When Leigh Carroll moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Glenview 10 years ago, the main draw was the family-friendly neighborhood and the prospect of sending her child to a good school nearby.
Oakland’s Rent Registry
This story is part of a series on Oakland’s new rent registry. Read previous pieces about average rent prices and how much housing costs in each neighborhood.
Over the following decade, she put down roots in the community, got married, and had another kid. Carroll’s household has doubled in size since she first arrived. Their apartment has not.
The 800-square-foot unit has “no dedicated eating area, and not really any ability for the kids to play outside,” Carroll said. She and her husband both work from home and the kids, 7 and 14, share a bedroom.
They’d like to move, but they face a dilemma that’s common for Oakland families: “Either leave a neighborhood where you’re established, or sacrifice space or expendable income,” Carroll said.
The city of Oakland’s new rent registry, a first-of-its kind database of 43,000 housing units, reveals that the vast majority of rentals in the city—87%—have two bedrooms or fewer. Three-bedroom rentals are hard to find—they make up just 10% of the homes in the registry. Anything larger than that is rare.
The prices for the few larger rentals that do exist are also higher, in an already high-cost city. Three-bedrooms in Oakland cost about $500 more per month than two-bedrooms, on average. Additionally, the homes with three or more bedrooms are often single-family houses, which are exempt from rent control by state law and subject to larger rent hikes.
More units still need to be registered, and the database does not include housing built in the last 10 years. But the large amount of data already collected lays bare the difficulty that families and other large households face when trying to rent a home that’s big enough to fit them.
Carroll’s family is also “priced out” of buying a home in Oakland, she said. Carroll works promoting literacy and her husband also works for a nonprofit. They’re acutely aware that residents have “fewer options to do mission-driven work” in Oakland without giving up basic comfort.
The lack of large units, and especially those renting at a low cost, also means many families are living over-crowded in Oakland, with parents raising several children in small apartments, and turning closets and nooks into living quarters.
Chasing a more family-friendly downtown
Tiffany Eng knows all about the shortage of bigger rental units in Oakland.
In the early 2010s, she was living in a two-bedroom condo on 10th Street with her husband, two children, and dog. They were enamored with downtown living, but cramped in their space. They wanted to upsize somewhere close to their apartment.
Easier said than done.
“There was construction everywhere, but we could not find a three-bedroom,” she told The Oaklandside. She started poking around the city records showing what kind of units were getting built.
“I went project by project, and there were basically no three-bedrooms for the past 10 years,” she said.
This was right around when Oakland was kicking off the process of creating its Downtown Specific Plan. “Everyone was talking about food and the arts and making room for tech workers, but there was no mention of families,” said Eng. “I was a little triggered. There were a lot of people that believed families don’t belong downtown.”
Enter Family Friendly Oakland, an initiative Eng launched to advocate for a city more hospitable to children, parents, and a diversity of ages. More parks, safer streets, and apartments that could fit Dad, Grandma, two teeangers, and a toddler. Eng, trained as a city planner, was working in the affordable housing field at the time, but the campaign was a volunteer effort and passion project.
She spoke at meetings, poured over records, and pestered elected officials, urging them to pay attention to unit sizes when project proposals came before Oakland’s councils and commissions.
Why aren’t more three-bedroom apartments getting built in Oakland?
Like most Bay Area cities, Oakland has been experiencing a crushing housing shortage for years. State officials and local advocates have urged the city to build more, and fast. Oakland, like elsewhere, is required by state law to submit a plan for a set number of new housing units over an eight-year timeline. In the most recent cycle, Oakland was tasked with planning for 26,000 units between 2023-2031.
The point of this so-called Regional Housing Needs Allocation is to create a feasible roadmap for increasing density and meeting much-needed affordability targets. How many bedrooms these units will have is not usually part of the conversation, and pursuing larger apartments can be even counterproductive to meeting the goal of building the most units possible, given the limits on height and size of buildings in many neighborhoods.
Oakland’s latest Housing Element does touch on unit size. One of the five goals in the sweeping, eight-year plan adopted last year is to increase affordable housing production. As one of the several “actions” associated with that goal, city staff said they’ll “encourage a range of unit sizes for affordable housing.”
They explain they’ll do this by monitoring openings and applications for existing buildings, and potentially adjusting how the city awards subsidies to new projects if the offerings aren’t meeting residents’ needs. The city could give more “points” to developers whose affordable projects include larger units, incentivizing that construction.
With privately funded, market-rate development, larger apartments are simply more financially risky to build, said Oakland general contractor Carlos Plazola of BuildZig. In the 2010s, he worked in mid-rise construction, and only did one project with three-bedrooms, a church conversion in North Oakland.
“Developers can only take on so much risk for their investors,” he said. Financiers are interested in projects that will yield the highest revenue—rents—per square foot.
“The [construction] costs aren’t higher for three-bedrooms—it’s a marginal increase” in materials and labor expenses, Plazola said. “The issue becomes the expectation of revenue. Who’s occupying the third bedroom?”
With a two-bedroom apartment, it’s pretty safe to assume it will draw two working professionals willing to pay a significant amount of their income on rent, he said. But in a three-bedroom, the additional tenants are often children or grandparents, and “the price people are willing to pay for a third bedroom starts dropping.”
Although the average $500 increase between a two-bedroom and three-bedroom is significant for tenants, for developers it may not compare to the return on building more one- or two-bedrooms instead.
This preponderance of smaller rental housing is hardly unique to Oakland. Other cities where demand for housing outstrips supply also tend to lack larger units fit for bigger households. Chicago has long faced this shortage, as has New York City.
From Plazola’s perspective, the government both hampers, and has the opportunity to encourage, construction of larger units. Increasing fees and requirements for developers in Oakland amount to “death by a thousand cuts,” said Plazola. However, the city has had no trouble meeting its targets for market-rate construction, instead seriously lagging on affordability goals.
Plazola said the city should consider subsidies for private developers, whether in the form of loans to build in low-income neighborhoods or credits if a building includes a certain number of affordable three-bedrooms.
The state already has a longstanding program encouraging general affordability in private projects. Developers can receive a “density bonus”—permission to construct a larger building than they’d be allowed to otherwise—if they include a certain number of below-market units.
Carroll, the Glenview resident, also wishes the three- and four-bedrooms that already exist in Oakland, typically in single-family homes, were more accessible to renting families like hers. This could happen through more public support for first-time homebuyers, she said, or through rent control and other protections for these houses. The state’s 1995 Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act prohibits rent control for single-family homes.
Eng says that Oakland must find a way to create more large living spaces, whatever it takes.
When she lived in a building with a range of units, she saw families grow up there. A couple would have a child, or welcome an aging parent, and find larger digs on another floor. Young roommates would move in and out, and pair up. There were options.
“This is how a functioning community works,” Eng said. “If you can have a diversity of unit mixes, you can have diversity of generations and create a village where people support each other.”
She’s still advocating for family-friendliness these days, only now through Friends of Lincoln Square Park, supporting plans for a new rec center there. Improving Oakland’s public spaces feels slightly more achievable than fundamentally altering its housing supply.
Eng’s family ended up buying a townhouse in the Oakland Hills when interest rates dropped low enough in 2015. She called the decision “the grand compromise,” and misses the hustle-bustle of the city’s center.
“I still have a search set for a three-bedroom downtown,” she said.
This story was updated after we received additional information from the city of Oakland after publication, confirming that developers must provide information on unit size in project applications.
