ONN – Oakland Planning Commission Approved Giant 415 20th Skyscraper Ignores Homeless – Thomas Berkley? – vlog by Zennie62 YouTube
Oakland Planning Commission Approved Giant 415 20th Skyscraper Ignores Homeless – Thomas Berkley?
A shameful event in Oakland’s development history: a planning commission in a city facing an incredibly large homeless problem, approves what would be the tallest building, ever, in Oakland. A structure that, at 864,000 square feet, is so large, and office-only, that it threatens to drop 3,400 workers (most seeking market rate housing) on Oakland. Without its own housing, those people will be pushed on to an expensive housing market that’s forced a giant number of people on the streets.
The Oakland Planning Commission could have stopped this, but instead voted 5 yes votes to one abstention, Nischit Hegde. In the case of Commissioner Hegde, when asked for her decision, she said “It’s just too big”, referring to the huge scale of the 622-foot, 39-story structure.
The building is so large that it looks like King Kong waiting to face-off against Godzilla. And the developer did nothing to put anyone’s concerns about that size at ease when it used photos that either made the structure look like it was a massive takeover vehicle for San Francisco’s population, or an attempt to replicate all that is bad about San Francisco’s urban development, or both.
Indeed, when my time to speak on the project came up, I explained the problem that 3,400 workers presents for Oakland. I suggested that the skyscraper be live-work, rather than just office, thereby reducing housing pressures to a large degree. What was shocking was the Planning Commission was all too willing to just rubber stamp the project, with some members saying the homeless problem was for government to solve, forgetting that they’re part of the government that solves the problem.
I ask you to draw your own conclusions from watching the planning commission meeting yourself, here:
Meanwhile, I am filing an appeal against the project. The matter of the continued pressure on Oakland’s housing market is not being appropriately mitigated in the case of this enormous monstrosity of a building. Oakland does not have the appropriate control over the housing market to justify this project. Dumping 3,400 people on Oakland, and just down the block from Square Headquarters, which can accomodate an additional 3,000 workers, is far too much office space in the age of ZOOM – that area needs housing to go with the office.
The jobs / housing balance (a statistic of estimates of jobs versus housing in a city with an eye toward traffic relief, but should be applied to the homeless problem) is done parcel-by-parcel. One does not wait until some year off into the future to then see what the jobs / housing balance looks like, contrary to what Planning Commission Chairman Limon and some other colleagues think.
In closing, The Hines Real Estate Investors referred to Thomas Lucius Berkley, AKA, Thomas Berkley, as a politician. Mr. Berkley is not a politician, he’s the publisher of The Oakland Post: one of the first black news publications in America, and the first one on the West Coast. Any developer coming to Oakland should brush up on Oakland’s history, first.
Stay tuned.
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Note from Zennie62Media’s Zennie62 YouTube and Oakland News Now Today Blog SF Bay Area: this video-blog post demonstrates the full and live operation of the latest updated version of an experimental Zennie62Media , Inc. mobile media video-blogging system network that was launched June 2018. This is a major part of Zennie62Media , Inc.’s new and innovative approach to the production of news media. What we call “The Third Wave of Media”. The uploaded video is from a vlogger with the Zennie62 on YouTube Partner Channel, then uploaded to and formatted automatically at the Oakland News Now site and Zennie62-created and owned social media pages. The overall objective is smartphone-enabled, real-time, on the scene reporting of news, interviews, observations, and happenings anywhere in the World and within seconds and not hours. Now, news is reported with a smartphone: no heavy and expensive cameras or even a laptop are necessary. The secondary objective is faster, and very inexpensive media content news production and distribution. We have found there is a disconnect between post length and time to product and revenue generated. With this, the problem is far less, though by no means solved. Zennie62Media is constantly working to improve the system network coding and seeks interested content and media technology partners.