Advanced Planning Studio:
Lower San Antonio, Oakland, California
In Spring 2004, a team of students, working collaboratively in a graduate course in UC Berkeley's Department of City and Regional Planning (taught by Assistant Professor Elizabeth Macdonald in collaboration with CCI), created a planning study and set of recommendations for the Lower San Antonio community and those who care about it.
Oakland's Lower San Antonio neighborhood contains some of the earliest residential areas in the city, dating back to the mid 19th century. Now, this area is one of the most diverse communities in the Bay Area.
The 2000 Census indicates that 72% of the residents rent and 28% own their homes, and the average household size is 3.84 people. The area is attractive to those who know about it, yet unknown to many people in the Bay Area, often leaving it overlooked by outsiders as a place to live, build or invest. To some degree, this anonymity has allowed the area to remain less gentrified than it could have become in the past ten years (as have the nearby districts of China Hill and Fruitvale); however, with the pressures of the East Bay's housing/real estate market, the new Fruitvale Transit Village completed, and a new Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) line planned for International Boulevard, development is bound to accelerate in the Lower San Antonio district. The plan sets out to show how the growth should be encouraged and managed. (See report: Planning for the Central Lower San Antonio Neighborhood, Oakland, California.)
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