Gentrification
At the corner of 22nd Street and Carlson Boulevard in Richmond sits a homeless encampment where the unofficial mayor, Oretha “Porkchop” Stevens, is calming down her next-door neighbor Tone. His phone is missing and Porkchop works to reassure him. “You’re not crazy, you know where you put your stuff! Don’t play with your own mind,” she says with authority, perched on the bed inside her tent from where she presides all day over her dozen neighbors’ lives. She and her…
As city workers continue to uproot the homeless from encampments around Richmond, at times without any warning or help, Mayor Tom Butt is pushing to raise $1.5 million from local companies to pay for a managed homeless encampment. He has asked several local companies, including Chevron Corporation, Kaiser Permanente, Blue Apron, Costco Wholesale and Sims Metal Management to donate $154,000 each—to build and run a camp serving 100 people for a year. As a group of homeless people were being…
A series of recently proposed housing developments along Macdonald Avenue in downtown Richmond could spur a business renaissance in the struggling district if city and local business leaders’ predictions ring true. In a city desperate for affordable housing, the developments reserve only about one quarter of the total number of units for residents making below the median income. The rest of the apartments would be rented at market rates. Still, Richmond leaders are supporting the proposals on land that has…
North Richmond is an unincorporated community in West Contra Costa County and is almost completely surrounded by the City of Richmond. The idea of annexation, or integration, of North Richmond into the city has been raised for decades. In 2017, it came up once more and residents are currently discussing the possibility.
As rents and home prices continue to skyrocket across California, a major ballot fight is brewing between tenants and the real estate industry over the state rent control law Costa Hawkins. The law prohibits cities from implementing rent control on single family homes as well as homes or apartments built after 1995 (or the year the city passed it’s rent control law, which, in Oakland, is 1983), resulting in 100% or more rent increases for tenants in these dwellings. The…
Richmond has hundreds of abandoned and blighted properties at any given time. These properties cost the city millions of dollars, because numerous city departments have to deal with them, they drive down property values, and pose serious health and safety risks to neighbors. City officials have taken a unique approach to solving this problem with a municipal bond-funded housing renovation program, which may also assist in providing affordable housing in the Bay Area. Click the video above to learn more…
At least 109 individuals living in Richmond city limits have no home to return. This is according to the annual Point in Time count, a county-wide assessment conducted on one night of the year that tallies the number of people sleeping outside.
But the Richmond Police Department reports encountering up to 800 separate individuals sleeping outside on any given night.
The situation is desperate. Research indicates that homeless individuals live shorter lives, endure higher rates of mental illness, drug addiction, poor health and injury than their sheltered counterparts. Still, people without homes are often dismissed as careless or crazy, the lasting legacy of a stigma that has its roots in the Great Depression era, when welfare programs were introduced in the United States.
Nikki Beasley is executive director of Richmond Neighborhood Housing Services, a nonprofit developed in the 1980s to address housing inequities, particularly those created by practices such as redlining and discriminatory lending. She’s served in her current position for little more than a year, but in that time she’s made it clear she’ll be showing up and speaking her mind when it counts.