Community Task Force Scoping Meeting

Community Task Force Scoping Meeting

On Tuesday night, Urban Ecology hosted an EN TRIPS Community Task Force meeting in the SOMA. This Task Force will be a key information and communications conduit for organizing community input on the city’s Eastern Neighborhoods Transportation Implementation Planning...
BRIDGE Housing Corporation

BRIDGE Housing Corporation

1 Hawthorne Street, Suite 400 San Francisco, CA 94105 415.989.1111 Fax: 415.495.4898 Carol Galante, President Marin City BRIDGE, a non-profit regional development corporation, provides distressed urban areas with opportunities for economic revitalization through...
Mid-Peninsula Housing Coalition

Mid-Peninsula Housing Coalition

658 Bair Island Road, Suite 300 Redwood City, CA 94063 650.299.8000 Fax: 650.299.8010 Dick Ridenour Redwood City Center Plaza Mid-Peninsula Housing Coalition is a non-profit affordable housing developer on the Peninsula, an area that has some of the highest home...

Our Supporters

Foundations & Organizations The Anne E. Casey Foundation – www.aecf.org The California Endowment – Healthy Living Active Communities Initiative – www.calendow.org The East Bay Community Foundation – www.eastbaycf.org Walter and Elise Haas...
Bay Area Transportation & Land Use Coalition

Bay Area Transportation & Land Use Coalition

The Bay Area is facing many of the most urgent land use and growth questions in recent history. The Silicon Valley boom, aided by the nine-year expansion of the national economy, has sent residential and commercial real estate values soaring, and has overburdened the...
Coalition Symposium a Hit

Coalition Symposium a Hit

Held on January 29, the Bay Area Transportation and Land Use Coalition’s symposium, Community Vision: Regional Action, drew more than 180 activists and elected leaders from around the region. Keynote speaker Congresswoman Barbara Lee detailed federal legislation...
Including the Excluded: Supportive Housing

Including the Excluded: Supportive Housing

By Kate Bristol Consider these scenarios: a young man with a serious mental illness is ready to move from a group home to independent living in the community, but must find a housing unit he can afford on a $640 per month disability benefit. A women with two small...
Emerald Fund

Emerald Fund

501 Second Street, Suite 212 San Francisco, CA 94107 415.777.2914 Fax: 415.777.1317 Oz Erickson 530 Chestnut St. The Emerald Fund’s infill projects are concentrated in San Francisco and most include both housing and retail space. At 530 Chestnut Street in the...
Holliday Development, LLC

Holliday Development, LLC

1500 Park Avenue, Suite 200 Emeryville, CA 94608 510.547.2122 Kevin Wakelin, Kevin@hollidaydevelopment.com The Marquee Holliday Development is a real estate development company specializing in the rehabilitation of former industrial buildings into mixed use, live-work...

Classic Communities, Inc.

1068 East Meadow Circle Palo Alto, CA 94303 650.496.4496 Scott Ward Classic Communities, Inc., headquartered in Palo Alto, is one of the Bay Area’s leading specialty homebuilding companies. Since its founding in 1992, the company has established a track record...
Neighborhood Vision Moves Ahead

Neighborhood Vision Moves Ahead

On April 5, Urban Ecology organized the third in a series of community workshops in Telegraph-Northgate, a low-income neighborhood that lies just north of downtown Oakland. Nearly three dozen residents and merchants gathered to review design recommendations developed...
Cooling Our Cities

Cooling Our Cities

Lisa Gartland Scientific data show temperatures in cities all over the world, from Baltimore and Phoenix to Shanghai and Tokyo, are steadily increasing by one half to one degree Fahrenheit every ten years, and the primary cause isn’t global warming. Cities...
The CoHousing Company

The CoHousing Company

1250 Addison Street #113 Berkeley, CA 94702 510.549.9980 Kathryn McCamant, katie@cohousingco.com Swan’s Market Cohousing The CoHousing Company is a design and development firm specializing in creating cohousing communities. These communities cluster 15 to 40...
Principle: Access

Principle: Access

As the Bay Area grows, transportation becomes more complicated and more frustrating. It is predicted that the average speed in Napa County during rush hour will be 18 mph by the year 2010 if current traffic patterns continue. Communities and transit agencies around...
UE Revitalizing Lower San Antonio

UE Revitalizing Lower San Antonio

How do people who speak five different languages talk about a common future for their neighborhood? Translation. Not just translation from one language to another, but translation from the language of planners to that of everyday people. This kind of translation...
Voting for Our Cities – A Look Back at Gore

Voting for Our Cities – A Look Back at Gore

By James B. Goodno Not too long ago, cities figured prominently in national politics. As a result, presidential candidates offered urban programs as a matter of course, and public investment flowed into housing, community development, transportation, social welfare,...
Ecological Development In The United States

Ecological Development In The United States

Santa Monica Sustainable Building Guidelines As part of its Sustainable City Program, adopted by the City Council in September 1994, Santa Monica is developing “Sustainable Building Development Guidelines” which may prove a useful model for other cities. A...
Citizens Housing Corporation

Citizens Housing Corporation

26 O’Farrell Street, Suite 506 San Francisco, CA 94108 415.421.8605 Fax: 415.421.8615 Scott Falcone, sfalcone@citizenshousing.org The Promenade Citizens Housing Corporation (CHC) is a non-profit, public benefit corporation established in 1992 to increase and...

Regis Homes of Northern California

393 Vintage Park Drive, Suite 100 Foster City, CA 94404 650.378.2800 Fax: 650.570.2233 Mark Kroll Regis Homes has developed over 9,000 units of housing in California and its infill projects include CityPark and Atherton Place. CityPark, in Foster City, consists of 42...
Interview with UE’s New Designer

Interview with UE’s New Designer

Jess Wendover started at Urban Ecology in August 2003. She is the recipient of one of five annual Frederick P. Rose Architecture Fellowships, a national program that places new architects with organizations that work in low-income communities. The three-year...

CORE Development

99 North 1st Street, Suite 101 San Jose, CA 95113 408.292.7841 Fax: 408.292.0339 Martha Putnam, mputnam@coredevelopmentinc.com David Neale and Core Development Inc have pioneered both affordable and market rate infill housing in San Jose since the late 1970’s,...
Fair Share Housing Campaign

Fair Share Housing Campaign

Bay Area Transportation and Land Use Coalition Fair Share Housing Campaign Platform Drafted and signed by: California Affordable Housing Law Project, Greenbelt Alliance, Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California, Urban Ecology The Bay Area Transportation...
Walkable Streets Toolkit

Walkable Streets Toolkit

The Walkable Streets Toolkit was published by Urban Ecology in October 2004. If you are a resident who wants cars to stop speeding down your block, a student who wants to walk to school more easily, or a businessperson who wants to see more people walking through your...
Alleys and Backyard Housing

Alleys and Backyard Housing

By David Winslow Nestled among the back alleys of many existing neighborhoods is a large, fallow urban resource. Alleys and backyards, if reclaimed as sites for secondary dwellings, could sustain unobtrusive and affordable new housing with only modest increases in...
Partnership

Partnership

Our work cannot be accomplished without partners. Urban Ecology works with: nonprofit advocacy groups, service providers, and developers foundations planning firms public entities, such as transportation agencies, city and county governments, and recreation...
Clinton Park

Clinton Park

Oakland, California Challenge The Eastlake neighborhood in Oakland, California, is one of the most diverse communities in that city. It is home to African Americans, Latinos, Southeast Asian immigrants, and Native Americans. Yet Eastlake’s main open space—Clinton...
The Future Conditions Report

The Future Conditions Report

The ENTRIPS Community Task Force recently met again in early November. Urban Ecology hosted and helped manage the meeting while the city’s Metropolitan Transportation Agency (SFMTA) took on the main facilitation of the agenda. We held the meeting at Recology‘s...
Abrams/Millikan & Associates

Abrams/Millikan & Associates

1834 Fourth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710 510.644.3002 Denny Abrams Fourth Street, Berkeley Abrams/Millikan is a design/build development firm that has been developing Berkeley’s Fourth Street Center for over twenty years. Stretching along two blocks on both sides...
CAPPs the Wrong Way to Curb Sprawl

CAPPs the Wrong Way to Curb Sprawl

On November 3 Tri-Valley voters defeated the CAPPs, a trio of closely-watched, nationally significant land use initiatives, designed to dramatically alter the planning process and ultimately curb residential development in Livermore, Pleasanton, and San Ramon. Because...
San Diego Canyons Mix Coyotes and House Cats

San Diego Canyons Mix Coyotes and House Cats

Kevin Crooks A century of intensive urban development has destroyed most of the native sage scrub and chaparral habitat in Southern California — helping to create one of the world’s largest epicenters of extinction. Indeed, San Diego has more threatened...
Regional Polarization and Tax Sharing

Regional Polarization and Tax Sharing

by Myron Orfield The forces of polarization — the push of concentrated poverty and the pull of concentrated resources — operate throughout metropolitan regions. Because the dynamics are regional, only a regional approach can change them. There is little that...