Despite decades of city-sponsored redevelopment efforts that have come in fits and starts, Oakland has yet to emerge from the long shadow of its neighbor to the west, San Francisco, much like Brooklyn’s former relationship to Manhattan, a comparison those redeveloping the East Bay are quick to make.

Oakland is in the midst of recreating its own Brooklyn: the Brooklyn Basin, a $1.5 billion waterfront housing and commercial development planned near Lake Merritt. Like its New York counterpart, the area was once in a separate city called Brooklyn, subsumed by Oakland in the 1870s, officials said.

Even so, Oakland has a base of high-tech and green energy companies, including the solar thermal company BrightSource and the commercial installer Borrego Solar Systems. The sector has been developing over many years, said Steve Lautze, who oversees green business development for Oakland, originally anchored by recycling companies attracted by the city’s position as a portal to the Pacific for Northern California.

Oakland development officials are now focused on maximizing what Mr. Kennedy has started at Jack London Square, said Kelley Kahn, the city’s economic and work force development director, who helped oversee the transformation of Mission Bay in San Francisco into a biotech center.

Image Sungevity has grown to 300 employees from 55 in its 11,000-square-foot space. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

“Oakland even offers a lot more in terms of an urban experience than what we were building in Mission Bay,” she said, adding that there was potential to create a new sector in Oakland’s economy. Officials are trying to figure out “how, across the board, can we really capture a bigger piece of this innovation economy.”

Officials with the city and executives at the SfunCube — perhaps mindful of criticisms that gentrification has made real estate in parts of New York’s Brooklyn more expensive than Manhattan — say they are trying to ensure that Oakland residents have access to whatever benefits come from the growth.

Toward that end, Ms. Kahn said, they are working to support or promote organizations like Hack the Hood and others that are dedicated to high-tech training and education programs, while the SfunCube has an outpost of the California Center for Sustainable Energy, which runs jobs and youth education programs as well.