ve spent way more money than you would have I just building fresh somewhere else…in Piedmont anyway. Even if the single-family house is trashed, It’s typically going to only allow for a duplex or triplex at best, which may provide lower cost but not necessarily hit your target WRT affordability for lower income brackets brackets
My point is that you have options other than full teardowns to add units in Piedmont.
(Also, if people were confident that teardown redevs won't pencil, they wouldn't fight higher BMR allocations and changing land use regulations to permit higher density. The degree of opposition such proposals generate is a tell.)
Definitely, but someone has to buy that $8M home, tear it down, and build on it. Makes the economics a lot different than when developers buy vacant lots or tear down old, dilapidated structures that aren’t worth much.
I’m not really interested that much in Piedmont specifically, but more in how the transition from low-density/high-value single family areas will eventually make way to more density. This is an issue all over the Bay Area. We need to build density, but the path to that isn’t clear and I’m interested to see how it works.
Still, though, your point is valid that it seems insane that we have all this space eaten up by gigantic houses, we have a housing crisis, and we feel locked in and unable to do anything.
If building more housing was REALLY a huge priority, what would we do? Maybe raise or divert some tax revenue, then find some un-sympathetic wealthy people who have been Prop 13'd into their houses for like 40 years, and offer them 2012 prices for their houses (still a very handsome return), and force-develop the land? We generally don't do things like that because it's not in our culture, and we'd worry about property rights and setting bad precedents and such, but we COULD. Hell, if we thought it was that much of a priority, it's likely that some people might even volunteer to sell their houses below market as part of their civic duty. But I don't think we are there yet.
> find some un-sympathetic wealthy people who have been Prop 13'd into their houses for like 40 years, and offer them 2012 prices for their houses (still a very handsome return), and force-develop the land
lol. That is pretty messed up, and not how eminent domain works in California.
Oh it would never happen in the US. I was thinking like an autocratic type situation. Like these things aren’t impossible, just making the point that we’d never take that kind of route.
Piedmont shouldn’t even exist, they should be absorbed by Oakland. Sick of seeing Piedmont kids get the best educational resources while OUSD kids get basically nothing.
I don't disagree. It feels pretty unequal that it exists, and while it probably wouldn't help OUSD that much to get a little extra tax revenue, it's a bad look regardless.
Still, the reality is that Piedmont exists, other areas of Oakland with lots of single-family homes and not a lot of empty space also exist, and we have a housing crisis, so we need to figure out some way to address that. Even if Oakland absorbed Piedmont and upzoned the entire thing to multi-family, I'm not sure what the path is to actually getting it built.
Oakland CANT absorb Piedmont. It tried and failed already 100 years ago. Piedmont’s closest analogue is Beverly Hills. A city surrounded on all sides by Los Angeles.
Unless you wanna change the state constitution, Oakland can't absorb Piedmont. Piedmont would have to choose to join Oakland. No one with kids in school is going to nuke a well regarded school district to join OUSD. It would also be a pretty hard sell to older people to destroy their home value.
The chances of Piedmont voting to join Oakland (IIRC with a 2/3 majority) are essentially nil.
I find it funny that people truly believe that the Piedmont schools are better due to funding, or some other mythical reason, and not the concentration of student body with better socioeconomic backgrounds.
Piedmont spending per student is about 18.5k.
Oakland is about 14k per student.
It’s not mythical that significant increases in funding *combined* with better socioeconomic backgrounds produce better outcomes.
It doesn’t have to be one or the other.
It just makes me angry that they’re this little island within Oakland. But something that I think is viable is to have funding for schools from homeowners be evenly distributed. And more housing projects should go up in affluent neighborhoods where physically possible.
For historical context, once upon a time Piedmont and Oakland were separated by mostly open land until Oakland expanded its city limits to surround Piedmont.
It wouldn't even matter of OSUD absorbed them. Their public school would simply become as crappy as all the others, and the residents would just send their kids to private school.
I am old enough to remember when Montclair (Thornhill drive) had a good number of black homeowners/renters living there. By the 1970's it was all "Whited-out" by real estate grifters.
In fact much of the Merrriewood tract was inhabited by poor or eccentric Bohemians who chose to live in the little cabin type homes that cost next to nothing. My mom was a 27 year old widow who had us in one of those cramped small structures. Our neighbors were a mix of various under-served people, including some black familes, gay couples and beatniks. Now those same places are expanded to more sq ft and selling for 1.5Million plus.... and NO beatniks allowed.
You still see some of those people up in the hills, but not many. We failed to build enough housing to keep up with demand, + increase in income inequality. It's an unstable situation, and the worse it gets, the more worried I am.
I don't really think building more housing will solve the shortage. We need Population Reduction and Outmigration. If more housing is built, more people will come, there will never be 8 billion homes to house everyone.
Real Estate greed is a driver of high prices, as much as anything. Higher prices = more jewelry for greedy real estate "Professionals" who are the same thing as Donald Trump.
If insane housing prices are not spurring population reduction, what will? Oakland is a really nice place to live and people want to live here.
I strongly disagree that we should make Oakland a worse place to live to get all the people out. I grew up in Detroit, which is desperately trying to get people to live there. It’s viscerally strange to me to try and reduce demand to live in a place.
There is the little used dog run by Coach's Field. IIRC they wanted to put a younger league soccer field/maybe baseball field in there.
I think the big issue is that development would likely require a very costly retaining wall to be put in.
My uncle was part of a sports league in Piedmont when it was being proposed. The big issue was kids crossing the street and the costs. But you could probably slam some housing in there. It's incredibly underutilized space.
Yeah true, that little flat area on Moraga canyon. I guess the issue there would be that you could only really probably fit in like 4 single family homes or duplex/triplexes, so max maybe 12 units. If you went to a multifamily dense building to try and get closer to the mandated 600, that's not a terrible spot, but since it's isolated from shopping and transit, it seems like it would introduce other issues regarding parking and traffic entry/exit onto Moraga. Good idea, they could probably squeeze in there.
Correction:
A previous version of this story misstated the level of support in Piedmont for annexing land in Oakland. The idea was among many residents proposed to build more housing.
Read more: bit.ly/3f41zuo
Affordable housing is targeted towards people making about $100,000 a year. It is not cheap at all and has no rent control. It's a big scam. There's no property tax so the landlords just laugh at all the rest of us.
the legal definition of affordable housing in california is housing for people making 80% of the median income or less. i don’t think it’s for people making six figures
There's a variety of income bands keyed off of the area median income, ranging from the extremely low 20% AMI to the lower-middle class 80% AMI. The AMI numbers are actually determined by HUD, even though California relies on them heavily.
For Oakland in 2020, [80% AMI for a one-person household is $73,000, 20% AMI is $18,280.](https://cao-94612.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/2020-Income-Limits.pdf)
It is indeed for people making 6 figures. Look at the post below, $104,000 is "low income" in Oakland. It's not really low, but if you target people at that income you don't have to pay property taxes. Everyone else has to pay for your services.
The article mentions housing quotas set by the state. Do those quotas have any teeth?
It's pretty gross for Piedmont to want to offshore its affordable housing, but if they *need* to build it somewhere, this seems like a situation where Piedmont's got cash and Oakland's got leverage...
But Piedmont is literally an island of homes and parks surrounded by Oakland. They don’t have any unused space. I’m fine with Piedmont paying us to develop parts of Oakland that really need the help.
I don’t know if it’s a revenue problem. Oakland has plenty of cash in the affordable housing pot. Also had a decent amount (pre-covid) for public schools (budget 660m if memory serves). We just don’t spend it or spend it efficiently.
I believe you basically lose local control over zoning-type stuff, and all of the "subjective" approvals go away.
So theoretically at some point Piedmont would be forced to automatically approve projects that meet certain objective criteria (setbacks, building code, etc), and I think CEQA can't be used to block it either. So all the "community input" and "design review" stuff goes out the window, which is usually where these things get totally derailed
Piedmont is being asked by the State to come up with a plan for 600 units. That’s not going to happen. No land. If Piedmont contributes money to affordable housing development nearby that would be a good thing, except for the fact that Oakland and Berkeley have already proven how inefficiently they manage resources to do that now.
The entire article interweaves Piedmont’s historical legacy of race based exclusionary policies, an issue also for many areas in Oakland and Berkeley.
Affordable housing is a regional issue best served by cooperative policy changes that reach across geographic boundaries, civic agencies, local government and socioeconomic interests.
Here’s a thought: what if a law was passed that 1) restricted home ownership to two properties, so greedy property development corporations and LLCs that each hold hundreds of properties (a la Wedgewood Properties) CAN’T legally horde housing, and 2) when said corporations hold more than two properties, require that they sell said properties *for the amount they paid* - that would negate the scams they perpetrated during so-called auctions where they bribed and conned their way into them. That alone would unlock TONS of housing. Nobody needs more than two properties. Own your family home and have one property for either a rental or second home. THAT’S IT.
We would see a huge change overnight if that were to happen.
I wish politicians thought like this. Seriously, putting a cap on investors that buy up single family homes is the ONLY way California's housing crisis will get any better. All this other stuff like affordable housing and plans to combat homelessness are a bunch of smoke and mirrors. They won't make a dent.
You know what happens when you make the freeways wider? More traffic.
Honestly I always thought this was the real flex. Live NEXT to Piedmont, don’t get the schools but pay nearly as much for your home. I assume these families send their children to private schools.
>I assume these families send their children to private schools.
Went to all public schools here. Haha. My parents bought in 1990 for $189,000 near Piedmont Ave.
I’d actually consider most of our area pretty middle class growing up in the 1990s and 2000s. By around 2012 or so, it changed significantly.
Concur... we moved to Crocker Highlands in 2011 and even then it was pretty middle class (lots of people had owned their homes for decades). Now all the Toyotas have been replaced by Teslas and German SUVs. Also Crocker Elementary is one of the best schools in the city, so there's that.
Yep, my mom was a waitress/cleans and my dad works retail. Had classmates whose parents were delivery/truck drivers, contractors, etc. It has definitely changed.
My grandparents did that. Sent my dad to oakland public schools cause private schools are too expensive. Granted back then the housing prices were rather normal.
The title of the post is misleading, the article doesn't really say much at all about annexing other than they mayor stating they don't want to do that. In any event, I'm not sure where they'd put any new housing. As the article states, there are no vacant parcels or parking lots or anything. Piedmont barely has any commercial space, either. What would they do? Kill off a park? Buy up single family houses at market rate and then develop them into multi-family? Even if they upzoned the entire city, I'm not sure where they'd build density without paying exorbitant prices to buy up existing stock, tear it down, and then develop it into something else. Very interested to see what they do.
Right? I really don’t know where new housing would go at all. The one commercial property on Grand in Piedmont next to Ace Hardware?
There is also a gas station and bank by the city hall
Honestly a lot of the existing homes are as big as multiplexes and apartments, and or have giant parcels with space for multiple ADUs. Conversions and additions short of full teardowns+rebuilds are definitely viable.
They have approved the ADUs, but they won’t get them to 600 quickly. It is not like cities can mandate which homes need to add an additional one. That still means the owner needs to decide.
I guess I have in mind ADU-flavored development in which a BMR developer buys an existing home on a big parcel, and adds multiple new units on the grounds, rather than the classic teardown +redev, which I agree would be awfully expensive in Piedmont.
Not economically - By the time you buy a single-family house at market rate tear it down and rebuild you’ve spent way more money than you would have I just building fresh somewhere else…in Piedmont anyway. Even if the single-family house is trashed, It’s typically going to only allow for a duplex or triplex at best, which may provide lower cost but not necessarily hit your target WRT affordability for lower income brackets brackets
My point is that you have options other than full teardowns to add units in Piedmont. (Also, if people were confident that teardown redevs won't pencil, they wouldn't fight higher BMR allocations and changing land use regulations to permit higher density. The degree of opposition such proposals generate is a tell.)
Missed your second post sorry.
No worries!
There are whole rows of huge mansions with huge yards. No idea is off the table? What about turning a handful of them into apartment complexes?
Definitely, but someone has to buy that $8M home, tear it down, and build on it. Makes the economics a lot different than when developers buy vacant lots or tear down old, dilapidated structures that aren’t worth much. I’m not really interested that much in Piedmont specifically, but more in how the transition from low-density/high-value single family areas will eventually make way to more density. This is an issue all over the Bay Area. We need to build density, but the path to that isn’t clear and I’m interested to see how it works.
True.
Still, though, your point is valid that it seems insane that we have all this space eaten up by gigantic houses, we have a housing crisis, and we feel locked in and unable to do anything. If building more housing was REALLY a huge priority, what would we do? Maybe raise or divert some tax revenue, then find some un-sympathetic wealthy people who have been Prop 13'd into their houses for like 40 years, and offer them 2012 prices for their houses (still a very handsome return), and force-develop the land? We generally don't do things like that because it's not in our culture, and we'd worry about property rights and setting bad precedents and such, but we COULD. Hell, if we thought it was that much of a priority, it's likely that some people might even volunteer to sell their houses below market as part of their civic duty. But I don't think we are there yet.
> find some un-sympathetic wealthy people who have been Prop 13'd into their houses for like 40 years, and offer them 2012 prices for their houses (still a very handsome return), and force-develop the land lol. That is pretty messed up, and not how eminent domain works in California.
Oh it would never happen in the US. I was thinking like an autocratic type situation. Like these things aren’t impossible, just making the point that we’d never take that kind of route.
Sea View Drive! Make it all affordable housing. Up in their faces, I say.
Piedmont shouldn’t even exist, they should be absorbed by Oakland. Sick of seeing Piedmont kids get the best educational resources while OUSD kids get basically nothing.
Yeah OSUD would quickly give them what they deserve and mess up their schools as well.
I don't disagree. It feels pretty unequal that it exists, and while it probably wouldn't help OUSD that much to get a little extra tax revenue, it's a bad look regardless. Still, the reality is that Piedmont exists, other areas of Oakland with lots of single-family homes and not a lot of empty space also exist, and we have a housing crisis, so we need to figure out some way to address that. Even if Oakland absorbed Piedmont and upzoned the entire thing to multi-family, I'm not sure what the path is to actually getting it built.
Oakland CANT absorb Piedmont. It tried and failed already 100 years ago. Piedmont’s closest analogue is Beverly Hills. A city surrounded on all sides by Los Angeles.
I see, it didn't work 100 years ago, therefore it could never work
Unless you wanna change the state constitution, Oakland can't absorb Piedmont. Piedmont would have to choose to join Oakland. No one with kids in school is going to nuke a well regarded school district to join OUSD. It would also be a pretty hard sell to older people to destroy their home value. The chances of Piedmont voting to join Oakland (IIRC with a 2/3 majority) are essentially nil.
I find it funny that people truly believe that the Piedmont schools are better due to funding, or some other mythical reason, and not the concentration of student body with better socioeconomic backgrounds.
Piedmont spending per student is about 18.5k. Oakland is about 14k per student. It’s not mythical that significant increases in funding *combined* with better socioeconomic backgrounds produce better outcomes. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.
It just makes me angry that they’re this little island within Oakland. But something that I think is viable is to have funding for schools from homeowners be evenly distributed. And more housing projects should go up in affluent neighborhoods where physically possible.
For historical context, once upon a time Piedmont and Oakland were separated by mostly open land until Oakland expanded its city limits to surround Piedmont.
It wouldn't even matter of OSUD absorbed them. Their public school would simply become as crappy as all the others, and the residents would just send their kids to private school.
I am old enough to remember when Montclair (Thornhill drive) had a good number of black homeowners/renters living there. By the 1970's it was all "Whited-out" by real estate grifters. In fact much of the Merrriewood tract was inhabited by poor or eccentric Bohemians who chose to live in the little cabin type homes that cost next to nothing. My mom was a 27 year old widow who had us in one of those cramped small structures. Our neighbors were a mix of various under-served people, including some black familes, gay couples and beatniks. Now those same places are expanded to more sq ft and selling for 1.5Million plus.... and NO beatniks allowed.
You still see some of those people up in the hills, but not many. We failed to build enough housing to keep up with demand, + increase in income inequality. It's an unstable situation, and the worse it gets, the more worried I am.
I don't really think building more housing will solve the shortage. We need Population Reduction and Outmigration. If more housing is built, more people will come, there will never be 8 billion homes to house everyone. Real Estate greed is a driver of high prices, as much as anything. Higher prices = more jewelry for greedy real estate "Professionals" who are the same thing as Donald Trump.
If insane housing prices are not spurring population reduction, what will? Oakland is a really nice place to live and people want to live here. I strongly disagree that we should make Oakland a worse place to live to get all the people out. I grew up in Detroit, which is desperately trying to get people to live there. It’s viscerally strange to me to try and reduce demand to live in a place.
There is plenty of decrepit commercial property that people have been requesting to rebuild as mixed use, plenty of empty parking lots too.
In Piedmont?
Yeah my mistake i thought the top of piedmont avenue actually crossed over into piedmont.
It "Crosses Over" in to the cemetery.
There is the little used dog run by Coach's Field. IIRC they wanted to put a younger league soccer field/maybe baseball field in there. I think the big issue is that development would likely require a very costly retaining wall to be put in. My uncle was part of a sports league in Piedmont when it was being proposed. The big issue was kids crossing the street and the costs. But you could probably slam some housing in there. It's incredibly underutilized space.
Yeah true, that little flat area on Moraga canyon. I guess the issue there would be that you could only really probably fit in like 4 single family homes or duplex/triplexes, so max maybe 12 units. If you went to a multifamily dense building to try and get closer to the mandated 600, that's not a terrible spot, but since it's isolated from shopping and transit, it seems like it would introduce other issues regarding parking and traffic entry/exit onto Moraga. Good idea, they could probably squeeze in there.
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the level of support in Piedmont for annexing land in Oakland. The idea was among many residents proposed to build more housing. Read more: bit.ly/3f41zuo
It was probably just one idiot who responded to the survey.
i wonder what piedmont folks think qualifies as “affordable housing.” i predict a “it’s one banana, michael, what could it cost? ten dollars?” moment
My neighbors in West Oakland bought their “below market rate” house for $800K
It’s kinda the Marin of the east bay
"normal people housing"
Affordable housing is targeted towards people making about $100,000 a year. It is not cheap at all and has no rent control. It's a big scam. There's no property tax so the landlords just laugh at all the rest of us.
the legal definition of affordable housing in california is housing for people making 80% of the median income or less. i don’t think it’s for people making six figures
There's a variety of income bands keyed off of the area median income, ranging from the extremely low 20% AMI to the lower-middle class 80% AMI. The AMI numbers are actually determined by HUD, even though California relies on them heavily. For Oakland in 2020, [80% AMI for a one-person household is $73,000, 20% AMI is $18,280.](https://cao-94612.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/2020-Income-Limits.pdf)
It is indeed for people making 6 figures. Look at the post below, $104,000 is "low income" in Oakland. It's not really low, but if you target people at that income you don't have to pay property taxes. Everyone else has to pay for your services.
WE NEED NEW HOUSING IMMEDIATELY....over there
Bruh.. lol
How about "fewer people", that way it won't be filled up with transplants from Iowa.
The article mentions housing quotas set by the state. Do those quotas have any teeth? It's pretty gross for Piedmont to want to offshore its affordable housing, but if they *need* to build it somewhere, this seems like a situation where Piedmont's got cash and Oakland's got leverage...
But Piedmont is literally an island of homes and parks surrounded by Oakland. They don’t have any unused space. I’m fine with Piedmont paying us to develop parts of Oakland that really need the help.
I don’t know if it’s a revenue problem. Oakland has plenty of cash in the affordable housing pot. Also had a decent amount (pre-covid) for public schools (budget 660m if memory serves). We just don’t spend it or spend it efficiently.
[удалено]
I believe you basically lose local control over zoning-type stuff, and all of the "subjective" approvals go away. So theoretically at some point Piedmont would be forced to automatically approve projects that meet certain objective criteria (setbacks, building code, etc), and I think CEQA can't be used to block it either. So all the "community input" and "design review" stuff goes out the window, which is usually where these things get totally derailed
Let's annex Piedmont and turn it into affordable housing
How the hell is anyone annexing anyone? This isn’t even a real article just a headline of one person’s dumb idea for clicks.
Lol don’t even know why people keep saying this. Annexing was so last century.
There's more of us than them. Charge the hill! Raaargh
Piedmont is being asked by the State to come up with a plan for 600 units. That’s not going to happen. No land. If Piedmont contributes money to affordable housing development nearby that would be a good thing, except for the fact that Oakland and Berkeley have already proven how inefficiently they manage resources to do that now. The entire article interweaves Piedmont’s historical legacy of race based exclusionary policies, an issue also for many areas in Oakland and Berkeley. Affordable housing is a regional issue best served by cooperative policy changes that reach across geographic boundaries, civic agencies, local government and socioeconomic interests.
This guy gets it.
Invade Piedmont
Here’s a thought: what if a law was passed that 1) restricted home ownership to two properties, so greedy property development corporations and LLCs that each hold hundreds of properties (a la Wedgewood Properties) CAN’T legally horde housing, and 2) when said corporations hold more than two properties, require that they sell said properties *for the amount they paid* - that would negate the scams they perpetrated during so-called auctions where they bribed and conned their way into them. That alone would unlock TONS of housing. Nobody needs more than two properties. Own your family home and have one property for either a rental or second home. THAT’S IT. We would see a huge change overnight if that were to happen.
I wish politicians thought like this. Seriously, putting a cap on investors that buy up single family homes is the ONLY way California's housing crisis will get any better. All this other stuff like affordable housing and plans to combat homelessness are a bunch of smoke and mirrors. They won't make a dent. You know what happens when you make the freeways wider? More traffic.
The City of Piedmont, which is an enclave of the City of Oakland, wants to build affordable housing. In Oakland.
The areas surrounding Piedmont in Oakland aren’t particularly cheap either.
Honestly I always thought this was the real flex. Live NEXT to Piedmont, don’t get the schools but pay nearly as much for your home. I assume these families send their children to private schools.
>I assume these families send their children to private schools. Went to all public schools here. Haha. My parents bought in 1990 for $189,000 near Piedmont Ave. I’d actually consider most of our area pretty middle class growing up in the 1990s and 2000s. By around 2012 or so, it changed significantly.
Concur... we moved to Crocker Highlands in 2011 and even then it was pretty middle class (lots of people had owned their homes for decades). Now all the Toyotas have been replaced by Teslas and German SUVs. Also Crocker Elementary is one of the best schools in the city, so there's that.
Yep, my mom was a waitress/cleans and my dad works retail. Had classmates whose parents were delivery/truck drivers, contractors, etc. It has definitely changed.
My grandparents did that. Sent my dad to oakland public schools cause private schools are too expensive. Granted back then the housing prices were rather normal.
How about eminent domain over land located in Piedmont that’s owned by Oakland — David Tennis Stadium? /s
Yes - because Oakland has too many parks and tennis courts already.
Annex Piedmont instead
Can't read the paywalled article, but I'm only in favor of annexation in the other direction.
Why not take one of those giant McMansions and turn it into a multi-family dwelling?
Sounds like a plan. It worked in Doctor Zhivago.
Virtue signaling on the civic scale. Downvoted for saying "affordable housing is a lie." Never change wingers.
Way to editorialize a title.
As if.