The urban farming non-profit has secured a 1.4 acre lot on which to build its first permanent farm and park. It’s now fundraising for construction costs.
Preliminary plans have been filed for a 572-unit residential project near the West Oakland BART station, potentially creating one of Oakland’s largest new developments in one of its fastest-changing neighborhoods.
Sinai [Wharton Professor Todd Sinai in a new policy brief] argues that for those who can afford it, buying a home may offer a way to sidestep this cycle of ever-rising housing prices and rents. “Because homeowners lock in their house price at the time of purchase,” he writes, ”when rents rise, a homeowner’s annual housing cost is unchanged.” But as the last housing crisis showed us, our current system encourages a deadly combination of irrational expectations, outright speculation, and unscrupulous lending practices that can do serious damage to the broader economy. Buyers, beware.
Ultimately, Sinai frames America’s worsening housing affordability crisis in unusually blunt and candid terms. “Already it is no longer the case that someone can automatically afford to live in the city in which she grew up,” he writes. “A debate needs to take place about the value our society should place on whether a household should have an unlimited right to choose where to live, and how much they should be insulated—if, at all—from the differences in cost.” The brutal reality may well be that more and more people will be unable to live in superstar cities, as they are sorted and shunted off into less desirable and less costly locations.
Source: America’s Housing Affordability Crisis Isn’t Actually New – CityLab
Oakland Unified School District has released its new maps detailing the amount of stress at each of the school sites. Red dots signify those in neighborhoods with increased stress, violence and poverty, while green and blue dots are the schools which it considers the least stressed. While living within the boundaries of a particular school zone give you a priority to attend that school, it certainly isn’t fixed; a fascinating set of heat maps is now available that show where the students at any particular school live.
While interesting in their own right, these maps will be the basis of major funding shifts as the new Local Control Funding Formula is implemented. According to a report by KQED, red dot schools received $95k in additional funding last year. As the Governor’s new funding methods increase, expect to see much more funding moving to the schools that need it the most. If done well, we might see future maps with much more green.
