[timbad]

SF Chron article on Oakland

A wave of migration from San Francisco, along with local business growth, has made Oakland one of the hottest local economies in the country. Additional office projects totaling more than 4 million square feet, or room for 20,000 more employees, are under construction or planned downtown, which currently has around 80,000 jobs.

More than a dozen major housing projects are also in progress. Combined with easy BART access and proximity to new restaurants and bars, downtown is seeing the biggest building boom in decades, experts say. ...

Morten Jensen, president of Oakland architecture firm JRDV, increasingly sees a “dual core” of major employment and housing centers in San Francisco and Oakland, connected by a 15-minute BART ride. ...

A draft plan calls for 61,000 new jobs and nearly 30,000 new homes downtown, up to a quarter of them affordable, by 2040. The city could implement fees and require more affordable housing to help meet those goals. Less than 7% of the 9,304 homes being built citywide are affordable, despite fees on market-rate housing passed in 2016.

also Chron, comparison of SF and Oakland piece

Why is development suddenly booming in Oakland?

The Oakland building boom has its roots in a series of five neighborhood plans the city passed in 2014 and 2015 that are now bearing fruit. These plans — which included Lake Merritt, West Oakland and Broadway-Valdez — lured developers by relaxing zoning and eliminating parking requirements. At the same time, the price of developing in San Francisco — a combination of construction costs, land value and various impact fees and affordable housing requirements — had jumped to the point where major regional and national developers were looking for alternatives. While Oakland has a variety of impact fees that add up to about $65,000 a unit, the number in San Francisco is more than $165,000 a unit, according to Todd David, executive director of the building industry group the San Francisco Housing Action Coalition. Approvals in Oakland were generally seen as faster and less contentious than in San Francisco. Moreover, lenders are finally confident that Oakland is a safe place to invest.