Plan for homeless shelter in Oakland's Chinatown dropped after pushback
Local non-profit organisation Cardea Health was lined up to run the 'interim housing' site at the Courtyard Marriott on Broadway, a US$20 million real estate deal that would convert the hotel into 150 shelter beds for those experiencing homelessness.
The hotel was sold last year for US$10.6 million, a value that took a nosedive in recent years amid the local hospitality industry's decline.
But business leaders in Chinatown successfully lobbied their new city council member, Charlene Wang, whose district includes the downtown neighbourhood, to pull a planned letter of support from next week's council agenda.
'To be frank, this is a perfect example of institutional racism,' Wang said in an interview about the nixed hotel-to-housing proposal. 'You're placing a shelter right beside this vulnerable population.'
City leaders now have two weeks to endorse an alternate shelter site in Oakland, where crime fears and a battered economy have fuelled contentious politics among Chinatown residents in the years since the Covid-19 pandemic.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Standard
8 hours ago
- The Standard
Bessent to meet with Fed candidates around Labor Day to winnow list
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent takes questions from reporters at the Institute of International Finance (IIF) Global Outlook Forum on sidelines of the IMF and World Bank?? 2025 annual Spring Meetings in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 23, 2025. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
South China Morning Post
10 hours ago
- South China Morning Post
‘Not easy': how a US firm avoided Trump's China tariffs by sourcing American
Denis Gagnon had long wanted to establish a manufacturing firm supplied only by American-made parts, a vision shaped by his experience in the international corporate world and his assessment of business risks offshore. He was an outlier in an era of globalisation when businesspeople, including his US peers, waxed lyrical about outsourcing from Asia to minimise production costs. The Gagnons, including his son William, run a medium-sized company called Excel Dryer in the US state of Massachusetts. In 2018, the year US President Donald Trump raised tariffs on Chinese imports in his first term, the father and son knew they had the right plan. Their conviction was reinforced earlier this year when the world's two largest economies escalated duties on each other's imports. 'The tariff increase only solidified our decision to move forward,' said William Gagnon, who is now executive vice-president of the company. After eight tough years searching for a motor supplier outside China, the maker of electric hand dryers achieved its goal of sourcing 100 per cent of its parts domestically by 2023, William Gagnon told the Post.
South China Morning Post
18 hours ago
- South China Morning Post
Style Edit: De Beers drops lab-grown diamond jewellery to focus on natural stones
In the rarefied world of jewellery, the brightest light apparently comes from the deepest origins. This year, the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) – the foremost arbiter of diamond standards for more than 90 years – has drawn an unmistakable line between the treasures of the Earth and their laboratory-made counterparts. On June 2, the institute announced that by year's end, its famed 4Cs grading system – cut, colour, clarity, carat – will no longer apply to lab-grown diamonds. Instead, man-made stones will receive simplified descriptors such as 'premium' or 'standard', or no grade at all if they fall short. Asscher-cut and cushion-cut natural diamonds, and clarity grading for natural diamonds. Photos: Handout Advertisement For the GIA, this is no cosmetic change but a definitive separation of categories. More than 95 per cent of lab-grown diamonds fall within a narrow band of colour and clarity, making the precision of the 4Cs – developed to express the nuances of natural stones – irrelevant in the synthetic realm. From now on, the full vocabulary of rarity is reserved for gems formed over billions of years, under the unrepeatable pressures of the Earth's mantle. Diamond clarity gradings, now only applicable to natural diamonds. Photo: Handout For natural diamonds, the move is a reaffirmation of their magic: no two are identical, each having singular growth patterns and inclusions, each its own geological signature. They hold value not only for their scarcity and beauty but for the stories they come to carry – of love, commitment, heritage and investment. Engagement rings – from sketches to stone selection to the finished article. Photo: Handout De Beers, whose history has helped define the cultural cachet of diamonds , is acting in concert with this shift. The group will close Lightbox, its lab-grown jewellery brand launched in 2018 with a flat US$800-per-carat price. Since then, wholesale prices for lab-grown stones have collapsed by 90 per cent, as mass production and supermarket sales have stripped away the premium. The decision frees De Beers to focus its resources on reinvigorating desire for natural diamonds – a central aim of its Origins strategy set out in May 2024. A De Beers employee in Botswana sorts through rough diamonds with a loupe. Photo: Handout Synthetic stones will remain in De Beers' portfolio, but in a different arena entirely. Through its Element Six division, the company will continue producing lab-grown diamonds for advanced industrial and technological applications – from semiconductors to quantum computing – where performance, not romance, is the measure of worth. As CEO Al Cook observes, the widening gulf between 'factory made' and 'Earth made' is only becoming clearer. With the GIA redrawing the rules and De Beers doubling down, natural diamonds are not just holding their position – they are reclaiming the narrative in a market where rarity is the ultimate luxury.
