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After years of struggle, work began Monday at the site of what will become the city’s largest low-income housing structure and the home for a collection of cutting-edge environmental groups. 

“It feels amazing,” said Dan Sawislak, executive director of Resources for Community Development (RCD), developers of the 97-unit Oxford Plaza apartment complex. 

“We’re on our way,” said Amy Tobin, executive director of the David Brower Center, the companion office building, which will break new ground as an environmentally friendly structure. 

While Oxford Plaza has raised all the $40 million in loans and guarantees—with much of the latter provided by the City of Berkeley—needed to complete their project, the Brower Center is still raising funds for the center. 

A new fence is be the first sign of construction at the city’s now-closed Oxford parking lot, which occupies the eastern end of the block bordered on the north and south by Kittredge Street and Allston Way. 

Tobin said the fence will be the first stage in preparation of the site for construction that will formally commence in mid-May with a yet-to-be-scheduled groundbreaking ceremony. 

The first phase of construction will be excavation of the site’s underground parking lot, created to replace many—but not all—of the surface spaces on the city lot the structures will cover. 

The site will house both the center, an office building which honors Berkeley’s most famous environmentalist, and Oxford Plaza, which will provide apartments for low-income residents and families. Construction is expected to be completed in time for an opening in early 2009. 

“The general contractor will be mobilizing on the site in the next few weeks,” said Tobin, “which means that they are getting everything set up for construction.” 

The Berkeley City Council gave the project a final green light Jan. 30, though the road to construction proved a bit bumpy. Most recently a campaign by opponents who wanted a public referendum to let voters turn thumbs up or down on the project delayed movement for a month, while backers tried and failed to get the requisite number of signatures to put the measure on the ballot. 

Formal transfer of the land from the city to the new owners occurred Friday, Sawislak said. 

Critics like Jesse Arreguin, while praising the new low-income housing, have questioned the commitment of the city’s entire Housing Trust Fund budget to the project, rather than using it to fund less-expensive housing by rehabilitating old buildings. 

Reduced funding forced developers of the six-story, 55,000-square-foot apartment building to downscale that building’s finish, and they lost their anchor commercial tenant when eco-friendly outdoor gear supplier Patagonia backed out of their planned lease for the 8,500-square-foot retail space. 

“We’re just getting started looking for a new tenant,” Sawislak said, adding that he hopes to enlist the support of some of the planned tenants at the Brower Center to find an environmentally friendly retailer to take the space. 

A search for tenants for the new apartments won’t begin until about six months before the building is completed, or sometime next summer, he said. 

Funding 

Most of the $29 million needed for the Brower Center has been raised. The majority of funding—$17.5 million—has been raised through tax-credit financing and low-interest loans, while an additional $9.1 million has come from pledges and contributions—leaving $2.4 million yet to be raised, Tobin said. 

“Fund-raising should be a lot easier once construction begins,” she said.  

The building will offer 31,700 square feet of office space, a 7,000-square-foot conference center and space for a restaurant. 

The two buildings are legally separate projects and will be built by two separate construction companies, with Cahill Construction handling the housing component and Swinerton Building—a firm with experience in green building techniques—building the Brower Center. 

Swinerton, which has offices from Denver to Honolulu, will be creating a building designed to meet the highest, Platinum, ranking of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System. 

Building features for the center include solar panels, light-conducting materials to bring daylight into the interior, extensive use of recycled materials and other eco-friendly materials and techniques.  

While the housing complex is still looking for a commercial tenant, Tobin said the Brower Center “has a waiting list for tenants, and the challenge will be to find the right mix.” 

Anchor tenants for the center are expected to be Earth Island Institute, which was founded by the center’s namesake, and the Center for Ecoliteracy. 

Lots and cars 

The Oxford Street lot has now closed for public parking, the second lot serving Berkeley’s downtown film theaters to close in the last three years.  

A two-story, 362-space parking structure west of the Berkeley Public Library was demolished to make way for the Library Gardens apartments, with only 130 of the spaces replaced in the complex’s new underground lot. 

More than two-thirds of the Oxford lot’s public surface spaces lost to the new buildings will be replaced in an underground level beneath the site—97 of the existing 132 surface spaces. 

Still, the combined figures for both projects reveal a decline of public, off-street spaces in the two sites most convenient to Berkeley film-goers from the previous 494 spaces to the projected 227 when the new underground lot opens at the Oxford site. 

No parking spaces are being allotted for the David Brower Center in light of the environmental beliefs of its namesake and the expected tenants, while only 41 spaces are allotted for Oxford Plaza.