ouR-Home

The champion of ouR-HOME is the North Richmond Community Advisory Board, which includes a diverse group of local residents, elected officials, public agencies and community organizations.

The ouR-HOME projects enjoy the support of the City of Richmond Mayor’s Office and County Supervisor John Gioia’s office. Support will be requested from the North Richmond Municipal Advisory Council, East Bay Regional Parks District, Contra Costa Public Works, Contra Costa Flood Control District, West County Wastewater District and Bay and Water Trails as key project partners. The Mithun Home Team is a technical design team that includes landscape architects, architects, planners, coastal engineers, ecologists, artists, transportation and alternative mobility planners, affordable housing finance experts, economic advisors and community outreach facilitators.

Juliana Gonzales of The Watershed Project and Robert Rogers of County Supervisor John Gioia’s office have been the community liaisons throughout the process. Key community organizations such as Urban Tilth, Community Housing Development Corporation, Safe Return Project and the Council of Industries are participating on the advisory board. Public agencies include Contra Costa Flood Control District, West County Wastewater Facility, San Francisco Estuary Partnership and Contra Costa Public Works. To ensure direct community benefits, a third of board members are North Richmond residents and the board intentionally reflects the racial diversity of the community.

Source: Resilient by Design | Bay Area Challenge

Many Bay Area communities have similar challenges to North Richmond – including enduring structural racism, chronic flooding, industrial pollution and poverty.

The conditions in North Richmond are a particularly vivid example. Despite the recent economic boom time, many people have been shut out of opportunities to make things better for their families and their communities. Rapid population shifts from climate change create negative economic and individual impacts. Chronic health issues are linked to long-term stress and trauma from these challenges and a generational history of slavery, Jim Crow laws and mass incarceration. Many are being displaced by increasing rents, home prices or natural disasters. This affects everyone as the Bay Area economy is reliant on the workers who live in these communities.

North Richmond has proven to be adaptable and resilient. Strong activism and spirit in the community around unity and inclusion creates traction for good ideas. The Bay Area Challenge shines a light on communities like North Richmond that are positioned to be a model for other communities in the region. North Richmond demonstrates how familiar solutions and technologies can be combined for greater impact and innovation. Integrated strategies support new ways for existing residents to start small businesses, follow a career path, keep their cost of living low, increase their income and own the future of their families and the neighborhood.

Source: Resilient by Design | Bay Area Challenge

ouR-HOME ’s holistic design approach focuses on a regional issue: using infrastructure dollars to leverage health and wealth benefits for disinvested communities.

In North Richmond, investments include pump replacement and sea level rise protection for a wastewater facility, and marshlands that provide critical habitat and support the largest eelgrass bed and oyster beds in the Bay. Building on the North Richmond Shoreline Vision Plan, local expertise in the community has shaped a suite of four projects:

• Planting trees for air and water filtering;
• Using a range of levee edge typologies that change over time to protect Richmond Parkway, the wastewater facility and the neighborhood;
• Introducing a muted marsh that co-exists with industrial uses and allows the marsh to transition upland over time; and
• Completing a multi-use path overpass to provide shoreline access and creation of a green mitigation fund that continues to grow local jobs

Five workshops with the North Richmond Community Advisory Board and countless discussions with stakeholders have resulted in concept-level projects incorporating proven strategies that can have a profound and immediate collective impact in the community as well as long term benefits.

Source: Resilient by Design | Bay Area Challenge

The next step to implement community priorities is funding the continuation of the North Richmond Community Advisory Board.

Seed money will help the Board and the Mithun Home Team develop equity framework criteria. There are a number of implementable projects that support health and wealth so the community can adapt and mitigate climate change – tree planting, an overpass, a Heritage Walk, a horizontal levee and marsh restoration. Integrating the plans will yield the most benefits. For example, looking at public health issues in conjunction with an integrated water management action plan keeps the social benefits primary and linked to physical green infrastructure improvements.

Decision-making about the five project areas can be refined further with a specific plan for housing and transportation, an urban forestry plan and trail project plans. Many of these have been advanced by the community and public agencies over the years. When developed in conjunction, decision-making is leveraged to build shared support and test the feasibility of possible shared benefits. The Watershed Project and Urban Tilth will be central leaders in this work.

Source: Resilient by Design | Bay Area Challenge