Starting construction on a 64-acre site that could eventually house thousands of people and jobs may sound daunting, but the build-out might be the easy part of Brooklyn Basin. Developers marked the ground breaking of the huge, waterfront development in Oakland on Thursday morning a good 13 years after it was conceived.
Investors, city officials, labor groups, community leaders and residents gathered for the event that, as Oakland Mayor Jean Quan put it, was not just a milestone for the developers but all of Oakland.
“Our history and future is on the waterfront,” Quan said before a crowd of about 200 people who showed up for the ground breaking.
The developers behind Brooklyn Basin include Signature Development Group and Zarsion Holdings Group Ltd., a Chinese investor that committed $1.5 billion to build out the project over the next 15 years.
Signature Development came on to the project after being selected by the Port of Oakland as the master developer in 2001. The project went through years of securing approvals from various entities, lawsuits and the Great Recession before reaching the point of getting started.
Brooklyn Basin is slated to include 3,100 units of housing, 200,000 square feet of commercial space and more than 30 acres of parks and open space on former industrial land along the Oakland Estuary.
It is the one of the biggest residential projects ever in Oakland’s history and is currently one of the largest Chinese investments in a U.S. project.
“Oakland has a lot of potential. Some people were a little bit worried about the city, but that’s why we are here,” said Arthur Wang, president of Zarsion America Inc., the division of Zarsion managing the Brooklyn Basin investment. “We want to contribute to this community.”
San Francisco Business Times
Please
contact us in case of Copyright Infringement of the photo sourced from the internet, we will remove it within 24 hours.
京公网安备 11010502030593号
