An 11-storey post-and-plate mass-timber tower will finally rise in Downtown Oakland, following San Diego-based not-for-profit Community HousingWorks’s $10.2 million purchase of full ownership of the 1523 Harrison Street site.
Wood Central understands that the California Municipal Finance Authority has also committed $39.6 million toward acquisition and construction costs, with Jeremy Harris, oWow’s development director, confirming that crews are expected to start work on the developer’s first build-to-rent project before the year’s out.
The design, approved in late 2025, calls for an 11-storey structure rising over a two-storey concrete podium, with the upper nine floors built from Freres Lumber’s mass plywood panels (MPP), a veneer-based engineered wood product which is up to 15 per cent cheaper and faster to construct relative to steel and concrete.
Standing 106 feet (32.3 metres) tall, the tower will deliver 195,360 square feet (18,150 square metres) of interior space, including 164,800 square feet (15,310 square metres) of housing and 30,540 square feet (2,837 square metres) of parking. All 284 units are designated affordable, with 281 restricted to tenants and three reserved for on-site managers.
oWow’s in-house architecture team produced the final design, which Community HousingWorks is carrying forward without alteration, a duo-tone façade of contrasting white and blue panels above a base wrapped in dark grey fibre-cement cladding. The scheme deliberately mirrors the adjacent 19-storey mass plywood tower, completed at 1510 Webster Street on the same block.
From Plyscraper to Affordable Housing: A four-year pivot
Initial plans in 2022 proposed a 20-storey market-rate tower, later increased to 25 and then 28 storeys. As Oakland’s post-pandemic market stalled and financing dried up, the plan shifted to an 11-storey, fully affordable LIHTC-financed project—the only viable path when lenders declined to support the market-rate version.
Andy Ball, oWow’s president, has long argued that MPP’s speed and cost advantages keep the economics viable where conventional systems fall short, and the Harrison Street financing stack supports that.
In 2024, Andrew Dunn, CEO of the Australian Timber Development Association, said that MPP is “a game-changer in the world of sustainable construction materials.” At the time, Dunn noted that the product’s manufacture, scarfing cross-banded LVL to produce a cross-laminated timber panel, creates a post-and-plate system structurally comparable to concrete flat-plates, giving it load-bearing performance that steel-and-concrete cannot match.
The full-block site bounded by Harrison Street, Webster Street, 15th Street and 17th Street sits between Oakland’s Downtown and Lakeside neighbourhoods, two blocks from the 12th Street BART station, placing all 284 homes within direct reach of one of the Bay Area’s busiest transit interchanges.
- To learn more about MPP, which oWow in 2024 claimed could help it develop hundreds of mid-rise and high-rise buildings across the United States and around the world, click here for Wood Central’s special feature.
