News

The Berkeley Wire: 11.21.11

November 21, 2011 4:55 pm by Tracey Taylor

Op-ed: Cal’s Robert Hass on the “poet-bashing police” [New York Times]
Gap between rich and poor in area is widest in Berkeley [New York Times]
A professor’s personal journey to Occupy Cal [Oakland Local]
Berkeley pureplay Berkeleyside scratches a niche [NetNewsCheck]
ASUC organizes donation drive for Haste fire victims [ASUC]
Berkeley in top 10 most educated cities in the state [Daily Cal]
Occupy Cal on Sproul Plaza from an artist’s perspective [Urban Sketchers]
Fire a death-blow to lower Telegraph? [Berkeley Daily Planet]
Former UC Berkeley chancellor Ira Michael Heyman dies [AP]
Help on the way for Telegraph Avenue fire victims [UCB]

Photo: This is Bear Territory by dhparks/Berkeleyside Flickr pool

5 Comments

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  • Anonymous

    The gap between rich and poor thing seems a little bit suspect, though i suppose anywhere else you have such a gap, the poor live in a seperate municipality (Palo Alto and East Palo Alto, etc).

    Id just worry that the stat here could include some students who are living off loans or parents money that they dont count as income.

  • Charles_Siegel

    “Mr. Berube’s research has shown that the area of central Berkeley
    bounded by University Avenue and Oxford Street has one of the highest
    concentrations of poverty in the Bay Area, on par with perennially
    distressed areas like West Oakland and the Bayview Hunters Point
    neighborhood of San Francisco.”

    It doesn’t make sense.  Considering that downtown has the Gaia building, ArtTech building, Library Gardens, and other similar buildings, I don’t see how it can have the same concentration of poverty as West Oakland.  Downtown undoubtedly has lots of poor people living in SRO-type of buildings. But there is also a mix of incomes, rather than the concentrated poverty in West Oakland.

    Unless, as the previous commenter says, they are counting students as poor.  Those students may really be low income now, but most are culturally middle class and soon will be economically middle class or better.

  • Bill

    Yes, I had the same problem with the article.  I wondered that since they had only two sides of the square (University and Oxford) what the other two were – the Oakland border and the bay?

  • Bruce Love

    BS Newswire linked to his follow-up:

    http://www.baycitizen.org/blogs/newsroom/berkeley-wealth-gap-not-causes-students

    In the comments he mentions it’s:  University, Oxford/Fulton, Dwight, MLK

    To Charles:  Many poor people live in places other than SROs.  

  • Charles_Siegel

    I know.  I was thinking of many of the older buildings in downtown, not just the SROs.  But there is clearly also a mix of newer, higher rent buildings.