Business
Three East Bay residents share their plans for commuting while the Bay Bridge is closed for construction from Thursday, September 3 through Tuesday, September 8.
With the Bay Bridge closed for Labor Day weekend, the 280,000 people who usually use the bridge to cross San Francisco Bay will have to find ways to travel under, around or above it instead. Some are choosing to stay home, but the rest will crowd into BART trains, on to local ferries, or be forced to draw up alternative routes across other area bridges. John McClelland, owner of San Francisco Helicopter Tours, said that so far nobody’s asked him…
A handicapped woman takes her crafts to the street.
Only nine of 50 local businesses participated in Thursday’s General Strike to protest the hike in parking fees, but some 100 local business owners and residents attended the meeting Thursday night at the Grand Lake Theater and District 2 Councilmember Pat Kernighan said the City Council should meet soon to reconsider the fee hikes. Kernighan said at the meeting that she had received more than 200 e-mails during the last several weeks, complaining about the hikes in parking-related fees. “The…
The merchants on Lakeshore plan to hold a General Strike Thursday to protest the city’s parking fee hikes, which they said, are chasing away customers. “If we do not act now, many businesses will fail and our city will be much worse off,” wrote Allen Michaan, the owner of the Grand Lake Theater in a flyer calling for the strike. It’s unclear how many of the businesses on Lakeshore will participate. Bob Jaffe sighed at the sight of the parking…
Non-profit organizations were ready to hand out pay-checks to underprivileged youth in Oakland this summer but were unprepared for the reality checks that went with them. President Barack Obama’s stimulus package last February made it possible for Oakland to hire 1,000 youth this summer, but some agencies said the stringent qualifications narrowed the applicant pool to much. Applicants had to be at risk, which meant being a school dropout, homeless, an offender, pregnant or someone who “requires additional assistance to…
Cyprus Pishdad was excited two months ago when his new T-shirt business, Pure510 on busy Lakeshore appeared to be doing well despite the economy. Then in July, his business started to decline. “The sales were worse than the first week I opened the business. I realized that it coincide with the raise in parking meter,” said the 46-year old business owner, who said his business has dropped 30 percent. Now Pishdad and other angry business owners are talking about the…
Dia De Los Muertos Rises From the Dead
Safeway supermarkets plans to demolish its Pleasant Valley shopping mall — which at 185,000 square feet is about half the area of the Great Pyramid at Giza — and replace it with one almost two-thirds larger. The new mall would be 304,000 square feet with 1,066 parking spaces, or 50 percent more spaces. Neighborhood critics say the new mall, which would include Long’s Drug and other retailers, would be too big, attract too much traffic and therefore endanger pedestrians accustomed…