“It’d be terribly useful to have a clearer indication at this point,” Lustig said. “It’d be ridiculous to open an art center no one can afford.”

That was the refrain on Saturday across the street from the Oakland Civic—which sat bounded by chain-link fence and, on one side, city-sanctioned storage sheds for the homeless—at a public meeting hosted by city councilmember Nikki Fortunato Bas in Laney College Forum.

“We want this public asset used for the maximum public benefit,” said Bas, who was elected this past November to represent the district including the Oakland Civic, in introductory remarks to roughly 100 attendees. “Not only is there a housing crisis, there’s also a crisis in terms of us being able to preserve culture.”

Orton project manager David Dial, whose background is in arts administration, presented slides showing a co-working-style office space in the arena; performing arts tenants would have access to, say, a basement prop shop and ballroom rehearsal spaces. Outside, meanwhile, a raised terrace would improve visibility of the building’s sculptural niches. Orton originally projected an early 2019 opening, but the redesign has pushed groundbreaking to late this summer.

The idea, Dial explained, is to “remove walls between organizations to lower their costs, to lower their footprint, and to think about how we can really put those organizations in community.”

But many speakers echoed activists who’ve scrutinized officials’ disposal of public land in recent years. “I want us to ask the hard questions, like what affordability means, what community access means,” said Elena Serrano of EastSide Arts Alliance. “The slides reminded me of Lincoln Center—a beautiful space that most of New York is completely alienated from.”

At the event, Dial declined to define what portion of the office space would be reserved for arts organizations or to estimate rental costs, but he provided more details in a statement to KQED.

Per a tentative agreement expected to come before Oakland City Council in April, Dial said, at least 20 percent of the office space will be reserved for arts organizations. Between the basement, auditorium and second floor, Orton anticipates 450-550 workstations in addition to conference rooms and amenities accommodating an estimated 10-15 tenant organizations.

Programmatic rentals for the ballrooms and theatre will cost nonprofits roughly half the fee charged to for-profit companies. Dial said Orton expects to publish a detailed rent schedule “in the coming months,” and that the highest rents in the project will be less than downtown Oakland office rents, which currently average $4.66 per square foot. A draft letter-of-intent from Orton to an interested organization, which KQED reviewed, proposed $3.95 per square foot in 2017.

Randolph Belle of RBA Creative, who was part of a team that submitted a competing proposal to redevelop the building in 2014, called the plan a net loss for the public. “Since it’s being marketed for the arts, I’d say 50 percent of would be for arts organizations,” he said. “And $3.95 is just not tenable. That’s the kind of price that’s pushing cultural organizations out of the city.”

What works for relatively established outfits such as the Oakland Symphony, Belle said, generally doesn’t work for grassroots nonprofits that are most at risk of displacement. He added that the proposal serves several hundred people in a building that once served several thousand as an auditorium. “Oakland generally takes what it can get instead of getting what it wants,” he said.

Orton originally proposed a more transformative project, with a glass “building within a building” adding more square footage to the arena. In that plan, most of the space would’ve been marketed to a higher-rent commercial anchor tenant, but the design didn’t meet government standards for historic preservation. The current, lower-cost design, along with new tax credits, enabled the greater emphasis on nonprofits and arts and culture organizations, Dial said.

Still, among arts stakeholders there seems to be little more confidence in the project’s stabilizing potential for cultural organizations now than there was in 2016. “We’ve done a lot of deals where the developer promises various community uses but they’re not written into the agreement in a way that makes them required,” councilmember Rebecca Kaplan said in October 2016, adding that she wanted move beyond promises to “actual requirements."

Financed by voter-approved bonds, the Oakland Civic opened in 1915 and throughout the 20th century hosted a wildly eclectic range of events. A Mel Reid-promoted gospel revue there in late 1950s included a teenage Aretha Franklin, and Martin Luther King Jr. spoke there in 1962. Bill Graham first brought the Grateful Dead there in the 1970s, and in the late 1980s it hosted Public Enemy.

Losing money, though, the facility shuttered in 2006. (In 2012, Occupy protesters were arrested en masse as they tried to expropriate the building.) In 2014, the city requested redevelopment proposals, conditioning that the Calvin Simmons Theatre, named for the late Oakland Symphony conductor, remain a performing arts venue. Orton commissioned a report on financially viable uses that ruled out concerts and conventions in the arena.