A century-old two-story apartment building at 5035 International Boulevard in Oakland’s Melrose neighborhood is slated for demolition to make way for a 38-unit residential tower rising 84 feet above the corner of 51st Avenue and International Boulevard. The existing structure, built around 1922, sits on a compact 0.1-acre lot, and the new proposal would pack roughly 12,460 square feet of living space into five primary floors plus three mezzanine levels, giving the building an overall height closer to eight floors.
The project is the work of property owner LCD Enterprises Group LLC, an Oakland-based firm, with Los Angeles-based architecture firm Franklin Studios handling the application and design, according to San Francisco YIMBY. Public property records show LCD Enterprises purchased the 0.1-acre parcel on June 2, 2022, for $950,000, per PropertyShark, meaning the company sat on the site for roughly four years before filing redevelopment permits. Architectural illustrations have not yet been shared publicly, and no construction timeline or cost estimate has been released, the outlet’s report notes.
No Parking, No Problem Under State Law
Notably absent from the plans is any automobile parking. Instead, the ground floor will include bicycle parking, a design choice made possible by California Assembly Bill 2097, which bars cities from enforcing minimum off-street parking requirements on residential developments within a half-mile of a major transit stop, according to the Terner Center for Housing Innovation. International Boulevard is served directly by AC Transit’s Line 1T Tempo Bus Rapid Transit line, a dedicated 9.5-mile corridor connecting downtown Oakland to San Leandro that carries more than 17,000 weekday riders, per AC Transit. Future residents would also be just over a mile from Fruitvale BART Station, the outlet’s report adds.
The project’s scale is enabled by California’s State Density Bonus Law under Government Code Section 65915, which grants developers height and floor-area concessions in exchange for reserving units for lower-income households. Under the proposal, 15% of the residential units would be deed-restricted for very low-income households and 10% would be set aside for moderate-income households. That trade-off, as explained by CaliChi Design Group, is what allows an 84-foot structure with five primary floors and three mezzanine levels to rise on a lot barely a tenth of an acre.
Zoning and the Broader Housing Push
The parcel sits within Oakland’s Urban Residential-5 (RU-5) zone, a designation the city says is specifically meant to encourage multi-unit mid-rise and high-rise housing along major commercial corridors like International Boulevard. That zoning intent lines up with pressure from the state: Oakland’s 2023-2031 Housing Element, certified by California housing officials in February 2023, requires the city to plan for 26,251 new residential units across all income tiers over its eight-year housing cycle…