87-Unit Modular Housing Pitched for Vacant Oakland Lot on Brook Street

A plan has surfaced for an 87-unit modular apartment building on a vacant quarter-acre lot at 3070 Brook Street in Oakland’s Broadway-Valdez district, and the filing does not say who owns the project. Initial plans call for a five-story building of efficiency units, invoking California’s State Density Bonus law to pack that many homes onto a parcel this size. No developer name appears on the public record.

Why it matters

Broadway-Valdez sits in the mixed-use corridor between 30th Street and Broadway that Oakland has pushed to redevelop for years, and a modular, efficiency-unit building is the kind of fast, cheap infill the city’s density bonus rules were written to produce. But the ownership trail here runs cold. SF YIMBY reported the property is held by two individuals based in Rancho Palos Verdes, in Southern California, and Hoodline separately described the applicant as an unnamed Southern California family trust. Neither names the trust. The listed applicant of record, San Francisco-based PermitFlow, is a permit-expediting service, not the project’s owner, and it previously filed a smaller, now-voided preliminary application for the same lot in 2025 proposing four detached homes or modular ADUs. For a corridor Oakland is counting on densifying, the actual party making that bet is not on file anywhere a reporter or a neighbor can check.

The numbers

The current proposal is for 87 efficiency dwelling units across five stories on a lot of roughly a quarter acre, a density made possible only by invoking the state density bonus law layered onto Oakland’s own density-bonus provisions under Planning Code Chapter 17.107. Whether any of the 87 units would carry an affordability covenant, and what specific bonus percentage the project is claiming, has not been disclosed in the reporting available. The prior 2025 filing on the same site proposed just four units, a twentyfold jump in unit count between that application and this one.

What’s next

No hearing date, case number, or formal planning application has surfaced publicly for the current 87-unit proposal, and the project remains a pitch, not an approved building. Until the owner is named in a public filing, the unit count, the affordability terms, and the density bonus percentage are the only verifiable facts about who is trying to build nearly 90 homes on an Oakland quarter acre. Follow the Broadway-Valdez pipeline in our San Francisco market coverage.