A century-old two-story apartment building at 5035 International Boulevard in Oakland's Melrose neighborhood is slated for demolition to make way for a 38-unit residential tower rising 84 feet above the corner of 51st Avenue and International Boulevard. The existing structure, built around 1922, sits on a compact 0.1-acre lot, and the new proposal would pack roughly 12,460 square feet of living space into five primary floors plus three mezzanine levels, giving the building an overall height closer to eight floors.
The project is the work of property owner LCD Enterprises Group LLC, an Oakland-based firm, with Los Angeles-based architecture firm Franklin Studios handling the application and design, according to San Francisco YIMBY. Public property records show LCD Enterprises purchased the 0.1-acre parcel on June 2, 2022, for $950,000, per PropertyShark, meaning the company sat on the site for roughly four years before filing redevelopment permits. Architectural illustrations have not yet been shared publicly, and no construction timeline or cost estimate has been released, the outlet's report notes.
No Parking, No Problem Under State Law
Notably absent from the plans is any automobile parking. Instead, the ground floor will include bicycle parking, a design choice made possible by California Assembly Bill 2097, which bars cities from enforcing minimum off-street parking requirements on residential developments within a half-mile of a major transit stop, according to the Terner Center for Housing Innovation. International Boulevard is served directly by AC Transit's Line 1T Tempo Bus Rapid Transit line, a dedicated 9.5-mile corridor connecting downtown Oakland to San Leandro that carries more than 17,000 weekday riders, per AC Transit. Future residents would also be just over a mile from Fruitvale BART Station, the outlet's report adds.
The project's scale is enabled by California's State Density Bonus Law under Government Code Section 65915, which grants developers height and floor-area concessions in exchange for reserving units for lower-income households. Under the proposal, 15% of the residential units would be deed-restricted for very low-income households and 10% would be set aside for moderate-income households. That trade-off, as explained by CaliChi Design Group, is what allows an 84-foot structure with five primary floors and three mezzanine levels to rise on a lot barely a tenth of an acre.
Zoning and the Broader Housing Push
The parcel sits within Oakland's Urban Residential-5 (RU-5) zone, a designation the city says is specifically meant to encourage multi-unit mid-rise and high-rise housing along major commercial corridors like International Boulevard. That zoning intent lines up with pressure from the state: Oakland's 2023-2031 Housing Element, certified by California housing officials in February 2023, requires the city to plan for 26,251 new residential units across all income tiers over its eight-year housing cycle.
The filing arrives at a pivotal moment for Oakland's housing pipeline. A city Housing Element progress report released in May 2025 found that new market-rate apartment completions had peaked after a five-year boom added over 12,000 units citywide, even as new permit submittals slowed in 2024 amid high interest rates and tight project financing, according to The Oaklandside. That financing squeeze has made density bonuses like the one applied here increasingly central to keeping small-footprint infill projects viable.
A Corridor in Transition
International Boulevard has also seen recent public-safety investment. An interagency safety report from December 2025 found that pedestrian traffic fatalities along the corridor dropped to zero in 2025 after OakDOT and AC Transit installed protective quick-build bollards along the Tempo bus lanes in mid-2024, reversing the boulevard's history as one of Oakland's most dangerous stretches for traffic violence. The surrounding 94601 ZIP code, which includes Melrose, is home to 53,259 people, with only 36.4% of housing units owner-occupied and median home values around $728,000, according to PropertyShark — a tenant-heavy demographic profile that underscores local demand for rental housing.
The site also sits just 0.1 miles from Bridges Academy at Melrose, a public K-5 elementary school in the Oakland Unified School District, per Compass. The project joins a string of housing and redevelopment activity along International Boulevard, including 76 apartments at a Native American health center site a few blocks away, though the corridor has also been the scene of recent violence, including a triple shooting and a stabbing at a busy Fruitvale intersection this summer. No architectural renderings, construction timeline, or cost estimate for the 5035 International Boulevard project have been made public yet.
