Oakland. Wow. Oakland. My city. It just can’t seem to get out of its own way – one step forward, two steps back.
That’s certainly the case with the African American Sports and Entertainment Group thus far. To date, the organization that won the right to have an exclusive negotiating agreement for a multi-use community-centered development is about to make the same myopic mistakes as its white developer counterparts: ignoring the sea-level rise problem.
The Sea-Level Rise Problem Will Push The Entire Coliseum Area Underwater In Just 15 Years
The livestream that I held on the problem is not old, and the issue is still with us.
The Oakland Sea Level Rise Plan of 2017 stated as follows:
Oakland has 19 miles of Bay shoreline that are lined with regionally significant infrastructure, diverse
neighborhoods, and open space. Therefore, SLR was selected as an impact that warranted further diagnostic
investigation under this discovery area. Several groundbreaking SLR studies have already been conducted for parts of the Oakland shoreline, such as the Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) Adapting to Rising Tides (ART) Sub-regional Pilot Project,2 Climate Change and Extreme Weather AdaptationOptions for Transportation Assets in the Bay Area Pilot Project,3 and the ART Oakland/Alameda Resilience Study.4 Based on these studies, critical assets such as highways, transit stations, schools, wastewater infrastructure, and landfills are anticipated to be impacted by SLR
Now, that came from 2017. And would you believe Oakland has done absolutely zero on this matter? Meanwhile, San Leandro, California, next to the Oakland International Airport, passed its own plan to build protection against the same problem. What’s notable is that San Leandro did not wait for Oakland to do anything – it just acted.
Oakland had better wake up to this problem, because the ground water rise is not going down at all.
Stay tuned.