Housing
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.
Veronica Hays stares out the window of a 12-person van cruising down I-580. In front and behind her, other passengers chat quietly with one another. Riding in a van with other parolees like herself on their way to volunteer has become a regular Saturday routine for Hays. This week they’re heading to the Alameda Food Bank where they will spend the afternoon organizing food donations. For Hays, just the thought of her sitting in this van, sober and out of prison, is enough to make her smile.
In Oakland’s Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, building inspector Ed Labayog walks past a line of nearly a hundred people waiting to apply for a job with the city on his way to the street where his car is parked. Wearing a black button-up City of Oakland shirt and carrying a bag containing case files, a camera, and his lunch, he’s setting out to find blighted properties. For Labayog, seeking out trash, graffiti and signs of crumbling structures on private property is his job.
Oakland city leaders and residents celebrate the opening of Kinsell Commons, a Habitat for Humanity and Oakland Housing Authority mixed-income housing project in East Oakland.
The newly minted Oakland chapter of the Green Party met for the second time on Tuesday evening to talk politics: city redevelopment funds, gang injunctions and whether to support a statewide moratorium on foreclosures.
Crowded in the back of St. Vincent de Paul’s community center, dozens of people paint an extensive wood panel with a mosaic of images—trees, faces, buildings and flowers. They’re creating a work for display at the center, but these painters aren’t professional artists, they’re low-income and homeless clients of St. Vincent de Paul.
Mike Taft isn’t an artist in the traditional sense. But when his entire live-work apartment complex was having an open house art party on Friday—one that he founded and organized—he was of course going to find a way to entertain the crowd. “I’m grinding down a piece of plywood with an angle grinder,” the industrial designer said with a grin.
For North Oakland residents who don’t live near a farmers’ market, there’s now a new way to purchase organic produce. Phat Beets Produce, a volunteer-run collective that aims to connect small farmers to urban communities, is now taking orders for their “Beet Boxes.”