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PW: Well, let's move to the next topic, which is, so now we're in the mid-'90s, and you alluded to this earlier with the wonderful Vicky Smith, moving from work within the Alameda Unified School District to paying more attention to what was happening to homeless youth. And it sounded like part of this was connected to the closure of the Alameda Naval Base, which, I didn't really ever think about this as such a big subject, but the more I'm talking to you, the more I'm realizing this really changed this community.

MY: Yeah, absolutely.

PW: Tell me about this. So, in the '90s, the Alameda Naval Base was in the process of being closed or closed entirely. What does that mean?

MY: Well, it was closed in 1996, that means the Navy operations would come to a halt, and that was part of President Clinton's tenure. And actually, he came out to have some ceremony to close the naval base, but that meant also the redevelopment of the base and all the land there. And then what's very important in all that is the land speculation and then housing issues were hitting a crunch. And you invoked Vicky's name. Vicky was a renter living in the west end of Alameda closer to the naval base, and she was noticing that there were a lot of people being evicted at that particular time, kind of in the mid-'90s or so. There was a housing crisis going on, and she was connected to our community organizing committee because she had been a community representative for other projects and also having worked with CARE. And so she brought it to that committee and said, "We really need to deal with the housing crisis going on." And so Lynette, also being, Lynette Lee, also being involved in housing work herself, could substantiate that what you're anecdotally seeing and feeling is true. She knew very well about the housing crisis, so kind of reconstituted the committee at that time, of community members and church members to begin focusing on the housing issue, and specific to Alameda. And we had some really, really good folks that were involved in that particular committee, including Don Tamaki, Diane Yamashiro, Carl Anderson, and then from the community, Vicky, along with Richard Woo and Arnold Perkins were the people.

And then Roy had left us, and so we hired on -- and actually it was through Roy's recommendation that we hired Cynthia Okayama Dopke to be our organizer for this next phase of organizing. And Cynthia had been working in my office, but had been a PSR grad, Pacific School of Religion grad, she had her M.Div. Decided not to go in the ministry, but she was very involved in peacemaking with her husband, with national peacemaking work. And Roy thought she would be a really good person to organize on this next effort, so she became our organizer. We ended up focusing on, there were 590 units of old Navy housing in Alameda, in the Alameda (naval base), that had not been touched for decades. And so there was a plan, though, to demolish them and to build upscale housing, single family homes there. And actually, Vicky and our community member Jeanne Nader went to the city manager and were asking, poking around asking about what's going on with this. The city manager says, "Yes, there's a plan, we have a corporation that we're working with to try to build new housing." And he said, "If you're concerned about it, come to city council meetings and we'll be debating it and discussing it." And so the committee came up with a focal point on that as a housing issue that was right in front of us. And so the idea was to oppose the demolition of those houses but to convert them into affordable housing. And Lynette, through EBALDC, came up with a pro forma to propose how they could be converted into affordable housing, and then Cynthia began organizing interfaith vigils at the site of the housing and organizing folks. The key partner for us in the faith community was the St. Barnabas church, which was located near the housing.

Other congregations weren't so enthusiastic about getting involved with the housing issue, because housing, we learned, kind of had been sort of a sacred cow around certain policies that had been in place. And we learned about Measure A, which was an exclusionary housing policy that had been passed in the 1970s that barred multifamily dwellings being built in Alameda, and was really, there were multiple rationales around it, but one of them was to keep out low income minorities from the community. And we began to understand it as we began to hear the stories being told, particularly from the Black community, because they understood it very well. But nonetheless, we moved forward with this campaign to convert East Housing, and Cynthia did a really great job of organizing folks, Lynette was kind of at the helm of it as well, being the expert on housing. We mobilized people to come out to the planning board meetings, we were unsuccessful in stopping at the planning board level, it went to the city council and we had dozens and dozens of people out testifying as well. People who were renters, people who were concerned about their long-term sustainability in this community, because there were neighbors that were being evicted, and it was just happening too rapidly. And we were unsuccessful at that point as well, at the city council, and they moved forward with the plans.

PW: You mean they were going to demolish the old naval housing and build new...

MY: And then they were going to build up a new development, which is, I think, called the Bayport now.

PW: That's over by College of Alameda?

MY: It's over by College of Alameda, yeah. But you know, here's what happened. In the process of this, it was determined that there needed to be a new organization to address these issues. And this is where we came up with the name Renewed Hope Housing Advocates, to be the organization that represented the housing interests of the community. And Renewed Hope was named after a group called HOPE, Housing Opportunities Provided Equally, that existed in the '60s, that was a fair housing organization that went defunct in the early '90s. And so we learned about this through people that got involved in the efforts with us. One of them was a significant person, (Peggy) Dougherty, who was from the St. Barnabas church, had been involved in the previous HOPE, and she and other people suggested we take on their name to honor the history of housing activism in the community, but put a prefix on it to indicate a new chapter. So that's why it became Renewed Hope Housing Advocates.

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