Economy
Cecilia Rodriguez has lived in Richmond for 24 years. Over the past seven, she has worked for $8 an hour at a McDonald’s on Macdonald Avenue to support her three children, all of whom are currently in college.
Long after the billboards come down, the campaign mailers rest in landfills and the New Year’s toasts come and go, 2014 may be remembered as Richmond’s big election year. We are honored to have been in Richmond’s streets and chambers, its homes and schools and everywhere else, helping write the first drafts of history in an important time and place. Chevron Corp. poured an unprecedented $3.1 million into the municipal races only to lose the open mayoral and city council seats to a progressive coalition on every…
Walk down Macdonald Ave from the Civic Center toward downtown Richmond, and something will make you say, “Huh?” At the 20th Street intersection, you can buy five Christian music CDs for $20, walk four feet, and buy two cigars for 99 cents. How many cities do you know where a Bible store and a smoke shop share a wall? There’s a 100-year-old flower shop on the same block— and three Metro PCS stores within a half-mile stretch. I’ve done the…
As the country continues to recover from the economic crisis, and housing prices in the Bay Area have quickly resumed their ascent, Richmond is stuck in the biggest wealth gap in housing it’s ever known.
The Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, Nicholas Dirks, assured Richmond stakeholders yesterday that the economic benefits of the proposed Global Campus will be shared with the community. The project has raised concerns among the Richmond community as well as hopes.
As Richmond prepared to enter the 1960s, the city was about to encounter an era of rapid change. In November of 1959, readers opened the pages of the city’s daily newspaper, the Richmond Independent, to be confronted with Thanksgiving sales and headlines about next fall’s presidential race (“State GOP Supports Nixon”). The advertisements reflected an idyllic version of late 1950s America: A well-dressed businessman, hands clasped in his lap, dozes with a smile as a cherubic young boy gazes up…
Of the city’s full-time employees, 346 – more than half of all workers – surpassed the six-figure mark. The median household income in Richmond is $54,000.
The Richmond Memorial Convention Center was the site recently of a health care enrollment event directed at Asian and Pacific Islander communities. Asian and Pacific Islander (API) communities are some of the least represented in healthcare enrollment, yet represent about 12 to 13 percent of the population in West Contra Costa County, said Sean Kirkpatrick, Co-Interim Executive Director of Community Health for Asian Americans (CHAA). But because they are divided by many different languages and cultures, it can be difficult…
The Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors agreed to forgive about $9 million in repayment debt from struggling Doctors Medical Center (DMC) over the next three to five years. Supervisors John Gioia and Federal D. Glover proposed the two resolutions on Dec. 2, one providing immediate financial relief and the other a long-term stabilization strategy. DMC has been steeped in financial turmoil since it was rescued from bankruptcy in 2008, and faced possible closure since the beginning of summer. Now,…