community
Dear Readers/Listeners, The combined staff of Oakland North and Richmond Confidential is excited to announce a new bi-weekly podcast featuring radio stories from Richmond and Oakland, as well as interviews with our reporters, community leaders and other news-worthy characters. Every two weeks until June, we will bring you radio stories focused on a theme or issue affecting these two cities. You will also hear from our reporters to get a behind the scenes look at our news room. Every other Thursday, check our sites for new…
For more than four decades, five Richmond friends have come together to create collaborate art. Meeting weekly, the Gang of Five shares stories, art supplies and drawings.
Talk about policing dominated the Richmond City Council meeting on Tuesday, as councilmembers and citizens discussed amending the Richmond Police Commission enabling ordinance, initiating a police commission investigation into the death of Richard “Pedie” Perez following a settlement between the city and Perez’ family earlier that day, and investigating all cases in which individuals are seriously injured by Richmond police. At the meeting’s beginning, Richmond Mayor Tom Butt proposed moving these three agenda items to a future meeting, based on…
Among the many unorthodox tools Cara Corey has used to make her handmade artist line unique are knitting needles made out of PVC pipe and merino wool fiber (the material before wool becomes “wool”) shipped from the Ukraine. Corey moved to Richmond, California, in 2010 after spending over four years as a newspaper reporter in Des Moines, Iowa. She had written a wide variety of stories about people who owned their own businesses, and at one point, she had her own…
Frustration was the headliner at Tuesday night’s city council meeting, at which the council heard from a mourning family and unanimously elected a new vice mayor.
The California Transportation Commission approved a $6 million grant for a plan to improve Richmond’s Iron Triangle neighborhood. Known as the Iron Triangle Yellow Brick Road Walkable Neighborhoods Plan, the project aims to improve streets notorious for high crime and blighted conditions. Pedestrians and bicyclists would get safer, cleaner pathways to schools, parks and churches. The paths would be marked by stencils of yellow bricks, fulfilling a vision teenagers came up with during a 2008 summer youth program. City planners made a point to emphasize…
In the months following the April shutdown of Doctor’s Medical Center, doctors and patients have dispersed to other care centers. Some have had to go only across the street in San Pablo, while others must find care much farther away in Pinole, Walnut Creek, Martinez, Concord, Oakland or Berkeley. The distance takes a toll on former patients, and that concerns some doctors.
Senior citizens aged 80 or older are the fastest growing population segment in Contra Costa County. The aging trend raises new concerns about the adequacy of local resources to serve seniors—and the vital role of social opportunities.
After the great recession of 2008, inequality widened along racial lines as people lost their homes, often their only major asset. Earlier this month the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington, D.C. think tank, reported in “Billionaire Bonanza: The Forbes 400 and the Rest of US,” that the average white family today has net assets of $141,900, compared with the $11,000 for African American families. This hollowing out of the African American family asset base is a nationwide phenomenon that can be explained by the shrinking African American middle class. It’s even more a factor in “strong market” regions like the Bay Area, where housing costs are soaring.