Housing
A giant excavator was parked in the yard of a motel near the MacArthur BART station on Monday afternoon, where dozens of people were taking pictures with the machine that may soon start tearing down the motel rooms. The MacArthur Transit Village project will eventually transform a 7.76-acre site near the MacArthur BART station into a mixed-use area with new housing units and retail shops, along with restaurants and possibly a day care center.
Open up your daily newspaper and there’s no doubt you’ll find a story about a greedy bank, home foreclosure or some aspect of the financial crisis that has left people reeling. But this isn’t one of those stories. It’s a story about banks supporting a project even though they wouldn’t necessarily earn a profit from it, about a community organization helping those in need, and about people coming together and making what seemed like an impossible project succeed.
A house with a white picket fence has long been a quintessential part of the American Dream. While a majority of Bay Area residents live that as home owners, in recent years renting seems to be trending upward in popularity in almost every Bay Area county. Now with the collapse of the real estate market, will home ownership become a fading dream?
Oakland is overdue for a major earthquake. The Hayward Fault, which runs along Highway 13 at the foot of the Oakland hills and streams through the Oakland Zoo and Mills College, has produced a significant earthquake on average every 140 years for nearly the past millennium. The last substantial earthquake caused by this fault was in 1868 … that was 143 years ago.
Volunteers from all over the Bay Area kicked off Earth Day weekend by participating in a Habitat for Humanity East Bay Build-a-thon. By the end of the four-day event, eight new homes in the Tassafaronga Village on 81st Avenue in East Oakland will be framed.
Mayor Jean Quan said that closing the budget gap by only making cuts would require 80 percent reductions in discretionary spending from the general purpose fund.
California’s state legislators aren’t the only ones uncertain about Governor Jerry Brown’s proposed cut of redevelopment agency funds. Even though schools stand to gain if lawmakers approve the proposal, Oakland educators worry that taking funds from affordable housing could put more students at risk of homelessness.
The sanctuary of East Oakland’s St. Louis Bertrand Church was filled with house keys on Saturday morning—keys on string encircling the room and hanging from the balcony, keys in jars, in pockets and around necks, keys in hands being jingled in uniform outrage, all because there are fewer house keys in Oakland than there used to be. The display of keys was a symbolic part of Saturday’s rally as over 1,200 people protested the recent wave of home foreclosure.
A lawsuit against the Bay Area Air Quality Management District’s new air quality guidelines will go to trial, according to a press release from the California Building Industry Association, the organization that is suing the air district.