Business
By 5 am Friday, David Martinez and Derrick Love, both Oakland residents, had spent nearly 48 hours stationed outside the Best Buy on the city’s Mandela Parkway. The first night, they slept in a borrowed tent. On Thursday they ate Thanksgiving dinner—turkey on paper plates—under the streetlights as the line circling the building formed behind them. “It’s totally worth it,” said Love, who had locked his target on one of the store’s ten $349 laptops that usually sell for $600….
Ebbett’s Good to Go is one of the newest food trucks cruising the East Bay to hawk gourmet fare. Its chefs focus on specialty sandwiches made from organic and local ingredients.
Rock Paper Scissors Collective, an Oakland-based volunteer cooperative offering free and low-cost art classes to the community, has offered “Street Style Fashion” workshops since 2007. The workshops, which are presented in partnership with Arts and Creative Expression, are open by application to young fashion designers ages 14 to 25 and focus on teaching participants professional design skills. Each workshop, students begin or continue work on a garment using techniques they develop in class to move their work forward. The clothing the students create ranges from sweatshirts to skirts to dresses.
For the founders of Oakland’s Pop-Up General Store—Chris Lee and fellow chef Samin Nosrat—food is, indeed, a labor of love. Since early 2009, the former Chez Panisse and Eccolo chefs have been selling gourmet goods out of Grace Street Catering in North Oakland. Once a month, Lee, Nosrat and a team of helpers prepare homemade delicacies and, along with a host of other specialty food vendors, set up for an afternoon and sell them to an ever-expanding group of Oakland and Berkeley foodies. Patrons can order beforehand online or buy up whatever is left on the spot.
Four three-foot high barrels resembling oversized soup cans sit at Spice Monkey Café and Restaurant in downtown Oakland. Each is emblazoned with photos of smiling children and has “Donate Food Here!” stamped across the black and red label. One barrel is filled with nonperishable canned goodies. Another is half full. And two are completely empty.
It was barely 3 p.m. at Hoover Elementary School in West Oakland, and the strawberries at the Tuesday farmers’ market were almost sold out. Hoover is just one of 25 schools part of “Oakland Fresh,” a recent OUSD effort aimed at providing fresh, locally grown organic produce for parents to purchase when they pick their students up from school.
Until it burned to the ground, Tiki Tom’s waterfront restaurant and bar, with its giant inflatable rooftop frog and bright yellow exterior, was a difficult place to miss.
As Oakland looks forward to a new mayor in the coming year, it faces giant-sized challenges in employment and business development that would be daunting for any city administration. Unemployment stands at 17.3 percent, compared to a national rate of 9.6 percent, and several large companies have deserted the city, taking hundreds of jobs with them. So business organizations and city officials are focused on strategies to make Oakland a business-friendly environment to attract new companies and new jobs.
Over the past 15 years Oakland has become the the epicenter of a national conversation about the legalization, taxation and regulation of marijuana. How did this happen? It started with the coalescing of an open-minded city council, an impoverished downtown, and a handful of determined activists.