Race & Racism (News)
Data shows nearly even racial mix in Silicon Valley
Dateline:
08/07/2008Marty Loo, a white 54-year-old legal secretary who works in San Jose, doesn't mind being a racial minority in Silicon Valley. The population currents shaping the Bay Area this decade mean that everybody, increasingly, has become a minority.
"You kind of work together," Loo said of the mix, "or you don't work here."
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Environmental justice in action
Dateline:
08/04/2008Report: Tri-Valley landlords discriminate
Dateline:
08/03/2008
A recent study of fair housing practices found that about 30 percent of landlords tested in the Tri-Valley and other parts of the East Bay treated prospective tenants differently depending on race.
The Eden Council for Hope and Opportunity, a 44-year-old East Bay nonprofit that specializes in fair housing, tested 111 properties in Alameda, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties — sending out one black and one white applicant to each, to see how they would be treated. Fifteen of the properties were in Hayward, and 10 each in Livermore and Pleasanton.
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Study paints grim picture of East Bay
Dateline:
08/01/2008OAKLAND — A new study shows the East Bay is leading the Bay Area in increasing poverty levels, low living-wage job opportunities, decline of housing affordability and sinking high school graduation rates.
These were among the findings released Thursday by the East Bay Community Foundation. Their 2008 East Bay Community Assessment Update is a "study of studies," based on a review of data from 58 other reports focused on barriers to justice and equity, as well as solutions to improve quality of life issues for East Bay residents.
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Tenderloin struggles to get local grocery store
Dateline:
07/28/2008(07-27) 19:13 PDT -- It seems like the simplest of necessities: a full-service grocery store. But things are never simple at the corner of Eddy and Taylor streets in the heart of the Tenderloin, San Francisco's densest neighborhood and one of its most notorious.
A local nonprofit has been working with city officials for two years to open a grocery store here, an area more known for drug dealers and prostitution than for its thousands of children and families. That admittedly well-deserved reputation, combined with the neighborhood's poor residents, security concerns and a lack of parking and financing, has made it nearly impossible.
Sad chapter in Western Addition history ending
Dateline:
07/21/2008(07-20) 18:13 PDT -- The city's redevelopment agency razed the Fillmore's thriving black neighborhood and business district 40 years ago, promising to revamp the area and then bring the residents and merchants back. Instead, the project languished for decades.
Today, there is a renowned jazz club, an Ethiopian restaurant and a cluster of high-rise apartment buildings. But those projects stand out in an area that has become known for its violence and is home to a number of fast-food restaurants and empty storefronts.
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Blacks' suit accuses Antioch of discrimination
Dateline:
07/17/2008(07-16) 17:48 PDT ANTIOCH -- A group of African American, low-income tenants accused the city of Antioch in a lawsuit Wednesday of trying to drive them out of federally subsidized housing by creating a police squad to target blacks for arrests, harassment and pressure on their landlords to evict them.
As more black families have been drawn to affordable housing in the Contra Costa County community, "the city has reacted with alarm and hostility to the newcomers, choosing to scapegoat them as the cause of economic downturn," lawyers for five renters declared in papers filed in federal court in San Francisco.
Survey Says That Some Landlords Discriminate
Dateline:
07/16/2008The Eden Council for Hope and Opportunity (ECHO) recently revealed the results of their annual fair housing audit, and over one-quarter of properties tested in San Leandro showed a racial bias.
ECHO tests landlords and real estate agents around the Bay Area to determine if they treat renters differently because of gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, national origin, and several other factors.
“The ECHO program is nonprofit and I think our practices are fairly standard to other housing organizations around the county,” said Angie Watson-Hajjem, the group’s fair housing specialist.
Antioch, police named in discrimination suit
Dateline:
07/16/2008The Antioch Police Department has been named in a federal class-action lawsuit contending the department's Community Action Team unfairly targets African-American families enrolled in the subsidized-housing program known as Section 8.
Filed in U.S. federal court in San Francisco on Wednesday by the ACLU of Northern California and three other nonprofit civil rights groups in the Bay Area, the suit contends the city and its police department "intentionally discriminate against African-American Section 8 households on the basis of their race and/or course of income, and has pursued policies and practices that have an unjustified adverse impact upon them."
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