On a quiet stretch of Harrison Street in downtown Oakland, a chain-link fence has long guarded a surface parking lot, one of several gaps in a neighborhood where investment seems to come in waves. This month, construction finally began to fill it.
The parking lot at 1523 Harrison St., now giving way to the foundation for an 11-story building with 284 income-restricted apartments, was purchased by local developer oWOW for $10.5 million late last month. A week later, excavation was underway.
What appears sudden is actually the culmination of years of groundwork and several big revisions: oWOW has been fine tuning its use of prefabricated, standardized building components, drawing from lessons learned from its earlier mass timber, market-rate housing tower next to the Harrison Street site, where it initially planned a 20-story tower…