Walk down Lakeshore Avenue this August and you will notice the gaps before you notice anything new. Gap's storefront near Mandana Boulevard sits dark, its lease left to expire this summer after more than 25 years on the block. A plaza that used to just be a plaza now has a name on it. Somewhere in a filing cabinet at Oakland's Economic and Workforce Development Department, there is a survey with your neighborhood's handwriting on it.
That last part is the piece most people miss. Storefronts empty out and refill on every commercial street in the East Bay, usually according to whoever can make rent. What is happening on Lakeshore right now is different. For the first time in its history, the business district serving Crocker Highlands and Trestle Glen is running an actual process to decide what replaces what is leaving, with a city partner attached and a public deadline on the calendar. The turnover is real. The part that matters is who gets a say in it.
The Handoff Nobody Announced
Carol Maes-Knight has been part of Lakeshore Avenue's business community for more than four decades, going back to the 1990s when she worked alongside John Russo and Barry Gilbert to help form what became Oakland's first business improvement district. She served as Co-Director since 2019. This June, she retired.
Her exit landed in the same season as the Gap's closure, the same season a first-time festival tested whether Lakeshore could still pull a crowd, and the same season the district launched a survey asking residents what they actually want in the empty storefronts. That is not a coincidence so much as a changing of hands. The people stepping into leadership now, Kelsey Heath and Racheal Knight-Scott among them, inherited a fuller set of vacancies than the district has carried in years, right as the person who remembered how it was built the first time stepped back.
In its report on the festival, Oaklandside recounted how, after conversations in 2025 about what it would take to bring Lakeshore's retail identity up to the level of other East Bay districts, Heath, now the BID's board president, reached out to the BID's treasurer, Terri Ellis, and the festival idea took shape. The report quoted Heath saying:
"I saw so much potential, and we had extra funds for a bigger project."
That is Heath describing the moment the Lakeshore Spring Festival went from idea to plan. It is also, read against Carol Maes-Knight's retirement the same season, a fair description of what leadership transition looks like when it works: someone new sees room to build something bigger right as the person who held the institutional memory hands it off.
A Survey With a Deadline
The mechanism worth understanding is the Vacant Storefront Opportunities Survey. LABID is working directly with the City of Oakland's Economic and Workforce Development Department and the District 2 council office, with a stated goal of filling every vacant storefront in the district by 2027. The survey itself asks blunt, open questions: would residents want a neighborhood café, a specialty market, a bookstore, a wellness concept, live entertainment. The district's own language on this is that empty buildings are not being treated as empty buildings. They are being treated as unanswered questions, and residents are being asked to answer them before landlords do it for them.
For a Crocker Highlands household that walks or bikes down to Lakeshore for groceries, coffee, or a Saturday stroll, this is the detail that changes how the next two years should feel. The commercial strip that anchors your neighborhood is not simply reacting to whichever tenant shows up with a signed lease. It is being shaped, deliberately and on a timeline, by a City-backed process that is asking for your opinion right now, not after the space is already filled.
At the junction where Lakeshore Avenue meets Grand Avenue at Lake Park, where the two streets run closest together, the festival covered in Oaklandside's report offered the clearest proof that this kind of deliberate rebuilding can work. The Lakeshore Spring Festival ran for the first time in May 2026, organized by Heath, Ellis, and veteran event producers Daniel Swafford and Candi Martinez, with the Oakland LGBTQ Community Center's Joe Hawkins joining to help shape the vision. It drew more than 10,000 attendees and over 100 local vendors, occupying the stretch of Lakeshore from the plaza outside the LGBTQ Center at Lake Park to Mandana Boulevard. That same month, on May 19, the Oakland City Council renamed that plaza Moore Hope Plaza, honoring Oakland activists and married couple Peggy Moore and Hope Wood, who died in a 2024 car crash. The BID is now fundraising to bring the festival back in May 2027, with a goal of raising at least $5,000 from residents and neighborhood supporters to make it an annual fixture rather than a one-time experiment.
In its festival report, Oaklandside quoted Hawkins describing the festival's purpose as a chance to show outsiders what neighbors already know:
"a neighborhood that has historically been very diverse, very inclusive."
What Left, What Arrived, What Stayed Put
Set next to each other, this year's changes read less like decline and more like a corridor mid-renovation.
- Left this year: Gap, after more than 25 years on Lakeshore, closing as its lease expired this summer.
- Already replaced: the old Starbucks space at 3347 Lakeshore, now a Philz Coffee that opened in 2024 and has settled into the corner without much fuss.
- Grown outward: Grand Lake Kitchen, which opened its original location on Grand Avenue in the Grand Lake neighborhood roughly seven years ago, added a Dimond District spot around five years later, and in April 2026 opened a third location in San Francisco's Noe Valley, exporting the same neighborhood-cafe formula that made it a local habit in the first place.
That last point matters more than it looks. A business built for one commercial strip succeeding well enough to plant a flag in another city is a sign the strip is doing something right, not something wrong.
The Places That Aren't Going Anywhere
Not everything on Lakeshore is in motion, and the anchors that have stayed put are worth naming because they explain why the street still feels like itself even with a Gap-sized hole in it. Colonial Donuts has run 24 hours a day as a family business for more than 50 years, with Phing, who left a product marketing career at Apple to return to the family shop in 2017, now serving on the LABID board herself. Ken Betts Service Center has belonged to Ken and Carla Betts since 1982. Arizmendi, the worker-owned cooperative bakery, still turns out the scones and farmers-market pizzas that made it a local habit for anyone within walking distance of Crocker Highlands.
The Saturday farmers market sits at Splash Pad Park, right where Lakeshore Avenue and Grand Avenue meet at Lake Park, the same corner the spring festival used as its stage. Long-time neighbors point out this is the spot residents organized to keep as a public park rather than retail space back in 1999, which is worth remembering the next time a survey lands in your inbox asking what should go into a vacant storefront. This corridor has done the ask-the-neighbors thing before, and the result is a market residents still call one of the East Bay's largest and most acclaimed. The park itself was designed by landscape architect Walter Hood, whose work has since earned him a MacArthur Fellowship and a spot on TIME's 2026 list of the world's most influential people.
What This Means If You Live Here
If your address falls inside the Lakeshore Homes Association, founded in 1917 as the second-oldest homeowners association west of the Mississippi and still responsible for the London Plane trees and antique streetlamps lining Crocker Highlands and Trestle Glen, then Lakeshore Avenue is not a destination you evaluate from a distance. It is the strip you already use. Between now and the district's 2027 target for filling every empty storefront, that strip is going to be shaped by decisions residents are actively being asked to weigh in on, with a deadline attached and a city department at the table.
Watching what fills the Gap's old corner, whether the 2027 festival fundraising hits its mark, and how the vacant storefront survey results actually get translated into tenants is not idle curiosity. It is the closest thing this corridor has offered in years to a say in its own next chapter.
If you are weighing a move within the East Bay and want a read on how a neighborhood's commercial heart is actually changing, not just what a listing says about it, Robert Jones has spent more than 15 years watching these streets up close. Let's Connect.
