Don’t look to central Oakland’s two new residential towers for skyline pyrotechnics. Each is a tailored slab set atop a parking-filled podium. Could be better, could be worse.

Down on the ground is where things get more interesting. The two connect with their surroundings in much different ways — and one has the sensibility that Oakland and other cities should encourage if our downtowns are to evolve in ways that allow dense but comfortable neighborhoods to emerge.

It’s a provocative comparison, and one that’s easy to ponder since the city’s first housing high-rises in a decade are just two blocks apart.

The largest takes its name from its address, 17th & Broadway, placing 254 apartments in a 33-story tower across the street from a BART station that is three stops from San Francisco. The other, Zo, fills a corner at 17th and Webster streets with a 23-story tower containing 207 apartments.

Though smaller, Zo has more to offer in terms of what can be experienced by those of us who aren’t paying monthly rents that begin at $2,800 for a studio.

The tower design by Perkins & Will for Portland, Ore., developer Gerding Edlen is blunt — a slab arranged as a stack of multistory glass cubes framed in white and set within a frame of gray precast concrete. But it emerges from something completely different, a podium where the three levels that hold parking spaces are screened by triangular folds of perforated aluminum amid translucent panels of blue and green glass.

The metallic wrap is as contemporary as can be. It also complements the tile-clad Howden Building that glows across the street. The two may seem like opposites — 1920s Spanish baroque and punchy Day-Glo abstraction — but each is happy to put on a show.

Beneath the podium’s screen, the sidewalk was widened to make room for raised planters. Not only do they serve an environmental function, capturing and filtering rainwater during storms, they include benches where patrons of the ground-floor retail spaces can linger.

This is an unusually civic gesture in an age where many developers do their best to chase away people who are down on their luck. It also sets off the storefronts along Webster and makes them feel like part of a communal scene, not just something that planners insisted on.

That’s what is intriguing about Zo, no matter how stark the tower might be at first glance. The horizontal and vertical sections operate independently of each other — while one announces itself on the sidewalk, the other engages with the street in a way that suggests it’s a place where you might want to linger.

“The idea was that if we did our job properly, we would create a feel of urbanity in a location that didn’t have it before,” said Jeffrey Till, who led the early design efforts at Perkins & Will but is now at Hart Howerton.

The approach at 17th & Broadway is more focused on making residents happy inside.

It’s a prominent location but a tough one as well: While the neighbors on Broadway include the Cathedral Building, a flatiron delight from 1914, the building next door on 17th is an AT&T switching station that’s a 300-foot-tall crate wrapped in glum stucco. And BART’s underground spaces hem in what can be done around the new tower’s property line.

Despite this, the architects at Solomon Cordwell Buenz were able to craft a slab with a bit of visual style for their client, Lennar Multifamily Communities.

The tower is more intrusive from the ground than Zo, because it extends straight up from the property line along 17th Street. Ideally it would be set back and parallel to Broadway, but this was ruled out because of the substation’s view-blocking girth. Fortunately, the long facades are sandy, precast concrete that feels at home amid older neighbors.

“Oakland is a ceramic town, and this tower at this corner wanted to have punched windows instead of (sheer) glass,” said Scott Berry, the lead architect. The precast panels also are patterned, though too subtly, to catch sunlight and shadow: “The owner asked us to design an Oakland building, one with personality.”

Oaktown’s aura of gritty authenticity is played up throughout the project, beginning with a free-flowing work of engraved glass above the lobby entrance by David Huffman, an artist with local roots.

“Experience a lifestyle that celebrates the city’s distinct spirit and creative culture,” proclaims the marketing brochure for 17th & Broadway, where the rent for one-bedroom units begins at $3,405.

Rhetoric aside, both towers come packed with amenities tailored to a caricature of work hard/play hard Millennials. Each offers a communal rooftop deck and podium deck, with fire pits at 17th & Broadway and a podium-top dog run with play equipment at Zo.

Gyms? Check. Bicycle repair stations? Check. Each even includes a small outdoor pool.

What you won’t find are apartments priced at below-market rates, or set aside for longtime Oakland residents who might not work in tech. The city got around to requiring affordable housing fees from market-rate projects only in 2016, after each project was approved.

Two other downtown housing towers will open next year, with a half-dozen mid-rise complexes accompanying them. When this round is done, downtown Oakland will have added nearly 3,000 apartments and condominiums to its core.

The largest tower, 40 stories at 14th and Franklin streets, will hold 633 apartments. Of these, 27 are classified as very low income. Everything else will rent at market rates.

As Zo and 17th & Broadway show, some will be better fits than others in terms of adding a residential sensibility to downtown’s core.

The bigger challenge is to thread the coming boom with a diverse and inclusive range of housing types. From that perspective, Oakland — and the Bay Area as a whole — still has a lot of work to do.

John King is The San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic. Email: jking@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @johnkingsfchron