Safeway on College – The cost of doing nothing is not nothing

Last night’s Planning Commission hearing on the College Avenue Safeway went well overall. Sure, the neighbors showed up in force to try to stop the project or at least to greatly reduce the scale of the project. But it was just a scoping session so staff and commissioners repeatedly reminded them to stick to scoping [...]

November 16-22 Oakland Political & Community Events

Monday, November 16th – Oakland Local Community Meetup

Via the Facebook event: “Oakland Local is one month old! Come join us at our first community meetup in downtown Oakland–community partners, OL bloggers & reporters, people interested in being involved with OL and anyone else who wants to support us are invited to our first meetup at [...]

John Gatewood: Safeway at College @ Claremont – Opportunity to Enhance an Urban Village

This guest post was written by John Gatewood, one of the co-founders of ULTRA (Urbanists for a Livable Temescal Rockridge Area), which supports higher density mixed-use development along the major transit corridors of north Oakland. John works in the Graphic Arts Industry and is a resident of Temescal.
Safeway is in the planning stages of replacing [...]

Safeway submits application, but “concerned neighbors” are not so happy about it

I had hoped to have a post up about the Oakland Airport Connector this morning, but I spent too long reading TransForm’s brand new report on the subject and didn’t have any time to write. Check back tomorrow though because I’ll have a lengthy post up about it.
For now though, a brief update on Safeway. [...]

Safeway unveils new design plans for College Avenue store

Last night I attended what I thought would be another community meeting about Safeway. Well it turned out to be less of a meeting and more of an exhibition, which means that I don’t have dramatic moments to share but I did get to look at Safeway’s plans closely.
Overall, I’mvery pleased with what I saw. [...]

April 27-29 Oakland Political & Community Events

This week’s listing is a bit sparser than usual, since I was busy all weekend at the California Democratic Party convention. If you’re curious about how the convention went, I highly recommend checking out the fairly thorough coverage at Calitics. (For my perspective, check out my post at Calitics.) Tomorrow I’ll finally post a write [...]

College Safeway Update

Back in December, I shared the news that the Safeway community meeting had been canceled, and for months after that, the Safeway website was not updated and no one really knew what was happening. Well, a few weeks ago, Safeway finally sent out an email and updated their site. Here’s some of what they had [...]

Safeway stakeholders meeting canceled (or postponed?)

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 [...]

Safeway on College might be stuck with a “patch & paint” job

Like what you see above? Well, if you don’t, you better speak up soon because it’s looking more and more like that’s what we’re going to be stuck with.
Tonight, I went to the 5th community stakeholders meeting about the proposed College Safeway rebuilding. The meeting seemed promising at first, but by the end, I left [...]

Check out CRE8 tomorrow night

I just got an email about what sounds like it will be an incredible event – CRE8:
Messy Monkey Arts is hosting at Swarm Gallery this Wed. 11/12 at 7pm. It’s called CRE8 — 8 artists create 8 canvases in 8 minutes to raise money for our Arts/Health program at Peralta Elementary School. (The school was [...]