Development
To commemorate Black History Month, the news teams from Oakland North and our sibling site, Richmond Confidential, spent a morning observing some of the spaces in our two cities that have been important to the East Bay’s black community—past and present.
The City of Oakland approved a new experimental short-term housing solution, called The Village. After a year of negotiations, they’ve been granted land by the city, and are building houses for the homeless.
Several Oakland organizations are uniting to bring economic growth to the city by opening a community advocacy and training center in a renovated building on International Boulevard, in the center of the Fruitvale community. Restore Oakland will provide community members with job preparation programs and offer services like a tenants’ rights clinic and a restaurant that will also be a work training site.
On Tuesday evening, about 120 people gathered at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center to attend a “neighborhood design session” held by the city. The session was a public meeting to discuss challenges in Oakland’s Chinatown and to generate ideas for the city’s “Downtown Oakland Specific Plan,” which will lay out a long-term vision for the area. “There are three big ideas that we are working with as part of this plan,” said Gregory Hodge, a social change entrepreneur at Khepera…
A $4 billion bond measure that will determine funding for California’s local and state parks will appear on ballots during the June statewide direct primary election.
2017 brought a new group of student reporters to Oakland North from across the country and the globe. They covered a city in flux: a housing and homelessness crisis that shows no sign of abating, a school district facing millions in budget cuts, a citywide crackdown on warehouse spaces in the wake of the Ghost Ship fire, and local reactions to the new immigration and sanctuary city polices coming out of Washington under the new Donald Trump administration. But they also dug…
In a six to one vote, the Oakland Unified School District school board voted to cut $9 million from the district’s budget on Wednesday night. Earlier in the afternoon, members of the Oakland Education Association assembled at Lake Merritt to protest the proposed cuts, then marched down the streets toward La Escuelita Elementary School, where the board meeting would take place. Olivia Udovic, a parent and teacher at Oakland Montessori School in the Fruitvale neighborhood, marched proudly in the front…
Every month, a group of technology enthusiasts meet in an Oakland warehouse to build tiny self-driving cars. “DIY Robocars” was organized by Chris Anderson, who also runs drone company 3DR. While these cheap, disposable cars aren’t as sophisticated as the ones being developed by Tesla or Google, Anderson says that the advantage of using these “Robocars” is that there is lots of room to fail.
At a time when Oakland neighborhoods are gentrifying, Sue Mark, founder of Commons Archive, hopes to share the stories of residents in the Golden Gate neighborhood and bring together neighbors to form stronger community bonds.