There’s no single program or magic wand to be waved that can bail the Bay Area out of its deep, dark affordable-housing shortage. But in Oakland, they’re trying.

The latest plan is to adopt development impact fees across the city. This is a device used by cities such as San Francisco, which charges fees on every new structure — from a single-family home to a high-rise apartment building — to create a fund for affordable housing and other things, such as transportation improvements.

Adoption of the measure is a no-brainer. Oakland is one of the last Bay Area cities to collect impact fees, and it’s also a city with one of the lowest per-capita tax revenues in the region. But the devil is in the details, and unlike some of its neighbors, Oakland would phase in the fees over the next three years to allow developers time to recalculate their costs.

Under the proposal, which an Oakland City Council committee will consider this month, three development zones would be established, each with a different fee schedule that doubles the amount every year until 2018. Fees in Zone 1, which includes downtown and the Oakland hills, would begin at $5,000 per unit through December and double in cost, eventually rising to $20,000 per unit in 2018. In North Oakland and East Oakland, the initial fees would begin at $4,000 and $3,000, respectively.

As in most cities, developers would be able to offset some of the fees by building affordable units as part of the project or providing affordable units at a different site. Otherwise, impact fees would be imposed to finance affordable-housing projects.

Oakland’s policy represents a compromise between the housing advocates who want the city to immediately adopt a $20,000-per-unit fee and developers wary of any costs not in their financial plans.

In Emeryville, city officials adopted a $20,000-per-unit impact fee in 2014. In Berkeley, impact fees have been a moving target — originally set at $28,000, then lowered to $20,000. There is now discussion of raising the amount to $34,000.

There was a temporary lull in both cities after the fees were passed, said Mike Ghielmetti, president of Signature Development Group, an Oakland developer that has done extensive work in the city’s Uptown district.

“There’s plenty of (housing) demand — but when you take a fee and go from zero to 20 (thousand) overnight, the market can fall away,” Ghielmetti said. “This isn’t a developer crying wolf; it’s actually happened. Oakland is more important, more central to health of the region for transportation, jobs and housing, and it’s important that it grows at a healthy pace.”

Impact fees aren’t a cure-all solution, but they could help.

In San Francisco, $88 million in development impact fees collected since 2002 has translated into a little more than 1,450 affordable housing units, according to city officials.

There is, however, a potential gnarly side effect: A $20,000 building surcharge could impact the development of midsize apartment buildings in and around downtown Oakland — and the residential Oakland hills. That would be an unintended consequence.

“You have to be careful that you’re not destroying the diversity of building in Oakland,” said Karen Chapple, a UC Berkeley professor of city and regional planning.

And everyone knows that any obstacle to diversity, whether racial, economic or in this case structural, is bad business.

Chip Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. His column runs Tuesdays and Fridays. E-mail chjohnson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @chjohnson