Palo Alto Matters - Community voices for sustainable solutions
News, data, commentary and connections to help Palo Alto residents get informed, get involved, and speak up about community concerns.
Palo Alto Weekly – by Jocelyn Dong / August 16, 2017
Avenidas, the downtown Palo Alto nonprofit that provides services to seniors, plans to open a cafe in its center at 450 Bryant St. — ending speculation that it might continue to host longtime lunch program La Comida.
Palo Alto Weekly – by Elinor Aspegren, Shawna Chen and Jocelyn Dong / August 15, 2017
Unhappy over the City of Palo Alto’s planned eviction of a dozen nonprofit organizations and businesses that have been using First Baptist Church in Palo Alto as their home, members of the groups and their supporters turned out in force on Monday to plead with the City Council to change zoning rules to allow them to stay.
San Francisco Examiner – OpEd by Leslie Dreyer, Joseph Smooke and Sarah Sherburn-Zimmer / July 20, 2017
Your platform, which relies on the filtering theory, states, “Today’s new, expensive housing becomes tomorrow’s inexpensive housing.” This theory doesn’t hold true for San Francisco, nor likely any other city strangled by the current global speculative market. When the California Legislative Analyst’s Office misused UC Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project data to advocate for the construction of market-rate housing as an anti-displacement tool, the researchers responded, in summary, by saying:
Palo Alto Matters – Guest Commentary by Greer Stone / June 25, 2017
Santa Clara County Human Relations Commissioner, Chairman of the Santa Clara County Justice Review Committee, and former Chair of Palo Alto’s Human Relations Commission
In 2003 the world was a different place. A gallon of gas cost $1.79, a dozen eggs would run you $1.24, and the average price of a home in Palo Alto cost $1,179,000. The world had never heard of Barack Obama, and Donald Trump had not even begun his reality show, let alone his career in politics. Yes, much has changed, but unfortunately, the funding provided by the City of Palo Alto to help the most vulnerable members of our community has not.
