A Model For Other Cities?
When I was speaking across the country promoting the housing policy changes urged in Generation Priced Out, I did not foresee my hometown of Berkeley, California ending exclusionary zoning before Seattle, Denver and other cities. To the contrary, my book discusses how Berkeley’s 1973 “Neighborhood Preservation Ordinance” became a national model for using “neighborhood character” and “public input” to stop new apartments.
Through most of 2020, Berkeley refused to end exclusionary zoning. City officials would not even back Councilmember Lori Droste’s proposal to study allowing new “missing middle” fourplexes in many neighborhoods.
But that was prior to last November’s elections. Berkeley politics has since been transformed.
First it was detected in the United Kingdom, and now a more transmissible variant of the coronavirus has shown up in two University of California, Berkeley.
UC Berkeley: dos estudiantes dan positivo a variante del COVID-19 detectada en el Reino Unido telemundoareadelabahia.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from telemundoareadelabahia.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
A version of this story first appeared on Berkeleyside’s sister site, the Oaklandside.
Oakland grocery workers are getting a substantial hazard pay raise starting immediately.
The City Council voted Tuesday to require large grocery stores to pay their employees an additional $5 per hour. The law will cover workers at popular stores like Cardenas Markets, Safeway/Albertsons, Save Mart, Target, Trader Joe’, and Whole Foods. Small independent stores are exempt.
The pay raise is meant to compensate grocery store workers, among the state’s essential workforce, for the increased risks they have faced during the pandemic. According to a study published in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine, grocery workers are at higher risk of contracting COVID-19 because they work in enclosed settings around numerous strangers where it’s difficult to socially distance themselves.
The Atlanta City Council approved a plan to spend $50 million on affordable-housing development and preservation projects earlier this month, according to a report in The Atlanta Voice. The council approved Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’s executive order to issue $50 million in housing bonds as part of the mayor’s campaign pledge to spend $1 billion on affordable-housing efforts. Early in her administration, as Next City reported, Bottoms released a housing plan calling for 20,000 new and preserved homes that are affordable to people at a variety of income levels, along with efforts to stem displacement.
“The passage of this legislation is a significant step in fulfilling our $1 billion commitment to the creation and preservation of affordable housing for all who call or wish to call Atlanta home,” Bottoms said, according to The Atlanta Voice.