This building wants to be the Swiss army knife of urban living

To shape the new high-rise tower he’s built in Oakland, California, real estate developer Colin Behring looked to the megacities of Asia. His site, on the edge of downtown and just above a station for the regional BART rail system, had all the makings of the kinds of central city developments he was familiar with in Shanghai, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, where transit access is the enabling factor behind dense populations and concentrated urban services and amenities. “They figured out how...