Economy
Although food insecurity—the formal term for being unable to reliably access and afford nutritious food—is on the decline in California, it’s on the rise for senior citizens.
Oakland is a city of immigrants. According to information provided by Census.gov, in 2018, Oakland had a population of about 429,000 people, with about a third of the population being from another country. But those census figures may not be accurate. “I think the challenge is that many of them are living in the shadows, so it is really hard to know how many [immigrants] are here,” said Lisa Hoffman, development director for the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, an organization…
On a quiet fall day, Noni Session parked next to a two-story apartment building in North Oakland. It was a simple, white mid-century structure with a turquoise door and grey trim on the windows. Across the street, a BART train whizzed by on its way to MacArthur Station. Session is the executive director of a nonprofit called East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, or EBPREC. Several months ago, the organization purchased this building in a bid to protect tenants after…
The Oakland school board considered a budget update and a new facilities plan at its final meeting of 2019.
Groups are gearing up for the 2020 Census and reaching out to hard-to-count groups in Oakland.
At Bishop O’Dowd High School in the Oakland hills, gardener Ned Lange is making small-batch vermicompost from the school’s food scraps. He takes scraps like leafy greens, peels, and stems that won’t make it into the cooked lunch, and blends them into a smoothie that he feeds into an 8-by-4-foot corrugated steel bin that is home to 100 pounds of worms. He lifts the roof off and carefully peels back pages of damp newspaper that are beginning to disintegrate. Underneath,…
Every theater seat was occupied in Oakland’s city council chamber on Tuesday night, with more community members spilling into the hallway, as members of two of the city’s biggest unions turned out to take opposite sides on a proposal to build a hotel in West Oakland. In November 2016, Architectural Dimensions, an Oakland architecture and planning firm, filed an application to build a six-story 220-room hotel on what is currently an empty lot on Mandela Parkway along Oakland’s border with…
At a special meeting on Wednesday night, Oakland school board members voted to deny one charter school a petition for renewal and failed to approve renewals for two others, planning to consider both again at the December 2 meeting.
Journalists hold a rally to denounce what they say are a decline in working conditions at The East Bay Times, San Jose Mercury News and Monterey Herald as a consequence of nearly a decade of ownership under MediaNews Group and its hedge fund owner, Alden Global Capital.