OAKLAND — The athletics compound that once served as the headquarters for multiple professional sports teams, including the Raiders, has been sitting empty for months, with no one willing to buy it.
That could spell trouble for Oakland, where officials are expecting the sale to yield millions of dollars by next year. The revenue would help patch up what city leaders call the largest budget deficit in Oakland’s history.
After an auction in the summer saw zero bidders step forward, officials in Alameda County and the city of Oakland — the agencies that jointly own the property — won’t disclose much about their plans, saying only that they are “discussing next steps.”
The compound sits on 16 acres divided into two parcels on Alameda’s Bay Farm Island, a stone’s throw from the coast and a few miles from the Oakland Airport.
It includes a slick athletics training facility, some offices that once served as the Raiders headquarters, multiple turf soccer fields and vast concrete parking space — all set against the scenic backdrop of the flatland that leads to the ocean harbor.
After the Raiders ditched Oakland for Las Vegas, upstart soccer franchise Oakland Roots SC moved into the compound in 2021, paying rent to use the facility as a practice grounds and headquarters until they were kicked out earlier this year ahead of the planned sale.
The soccer team’s management has previously said that purchasing the site wasn’t a priority, especially when the minimum bid at the county’s auction in the summer was just under $36 million.
Oakland expects to take in nearly half of that and put it toward a $360 million deficit that earlier this year led the city to squeeze some of its departments and leave job positions unfilled.
“It seems like they were desperate to generate as much revenue as they could,” said Dan Lindheim, the former Oakland city administrator who is now a professor at UC Berkeley, said of the city’s inclusion of the Raiders facility sale in its budget. “You’d expect there would now be some designation that they’re no longer assuming that revenue.”
Why hasn’t the property been sold? It has been popular among sports franchises, including European soccer clubs that have used it to train during the winter months, during the Roots’ offseason.
Oakland is rapidly losing its professional sports teams, but the property isn’t dedicated to athletics; after Candlestick Park changed hands, the San Francisco ballpark was razed because its new owners cared more about the land underneath it.
Alameda currently designates the Raiders training facility land for “commercial manufacturing,” or light industrial uses — an intuitive fit in an area populated mostly by warehouses, factory labs and a few airport hotels.
The problem, though, is that potential bidders in the Bay Area aren’t concerned with sports or industrial properties as much as they are with housing.
“It would be a very difficult proposition to get your money back if you bought it and leased it out,” said Spencer Hsu, a Bay Area real-estate expert. “The fact is, if they can’t sell as commercial, they should really explore the opportunity to do so as residential.”