Development
City of Oakland officials have high hopes that the new dealerships will help reinvigorate Auto Row, a long stretch of Broadway between Grand Avenue and 40th Street that since, 1912, has been a hub of city commerce teeming with auto businesses. Prior to the economic meltdown of 2008, the street generated millions of dollars in sales tax revenue for the city, but now it boasts more vacant buildings and “for lease” signs than live dealerships.
Last Saturday, hundreds of people flocked to City Hall to attend Financial Planning Day, a free event offering financial planning advice and workshops to participants.
Oakland’s Community and Economic Development Agency (CEDA) announced a pilot program Thursday to convert parking spots or unused bus stops into public spaces called “parklets” where people can relax and hang out.
The California Healthy Food Financing Initiative (CHFFI) landed on Governor Jerry Brown’s desk last week, after the state Senate and Assembly both voted to approve it by a wide margin. If signed by the governor, the bill would help bring more grocery stores, farmers’ markets and other sources of produce to under-served communities throughout the state, including West and East Oakland.
Going from a dingy yellow wall to a bright-colored, futuristic work of art, the 28th Street Partners apartment complex off of Telegraph Avenue in downtown Oakland has received quite a facelift. Earlier this month, Oakland artists Sidharth Chaturvedi, Samuel Garland and Lindsey Millikan took their art to the streets by painting a mural on the side of the two-story apartment building. Millikan found out about the job after property manager Tony Toppanno posted an ad on Craigslist. Soon after, Millikan…
Founded in October 2010 by Danny Rosen, Arthur Coulston and Billy Parish, Berkeley-based Solar Mosaic is using Oakland as a proving ground to test for the first time its model of this crowd-funded community solar, with plans to finance five to seven projects, of which the Asian Resource Center (ARC) project is the first.
An emotional Oakland Unified School District board meeting that attracted hundreds of agitated parents and children went on until nearly midnight, though the board took no action in its controversial plan to close or consolidate more than a dozen of the city’s schools.
The preliminary list of OUSD schools recommended for closure three weeks has changed. Now five elementary schools are recommended for closure while two others are being proposed for “quality expansion.”
How much life passes through one cubic foot of water in the San Francisco Bay every day? Photographer David Liittschwager set out to answer that question over the course of 14 days this past spring. From a small sailboat anchored in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge, he and a team of scientists collected and photographed whatever plants and animals were carried by the bay’s currents into a metal square-foot cube submerged in the upper water column.