Step 01
Listen
Before we draw anything, we meet the people who live and work within a few hundred feet of the site: neighbors, merchants, block clubs, congregations, and the folks who have been organizing here far longer than we have.
About the firm
The block should still be recognizable afterwards.
The Town Development Group is a community-focused real estate development company based in Oakland, California.
Why we started
Oakland does not have a development problem. It has a whose-terms problem. Capital arrives from somewhere else, decides what a neighborhood needs from somewhere else, and leaves once the building is stabilized and sold. The people who spent thirty years making the block worth investing in are the ones asked to absorb the consequences.
We started The Town Development Group to work the other way around: to be a developer that is from here, builds here, and is still here when the warranty runs out. That is a slower way to do this business. We think it produces better buildings and considerably better neighbors.
Development happens to neighborhoods far more often than it happens with them.
What “The Town” means
The Town is what Oakland calls itself — not a slogan somebody bought, but a name the city gave itself. Taking it as ours is a commitment we expect to be measured against. If our projects do not make the town better for the people already in it, we have not earned the name.
How we work
Our process is deliberately front-loaded. Most of the decisions that determine whether a project helps or harms a block are made long before anything is built, so that is where we spend our time.
Step 02
Design
What we hear becomes program: the unit mix, the ground-floor use, the parking, the setbacks, the construction hours. We show real drawings and explain the trade-offs honestly, including the ones we cannot solve.
Step 03
Build
Local contractors and trades wherever the scope allows, with apprenticeship built into the schedule. Neighbors get a named contact and a straight answer about noise, dust, and dates.
Step 04
Steward
We build to hold. That means real maintenance reserves, responsive management, and ground-floor tenancy that stays affordable to the kind of businesses the block actually uses.
Who we work with
Much of the land best suited to community-serving development is already owned by the community — by churches, mosques and temples, by nonprofits and community land trusts, by families who have held a parcel for two or three generations. Those owners are routinely offered one option: sell.
We are built to offer a second one. We partner as a co-developer or an advisor so that the owner keeps their land and their say, and still gets a building finished, financed, and operated properly. The structure varies; the principle does not.
Where we are going
We are an early-stage firm and we would rather say so plainly than pad this page. Our first projects are in predevelopment now, and we will publish each one here — with its neighborhood, its program, and its partners — as it becomes real.
If you own a site, represent an organization with land, or want to know what is being planned near you, get in touch.
Let’s talk about your block.
We read every message that comes in, and we answer the ones that are not selling us something.