A West Oakland Megaproject Now Wants to Be a Parking Lot

Here is a sentence that should not be possible in 2026. A parcel sitting directly across from a BART station, once cleared by the city to hold 1,032 homes, now wants permission to become a parking lot. That is the latest turn for 500 Kirkham Street, and it is a useful, slightly deflating window into how West Oakland development actually moves. Which is to say slowly, unevenly, and almost never on the timeline the approval paperwork implies.

The short version: the homes were approved years ago. The parking lot is the part that might actually happen next.

What is actually happening at 500 Kirkham

In late June, the site’s owner, Columbia Pacific Advisors, filed for a temporary conditional use permit to run roughly 250 fee parking spaces on the property for up to five years, with the option to extend, as first reported by San Francisco YIMBY. The application is blunt about why. In its own words, it is asking for interim parking “until the market for development of a mixed-use residential project at this site recovers,” and it plans to keep marketing the land for housing the entire time.

Right now the lot is not even a clean parking lot. It is being used to store shipping containers and park commercial semi-trucks. So the upgrade on the table is from truck yard to car lot, across the street from a regional rail station. That is the state of play.

How 1,032 approved homes turned into a truck yard

The plan here was not small. Back in the summer of 2019 the city gave final approval to a 1,032-unit project from Panoramic Interests, spread across three buildings with about 35,000 square feet of commercial space. The headline piece was a 32-story, 340-foot tower holding 456 apartments. For context, that is one of the taller things anyone has seriously proposed for West Oakland, and it was entitled, designed, and ready on paper.

Then the financing math fell apart. Panoramic defaulted on its loan in 2023 and the property went back to its lender. Columbia Pacific Advisors holds it now and has been shopping it as a development opportunity. No buyer has stepped up to build the towers, so the owner is doing the rational short-term thing. Generate a little revenue from parking while waiting for interest rates, construction costs, and rents to line up.

Here are the bones of what was approved, and what is on the table instead:

Approved 2019: 1,032 homes in three buildings, including a 32-story, 340-foot tower with 456 apartments and about 35,000 square feet of commercial space

Developer Panoramic Interests defaulted in 2023, and the lender took the site back

Current owner Columbia Pacific Advisors is marketing the parcel for sale

Proposed now: a temporary parking lot of roughly 250 spaces, up to five years, while the site stays listed for housing

The parking irony nobody planned

The detail that makes this almost funny: the original project was praised, and criticized, for including very few parking spaces. That was the point. You build housing without much parking precisely because it sits on top of BART, so residents ride instead of drive. Now the same lot’s best available use is parking for everybody else’s cars.

It gets sharper. Right across the street, BART is finally moving on its own land. The agency’s Mandela Station transit-oriented development is set to start construction in the second half of 2026, beginning with 240 affordable apartments. To make room, BART is closing roughly 300 of the station’s 440 parking spaces, with reserved parking ending and fewer spots available as soon as this summer. So at one corner of West Oakland BART, a public agency is tearing out parking to build homes. At the corner across the way, a private owner wants to tear up a stalled housing site to build parking. The two moves are happening within a few hundred feet of each other.

What is actually moving in West Oakland

This is the part worth sitting with, because “West Oakland has a 1,032-unit project” and “West Oakland is getting 1,032 homes soon” are very different statements. One is true. The other is not. The blocks around West Oakland BART carry a long list of entitlements and a much shorter list of cranes.

Here is the honest scoreboard for the immediate BART area:

The takeaway is not gloom. Mandela Station is a genuinely big deal, and it is the one most likely to put shovels in the ground first, starting with the affordable phase. But it is one project. The pace of real change in West Oakland over the next few years will be set by what breaks ground, not by the stack of approvals that looked impressive in 2019.

Approved is not the same as coming soon

This is where the way we look at neighborhoods at Houseberry earns its keep. When you are comparing blocks, an entitlement on file should not move the needle much. A delivered building should. A construction fence with a real lender behind it lands somewhere in between. The 500 Kirkham saga is a clean reminder that a neighborhood’s listed pipeline and its actual near-term future can point in different directions.

If you are weighing a home near West Oakland BART partly on the bet that all this approved density arrives and lifts the area, be honest about the timeline. Some of it will. Some of it, like the Kirkham tower, may sit for years or get redesigned smaller by whoever finally buys it. That uncertainty does not make West Oakland a bad place to buy. It is one of Oakland’s most transit-rich, character-heavy neighborhoods, full of the Victorians the city is known for, and you can see how its neighborhoods stack up across Oakland. It just means the smart move is to underwrite the block on what exists today, not on renderings.

So if you are researching the area, a few practical questions answer themselves. Will 500 Kirkham get built? Eventually, probably, but on nobody’s published schedule, and likely only after the market shifts and a buyer commits. Is West Oakland still changing? Yes, but the change you can count on in the near term is Mandela Station, not the stalled sites. And what should you check before buying near a project like this? Whether it is entitled or under construction, who owns it now, and whether financing actually exists, because those three things separate a real catalyst from a nice drawing.

That is the same lens worth applying citywide. It helps to see which Oakland neighborhoods offer the most value right now and where prices are genuinely appreciating, rather than guessing from the project with the tallest tower on paper. West Oakland’s transformation is real. It is just being written one financed building at a time, and for now the next chapter is a parking lot.

Sources

Temporary Parking Proposed For 500 Kirkham Street, West Oakland (San Francisco YIMBY)

West Oakland Gets Massive 1,032-Home Project, Very Few Parking Spaces (Bisnow)

Panoramic Defaults on Loan for 1,000-Unit Apartment Tower in Oakland (The Real Deal)

Transit-Oriented Development, West Oakland and Mandela Station (BART)

Reserved parking at West Oakland station ends, fewer spots beginning July (BART)