Proposal Would Raise West Berkeley Skyline - BDP

Proposal Would Raise West Berkeley Skyline. Category: Front Page News from The Berkeley Daily Planet - Thursday April 02, 2009: “City planning staff have dropped a bombshell on anxious West Berkeley activists: a proposal that would double the height of new buildings and potentially open the area to office complexes.

The staff proposal, if enacted without changes, could mean a West Berkeley skyline studded with 90-foot-tall office towers—a host of buildings as tall as the area’s currently dominant high-rise, the Fantasy Records Building.

Even some of the more developer-friendly commissioners had questions after Assistant Planner Claudine Asbagh presented the concepts, which are the latest round of a City Council-mandated effort to ease development rules in the only part of the city zoned for light industry and manufacturing. ”

-- And drive the poor out of West Berkeley. What's the deal with Berkeley's planning staff? A drive for more property taxes?

Oscar Grant Death a ‘Tragic Error,’ BART Lawyers Blame Grant

From The Berkeley Daily Planet - Thursday April 02, 2009 The BART strategy is unfolding and it spells a grim future for the Oscar Grant case and potentially even more unrest. The BDP reports that BART lawyers are saying Oscar Grants own actions contributed to his murder. I find that hard to swallow and it's a terrible message to have released into the public given the existence of the cell phone videos. BART continues to make PR blunders one after the other.

Color Correlations at Home - By Michael Caton

I was in Guatemala last summer for a wedding. A friend of mine from high school was getting married to a Guatemalan woman. Her family is fairly well-off. They are also not as dark-complected as your average Guatemalan - an observation that is, of course, less uncomfortable for me to make than for my friend's wife.

Driving around Guatemala City, I had noticed that the fashion and cosmetic ads on billboards usually showed women who were also lighter-complected than most of the people walking around the city, as is often the case in the global South. One day my friend was busy, but his just-betrothed had to go to the mall. I offered to drive her. On the way there I pointed to one of the billboards: "Juana," I asked, "who are all these white people on the billboards?" "There are light-complected Guatemalans, you know," she retorted. "Yeah," I said, "and all two hundred of 'em were at your wedding."

In some ways I feel bad for forcing the issue: my friend's wife is not racist, and many of the people I met at the wedding care deeply about their country and are doing what they can to erase the barriers that persist there. But travel in Latin America with your eyes even half-open, and what you see is that not only do these class barriers persist, they're largely based on race - and in Latin America, that means whether you're mostly of Native descent, or mostly European.

Of course, this isn't a pleasant reality, and people don't like to discuss it - either because they'd rather not think about it, or because they do think about it but don't want to inflame patients and possibly be misinterpreted as racist. I've had the same experience in other Latin American countries. In El Salvador, I had a long taxi ride with a friendly history-buff of a driver who kept talking about the Spanish conquistadors in "we" terms. If you've been to Spain, where people are white as the day is long (duh, it's Europe!) then you can't take these statements seriously. It was all I could do not to hold my white arm up next to his and ask him who "we" is. Pronouns are often more informative than we realize. Pay attention to pronouns when people talk about Oakland and you'll be surprised.

Once when I was in Coyoacan, which is kind of like the Berkeley of Mexico City, I did a pretty good job pissing off someone by suggesting to her that you could make maps of the city color-coded by average skin tone or by income; the map would look the same either way, and Coyoacan would be blazing white. Statement of fact, not meant to offend, but succeeding famously in this regard nonetheless; and I don't think it was because this person wanted to perpetuate race-based divisions in Mexico. On the contrary, she seemed to think that they were a very bad thing, but she was uncomfortable discussing them directly.

My failure was that I didn't recognize that it's much easier, as an outsider, to point out the divisions and blind spots that other people have gotten used to than to address your own. And I concede that perhaps I have a problem using my "inside voice". Much like the multiple well-meaning Europeans who have asked me - without meaning to make me uncomfortable - why, in the U.S. (for one example) Asian-white intermarriages occur at a far higher rate, given population sizes, than black-white marriages do.

Alright, I get it! you're saying. Oakland has racial issues that we don't like to discuss! But apparently we don't get it, because many of us still aren't fully comfortable directly addressing, especially in the public sphere, the largely race-based class divisions that continue to exist here in 2009, and continue to cause loss of and damage to human life.

I know I felt a little awkward posting this, and I've felt a little awkward making some of the assertions I have in post-police-killing blog posts. But the time has passed for us to continue allowing self-censorship and emotion to obstruct solutions that might solve Oakland's violence problem. So here's one question to illuminate some blind spots: how many people died as a result of violence in Oakland on Saturday, 21 March? Six. Four police officers, the person that shot them, and Edwin Bradford, 42, found dead nine hours before the police killings, 3.7 miles away from the scene of the Mixon shootings. Why was that not a bigger deal? And what about the two murders that have happened since the Mixon shootings?

Michael Caton is a guest blogger. His blog is An Oakland Citizen; check it out!

Getting Out Late In Oakland After Too Much Work: A Brief Report

This phase of work, work, work is not done (and this is part of it) but not yet taking its toll. To make sure that doens't happen, I did two things: 1) I went to the gym and 2), I went out to just relax. The first thing, the gym, I do every day, or try too. I'm working to keep by weight below 200 pounds. I find I feel best at less than 196. Yesterday I was at 198.

The second act was just plain going out. I wound up, as they say, at Luka's and ran into my neighbors and their friend who can dance up a storm. So, for the first time in a a while, I danced to some combination of "house" and reggae. Then, once enough sweat was produced to make think of my desire not to sweat a lot, I stopped, and fortunately so did they, and left. That was fun. It's also a blast to do it with people from your hood.

Then I wound up at another place called Mua and ran into a couple I generally see at Cafe Ven Kleef. They had a friend in West Oakland who had a story tip for me so they brought me over to her and we talked for a long time. To give the short version, it seems there's this company that specializes in cleaning up after a homicide. Now, according to my new friend, that firm, called "Crime Scene Cleanup", reportedly has been telling West Oakand residents that they "own the neighborhood" and plan to buy distressed property. For what reason, I do not know.

But the company has been -- according to my new friend -- active around West Oakland. Now remember they clean up after, say, a murder. And that, from what I've read today, is not a pretty thing. It's mostly maggots, and other disgusting stuff.

My friend then sent this message:

What we do know: they are moving into a property that touches a restaurant, is surrounded by residential properties and a half a block away from a school.

When my neighbors went over there in good faith - in fact excited to meet these guys because they had heard about them and thought that their van was really cool - they were instantly met with hostility and intimidation.

The questions we in the neighborhood have are:
- why hasn't this business notified residents that they are moving in, as they are supposed to do?
- what is their waste disposal procedure? Their safety measures must be excellent, since they were approved to operate right next door to so many families with children.
- how will this affect our neighborhood activities, such as our planned community garden, National Night Out block parties, etc?
- why is the business hostile to the community it plans to join?
- and finally, as a matter of curiosity, what kind of homework did they do that led them to choose a property right next door to two large loft developments (some of the oldest ones in West Oakland), a school, and lots of residential?

The main question is, are the employees of Crime Scene Cleanup doing any illegal waste dumping and with a sense of entitlement, which would explain the exchange I reported above? I understand Councilmember Nancy Nadel's aware of this so I'm going to do some digging. More soon.

At any rate, it was fun and even though I was the only person not "coupled" -- hey I could have gone to a fundraiser with a woman friend of mine but I had too much work to do (she' pissed at me now) and the woman I've been dating recently has a job that keeps her on a plane, overseas for months at a time. So you can imagine what I'm thinking.

So, perhaps taking pity on me, the women teased me mercilessly while their boy friends laughed in approval. Life is so fun, especially when your surrounded by great pairs of legs. There was a "film at 11" but to protect the identity of my source, it will not see the whites of your eyes.