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December 14, 2011
STEPHEN VANCE, McClymonds High
The greening of West Oakland would require less cement, more parks and even ponds stocked with fish. It would need more foot traffic and public transportation. And most of all, it would take more mixed-income housing and retail.
Those ideas were part of a blueprint for West Oakland that 13 Oakland students created during their summer internship at The Rose Foundation, an environmental nonprofit based in Oakland.
“This was the first time students from McClymonds, Mandela, Oakland Tech, Oakland High, Street Academy and Skyline came up with their own vision of a healthy, sustainable community,” said Jill Ratner, president of The Rose Foundation.
“After all their work identifying the sources of pollution in the neighborhood and testimony about diesel fumes, they were able to present a truly beautiful blueprint for what they really want in their community,” Ratner added.
The blueprint was developed in response to the Sustainable Communities Strategy — a strategy to guide land-use planning or design, namely the disposition of land, resources, facilities, services and public transportation for the next 25 years. It will reduce greenhouse gas emissions per person as required by California’s SB 375, which was signed into law in 2008.
Two local agencies — Metropolitan Transportation Commission and Association of Bay Area Governments — are preparing workshops in January, and will release a scenario for public comment in March or April.
The summer project also coincided with a pilot project by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to clean lead pollution at several West Oakland locations. For the first time, the EPA used a technology that it says is harmless to people, less invasive and less costly. It uses fish bones to chemically bond with lead.
The idea was to go beyond identifying toxic elements, health issues such as asthma, and pollutants, which students in McClymonds’ Law & Government Academy had tackled as part of a focus on environmental justice. McClymonds students, who testified before the EPA and state and local boards, won an award for their community service last year.
“The summer was devoted to making West Oakland sustainable and empowering the voice of the youth,” said Ratner.
One of those voices comes from Taneka O’Guin, a senior at Oakland Technical High School.
“Working on sustainability taught me to rethink urban planning and how that affects the community,” said O’Guin.
In order to create a blueprint, students visited the self-reliant house at Merritt College and heard from experts on sustainability and environmental technology. One speaker, Dr. Paloma Pazel, emphasized the “six wins” necessary to make a sustainable community: better health; end of gentrification and displacement; affordable housing; reliable transportation; economic opportunity and community activism.
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