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Living in the O reports - Safeway stakeholders meeting canceled (or postponed?) « Living in the O : “I’ve been planning to write another long post about the College Avenue Safeway rebuild, but haven’t quite found the time. I did want to alert everyone who’s interested that the meeting that was planned for this Tuesday, December 9th has been canceled. Unfortunately, there’s no further info on Safeway’s site about when the next meeting will be or if there will be one so that’s all the information I have.” -- The main problem is still the scale of the development proposed. Plus, the process of design did not include the residents from the start, so in perfect Oakland fashion, they're going to clobber it until Safeway understands and changes the process.

One good thing about being around here for awhile with an active memory is history. I remember when Dreyer's Ice Cream proposed its giant facility for Rockridge, and many, including for a time me, were against it. One reason for this was that the original plan called for a visible College Avenue presence that was just too out of scale with the neighborhood. I say that's true for the Safeway proposal before us. This is one of those stories that needs a video and one will be up soon, but for the present, what's neat about Rockridge is that there's not one long wall of building walls hugging the street. It's a parade of structures of varied heights, allowing Sun to reach the street and giving a small-town-in-Oakland feel. But Safeway's current proposal will destroy that feeling in my view. It calls for a building that does what's not cool: hugs the street and looms over it. It would drastically alter Rockridge and make it seem more like a retail downtow...