Neighbors United
Scrappy Group of Citizen Neighbors Taking on the Billion Dollar Sutter Juggernaut
Problems with the planned Sutter hospital center for 53rd Street in Emeryville has citizens in Emeryville and North Oakland concerned enough they are coalescing into a new activist group called Neighbors United. The 30+ member group, open to all, has several members of the former activist group RULE (Residents United for a Livable Emeryville) among its founders. The group invites all who are concerned about the Sutter project to the meetings (the next one will be tomorrow).
Sutter Health proposes a new 200 bed facility, about the same size as Kaiser Oakland, in a 330 foot tall tower with a heliport on the roof with 20,000 project generated car trips. The hospital plus administration buildings will total approximately 1.3 million square feet in a footprint half the size of Kaiser Oakland.
The 200 bed, 330 foot tall hospital with accompanying administration and parking structures totaling 1.3 million square feet and will present “traffic gridlock” as Neighbors United presented it, generating thousands of daily car trips as well as heliport noise and risks from all the low altitude helicopter flights to and from the proposed rooftop helipad. Several Neighbors United members state the project should move elsewhere because it is too large for the site and too constrained by it (being right up against the rail road tracks west of Horton Street) and so it will have an unnecessarily deleterious effect on the whole neighborhood.
A Neighbors United organizer and former RULE founder, Tracy Schroth pointed out the irony of Sutter Emeryville being a “trauma center creating trauma for the neighborhood”.
Sunday’s meeting, the group’s second, will be at 11:00 AM at Doyle Hollis Park near the basketball court.
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| Neighbors United flyer making the rounds in the neighborhood. |
