Updates

This Opinion piece appeared in The Independent, a weekly newspaper serving the Pleasanton area. Urban Habitat is a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the city for it's failure to build the amount of affordable housing as required by law. In response to a City Attorney's comments, Executive Director Juliet Ellis wrote the following Letter to the Editor which appeared in the Independent's July 3, 2008 Edition.

Given his statements last week (Affordable Housing Lawsuit Back in Play, June 26, 2008) Pleasanton City Attorney Michael Roush apparently needs to study up on his basic arithmetic.

As stated in the article, the City has reneged on its promise in the last Housing Element to rezone enough land for some 800 units of lower-income housing by June 2004. An additional 3,277 new units were allocated this month for the next planning period. For Mr. Roush’s benefit, that’s more than 4,000 units now needed, significantly more than the 2,755 units remaining under the 29,000-unit Housing Cap according to the City’s own staff report.

Developers Required to Meet with Community First

For the first time, a City Council is requiring Developers to hold public meetings that are open to community members, labor representatives, business leaders and other stakeholders before beginning the development process. This will give the public the opportunity to have a say in what the final project will look like.

Thanks to the hard work of Urban Habitat and coalition partners Congregations Organizing for Renewal and the Building Trades of Alameda County, San Leandro’s City Council unanimously voted in favor of adding an amendment to the Exclusive Negotiating Agreement between the City’s Redevelopment Agency, BART and developer/landowner Westlake Development Partners LLC. Westlake is the Master Developer for the first major development in the downtown TOD area, called The Crossings.

Boom-and-bust cycles have shaped the city of Richmond’s history. Its population quadrupled between 1940 and 1943; later, with the closing of its World War II shipyards, the population shrank dramatically. From 1970 to 2000, it grew at only half the rate of the rest of the East Bay. Today, Richmond remains an important industrial center for the Bay Area, home to nearly a third of all jobs in the manufacturing, wholesale and transportation sectors. Because of Richmond’s reliance on industrial economies, much of the city’s land is zoned for industrial and commercial use.

Beset by decades of economic, social and environmental challenges, Richmond faced significant financial shortfalls. “Historically it was unable to access its fair share of regional resources and was a city dealing with disinvestment,” recalls Juliet Ellis, executive director of the environmental justice organization Urban Habitat. “And for a combination of reasons the relationship between the City Council and community members was extremely tense, at an all-time low.”

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