20 May 2021
Piedmont, California, is a small suburb with a population of 10,667 surrounded by the gritty city of Oakland, population 425,097. Piedmont is almost exclusively zoned for single family dwellings and is home to prosperous businesses.
Activists and politicians are trying to end that distinction by forcing Piedmont to build “affordable housing” and increase density by allowing multi-family units.
One activist put it this way: “This is really what people have been pushing for — this desegregation of Piedmont,” Darrell Owens, a member of East Bay for Everyone, said in a
San Francisco Chronicle article about the effort to transform yet another American suburb to an urban neighborhood.