The new Oakland Career Center is holding an open house from 4-5.30p today at 294 Semple Street, with tours of the renovation, refreshments and dedication of the JoAnn Fountain community room, named in memory of one of Oakland’s most active advocates.

 

The Oakland Planning and Development Corp. has a long-term lease with the city to operate its JobLinks and School 2 Career programs there. 

 

More than 100 volunteers helped renovate the space, including residents and students who cleared old appliances, scrap metal and more than 60 bags of recycling and 40 bags of garbage.

 

I have blight on my mind now that the snow has melted. On walks and drives around the city lately, I see a shocking number of hillsides strewn with garbage, back porches leaning, gutters hanging, houses peeling paint, houses falling apart, such as this former gem (above) in the 2300 block of Perrysville Ave.

 

Blighted properties are this city’s greatest challenge because they are so pervasively spread over neighborhoods.

 

On a recent crawl through Perry South, where I lived through most of the ‘90s, I was struck by how much worse it has gotten. There are homes that were starting to fall apart in the ‘70s that are now boarded up, condemned or waiting to be boarded up and condemned.

 

The city has lost so many buildings to the momentum of this death spiral. That’s what losing half your population will do.

Now that the market is kicking back in, in some places quite vigorously, we need a visionary force to figure out a strategy to sell people in unaffordable markets on the possibilities in Perry South, Beltzhoover, Lemington, Sheraden, Larimer, Spring Garden, Arlington, Elliott... I could go on but you get the idea.

 

We have tons of houses that people could get for a song and begin infusing our neglected neighborhoods with the vigor they once had.

 

The house above is on Chester Avenue, also in Perry South.

 

You could spend all day shooting pictures like this.

The foundation of the new Shop ‘n Save in the Hill District is finally taking shape. Crews are on the scene at Centre Avenue and Heldman Street.

 

Construction was supposed to have started well more than a year ago on a grocery store that Hill District and Uptown neighbors have been awaiting for 30 years. Funding shortfalls have held the project up until now.

 

Eighteen new townhouses are also under construction along Heldman and Reed Streets, and work is ongoing to transform the former Miller School into eight apartments. TREK is the developer.

 

 

 

If you have failed to join the ranks of Dumpster divers because of the yuk factor, Walkabout’s Dumpster Diver correspondent has checked in to show us it isn’t all about finding edibles amid stinking messes of rot. 

 

“Today I found a few bouquets in the flower dumpster,” he wrote the other day, when he sent the photo of said flowers (above).“They’re grown in California. During spring there will be hundreds, perhaps thousands of bouquets that are thrown away. They aren’t composted, despite the compost dumpster sitting twenty feet away. Maybe they don’t want to pay someone to remove all the rubber bands and plastic? (Or they don’t want to innovate with their growers, to banish non-biological trappings from a biological product? Or is the cellophane compostable, and the employees just haven’t spent sixty seconds to find out?)”

 

These are the conscientious questions of a person who is trying to live thoughtfully on our befouled earth. And while he is doing that, he is making some extra money hauling metal from the woods behind his home in Spring Garden.

 

“I’ve collected hundreds of pounds of metal over the past year,” he wrote. “The scrapyard value of what I found during February approaches $200 for less than 20 hours of mucking around.

 

 

He has a good idea for the reuse of most of the  flowers he finds in Dumpsters.

 

 

“In the moment of discovery, I love to find flowers here, because rummaging through dumpsters is usually a depressing business. But then I must reflect — how demented can America get, with its dumpsters full of flowers, its soil saturated in stupidity [and] flushed daily out to sea.”

 

Chemicals in soil washed into rivers into oceans ... and flowers in Dumpsters.

 

While we wait for the first day of spring, that’s food for thought. Here are a couple of thoughts: