Housing needs

The long list of consent items doesn’t give me hope that the City Council will get to the regular agenda items but maybe because they were continued from the last meeting there will be some urgency behind actually hearing the items. The first big one is the scattered sites housing in the Big Whites neighborhood to be used for housing homeless individuals and/or families. Recall the last time this came before the City Council it was kicked back to have “listening sessions” and eventually the non profit who was tapped to run the program pulled out because they were concerned about the safety of their client based on the strong sentiments expressed by existing Big Whites neighbors. There was a whole thing on Alameda Peeps about this with questionable framing from the original poster.

Now Village of Love which has run other Alameda Point based homeless services is stepping up to take over this program as well and has many glowing letters from non profits and faith leaders around Alameda. As we’ve seen in recent counts of our homeless population, Alameda’s homeless folks are older and Blacker than the general Alameda population. Add to that a large percentage of those folks being veterans and one would think that all those people falling over themselves to designate McKay Avenue as a historic to “honor” the service of former military they would want to help veterans who are currently alive and suffering. But alas.

The next HUGE item is the Housing Element and AAPS/ACT and friends are having absolute kittens about the R-2 though R-6 zoning. We’re on a tight timeline because the Housing Element should be turned into HCD pretty soon for their 90 day review. Personally, I think the main weakness of the Housing Element is our fair housing analysis and the programs to affirmatively further fair housing won’t go far enough if AAPS/ACT get their way and have the R-2 through R-6 zoning bounced. There is a new letter from YIMBY Law and Greenbelt Alliance in the packet which suggests that Alameda may not be going far enough and that, based on its historic permitting, it might not be able to justify the numbers it’s putting forward in the Housing Element.