Safeway College Avenue

Kier + Wright provided civil engineering, land surveying and construction staking services for a shopping center in Oakland with 55,000 square feet of retail space. The 2.4-acre development includes a ground-level Safeway with rooftop parking, a plaza, and a multi-tenant retail building with frontages on two adjacent streets.

The triangular development, located in Oakland’s Rockridge neighborhood, is just south of Berkeley’s city limits. Berkeley residential properties border the northerly portion of the site. To the west and the east, pre-existing commercial and retail developments across College Avenue and Claremont Avenue face the site.

The new development replaced a smaller Safeway with surface parking. By demolishing the smaller store and constructing a new, 45,500-square-foot grocery store with rooftop parking, Safeway substantially increased the site’s capacity for both retail space and on-site parking. The development includes a secondary 9,500-square-foot multi-tenant retail component. A pedestrian plaza divides the two buildings and provides pedestrian access to both from the adjacent streets. The result is a development that improves the community’s walking access between the new retail and the pre-existing developments surrounding the site.

Representatives from the Rockridge community maintained active involvement in the project from planning through construction. In response to community feedback, architectural concepts were reworked several times during design development and during the preparation of construction documents, requiring that the design consultants maintain flexibility throughout the plan development process.

Kier + Wright’s site development scope included demolition plans, grading and drainage design, utility plans, and stormwater treatment design.

The longitudinal street slope along Claremont is over two times greater than the slope along College. The differing street slopes, multiple building entrances with various pedestrian access points, and the site’s unusual triangular shape added complexity to the design of site work. Kier + Wright prepared a particularly intricate grading design that provided the specific ADA access needed for building entrances with varying finished floor elevations along both streets and in the plaza area.

Kier + Wright’s off-site scope included design of parking improvements in both Oakland and Berkeley, bulb-outs for traffic calming, and ADA upgrades on both sides of College and Claremont.