community
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.
James Anderson has a habit of peeking out of his house, day or night, constantly checking on his unofficial front yard. From his front door or upstairs window, he can scan the half-acre park known as Elm Playlot, just to make sure there’s no trouble. He grew up in the Iron Triangle, a notoriously high-crime neighborhood in central Richmond named for the train tracks that create its distinctive borders. More than year ago Anderson started working at Elm Playlot, located…
Larnel Wolfe was released from prison six months ago after a 12-year sentence for a robbery. The former San Quentin inmate is now a Live Free Fellow at Richmond’s Safe Return Project.
Old opinions about Richmond often seem set in stone, but at least some of the worst may be on the way out.
That’s what we tried to document in “Agents of Change,” a series of photographs and feature stories by Richmond Confidential’s Brittany Kirstin, a photojournalism student at the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
Our plan was simple: Richmond Confidential student journalists would pick a spot and observe, just watch and take notes, for the same hour, recording everything seen, heard, smelled.
Menbere Aklilu has come a long way. From a struggling single mother, she is now a restaurant owner in Richmond, after moving from her native Ethiopia and a time in Italy.
Aklilu hosts an annual Thanksgiving dinner at her restaurant, Salute E Vita, where she just served a sit-down dinner for more than a thousand Bay Area homeless people. She has also begun holding a four-course Mother’s Day brunch for young single mothers. She helps Richmond and Oakland students pay school tuition.