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Oak Knoll Update

    What a wonderful article [“10 Projects Reshape Oakland,” September/October 2008] about 10 development projects in Oakland! Regarding the 10th project, the Oak Knoll Coalition can attest that there was agreement with the developer, SunCal, before there was “disagreement.”
    The company, which has more than one project in the Bay Area, has advertised that “SunCal has a long history of … open space preservation in its master-planned communities.” SunCal bought the Oakland property knowing planners had determined, as the Sierra Club newsletter headlined in 1996, that the “Oak Knoll Ridgetop Won’t Be Developed.” The East Bay Regional Park District has always had its eye on expanding its Leona Open Space Preserve through Oak Knoll’s oaks to the Knoll and beyond.
    In 2006 SunCal sponsored community meetings, called “charettes,” which indeed produced a SunCal plan preserving the oak woodlands and Knoll as open space, gracing the skyline above the planned community below. Then SunCal did a flip-flop. By 2007, they were asking to put 2.5 percent of 960 housing units on the grave of the signature open space. Your article’s wording “homes with killer views” is telling.
    The Oak Knoll Coalition is asking SunCal to flip back to the original collaborative plan. Thank you for your mention of this disagreement. Hopes are that, when the dust settles and SunCal leaves town, Oak Knoll will still have its oaks and knoll.

-Laura Dunn, The Oak Knoll Coalition
Oakland

Correction

The photography accompanying the Dialogues article with cheesemonger Juliana Uruburu [November 2008] was shot by Lori Eanes. We credited the wrong photographer.