Sierra missed

Normally I wouldn’t get involved in the private business of the executive committee of an advocacy organization, but since one of the members invited comment on the decision making process for the Sierra Club around the issue of the Alameda Point Revitalization Initiative, and invited members of the public to attend their meeting, it’s sort of fair game.

According to a comment made in early November, Bill Smith of the Sierra Club indicated that while the members ran the gamut from supportive, neutral, and opposed the Club has decided to only vote on two possible positions: “actively neutral” or “opposed.”   Declining to even consider a position of supportive for reasons unexplained.

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.

Get busy living or get busy dying

I’m big into parallels these days.   Perhaps because I’ve been listening to too much KQED (Pledge time!) or maybe because I’ve been thinking too much about Alameda issues, even more so than I usually do.    I have to say, to be perfectly honest, I was a little bugged by the announcement of the rebranding of the Alameda Point Initiative contest on my blog.   I’m not sure if the misspelling of my name bugged me more or if it was the whole idea of the contest.   Probably a little bit of both.   I mean seriously, my name is right there.  It’s not that difficult of a name.   But I digress.

As I was thinking more about the contest and the larger “discussion” surrounding the issue of Alameda Point so far and it struck me how little constructive criticism of the Alameda Point plan itself has been offered by a majority of the opponents.   The caveat is, of course, that there are notable exceptions of people actually doing good analysis of their objections of the problems with the initiative, but largely the critique has come from a purely emotional place.