By Isaac Pearlman

There’s no easy way to describe what makes the San Leandro Bay region of the East Bay so unique. Ask a design specialist, like Claire Bonham-Carter of Resilient By Design’s All Bay Collective, and she’ll point to “massive infrastructure–the Oakland airport, the BART station, two major roadways…” On the other hand, community activist Colin Miller of the Oakland Climate Action Coalition says “It’s the people that really makes it special.” Miller and the other All Bay Collective community advocates pushed the team hard from the start to consider equity and social justice in all aspects of the project. The final result, a concept called “the Estuary Commons,” proposes to build tidal cities—pre-assembled housing units floating on excavated lagoons—but a huge part of the process was understanding how the design concepts would actually work amidst the realities that East Oakland faces. “East Oakland is the last frontier of gentrification in Oakland,” says Miller. “I think [the team] understood there was a housing crisis, but didn’t fully grasp the importance of acknowledging the potential for displacement.” Bonham-Carter remains optimistic that community interests will remain in the forefront: “We’re committed to continuing to work with the community.”

Read More

San Leandro Bay: Three Cities Confront Common Estuary

By Isaac Pearlman

There’s no easy way to describe what makes the San Leandro Bay region of the East Bay so unique. Ask a design specialist, like Claire Bonham-Carter of Resilient By Design’s All Bay Collective, and she’ll point to “massive infrastructure–the Oakland airport, the BART station, two major roadways…” On the other hand, community activist Colin Miller of the Oakland Climate Action Coalition says “It’s the people that really makes it special.” Miller and the other All Bay Collective community advocates pushed the team hard from the start to consider equity and social justice in all aspects of the project. The final result, a concept called “the Estuary Commons,” proposes to build tidal cities—pre-assembled housing units floating on excavated lagoons—but a huge part of the process was understanding how the design concepts would actually work amidst the realities that East Oakland faces. “East Oakland is the last frontier of gentrification in Oakland,” says Miller. “I think [the team] understood there was a housing crisis, but didn’t fully grasp the importance of acknowledging the potential for displacement.” Bonham-Carter remains optimistic that community interests will remain in the forefront: “We’re committed to continuing to work with the community.”

Read More

Related Content

Resilent by Design Bay Area Challenge

The Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge (2017-2018) invited nine teams to design innovative shoreline adaptations to rising sea levels at nine sites around the San Francisco Estuary. The visions provided by this pre-disaster challenge — modeled on the post-disaster Rebuild by Design challenge in New York that followed superstorm Sandy — are powerful, silo-crossing conversation starters for a region now working to prepare low-lying communities, creeks, habitats, and infrastructure for a bigger Bay.
About the author

Isaac Pearlman covers sea level rise, flooding, and other topics for ESTUARY. A Bay Area native, Isaac's writing is informed by his master's degree in environmental science, as well as many adventures from living and working in South America, Europe, and Southeast Asia. His stories and essays have been featured in Earth Island Journal, the Progressive Populist, and Ecosystems among other outlets. https://isaacpearlman.wordpress.com

Related Posts

American Avocet on managed, former salt ponds in the South Bay. Photo: Roopak Bhatt, USGS

One-of-a-Kind Stories

Our magazine’s media motto for many years has been “Where there’s an estuary, there’s a crowd.” The San Francisco Estuary is a place where people, wildlife, and commerce congregate, and where watersheds, rivers and the ocean meet and mix, creating a place of unusual diversity. In choosing to tell the...
dam spillway oroville

Supplying Water

Ever since the state and federal water projects were built in the 1930s and 1940s, California has captured snowmelt in foothill reservoirs, and moved the fresh water from dam releases and river outflows to parched parts of the state via aqueducts hundreds of miles long. A convoluted system of ancient...

Tackling Pollution

Though the Clean Water Act did an amazing job of reducing wastewater and stormwater pollution of the San Francisco Estuary, some contaminants remain thorny problems.  Legacy pollutants like mercury washed into the watershed from upstream gold mining, PCBs from old industrial sites, and selenium from agricultural drainage in the San...