You’re my only HOPE

I’m not going to go into detail on the Renewed HOPE’s analysis of the Alameda Point initiative right now, maybe some other time, but I did want to acknowledge its existence.   First though, I just want to preface my statements by saying that I have nothing but respect for the folks at Renewed HOPE and the work that they do advocating for affordable housing issues.   Long time readers will know that affordable housing issues is a topic that I am passionate and interested in and anyone doing good work around  affordable housing advocacy will always have my respect.

With that said, I will say that I was highly disappointed in the analysis in the report itself.    The first sign was the usage of the “rebranded” name as opposed to what the actual initiative is called.    If there is anything that immediately says “biased report” it’s renaming something that you think will be cute.  So throughout the entire report rather than call it the Alameda Point Revitalization Initiative, it’s the “SunCal/Shaw Hedge Fund Initiative.”   Except for the fact that the company is D.E. Shaw, not just Shaw.

This could be a small error, but it speaks to a larger issue with fact checking and providing supporting evidence for assertions made throughout the document.   In fact, the most frustrating parts of reading the document is that it skips from sourcing the Development Agreement to the Specific Plan to the Initiative language without any real consistency.

It appears that the biggest issue that the authors had with the entire Initiative itself is that they simply do not trust the developer to build what they have said they are going to build.   This is fine as an opinion, but to build an analysis around it ends up in a document that looks like the Renewed HOPE document.   With contradictory statements such as saying that the ceiling SunCal has set on the amount of development is “unreasonably high,” (p. 8 on the reader) but yet warning that because this cap is too high and because the Initiative does not spell out a minimum level of development (p.9 on the reader) that it might mean that the developer will build single family tracts rather than the multi-family housing promised.    In fact, they are concerned that the medium residential neighborhood (30 – 70 du/ac) will end up looking like a “suburban tract development more than walkable neighborhoods.”

This all goes to an issue of trust, not an issue of deficiencies in the Specific Plan or Development Agreement or the Initiative language.   Which again, not trusting a developer is fine, we all have varying levels of cynicism which I can respect.  But what I guess I find ironic in the grand scheme of Renewed HOPE being against — not just the Initiative itself in the vein on the Chamber of Commerce — but being against the plan itself is that this is one of the best chances that I personally think will get a good number of affordable housing units built on the Island.   That a major affordable housing advocacy group is working against that effort instead of agitating for what they want within that effort is puzzling.

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