Los Angeles Times, October 21, 2019: How Affordable Housing Activists are Trying to Thwart Cutthroat Real Estate Capitalism
Oliver Burke could have joined his Silicon Valley counterparts who cashed in precious stock options and pumped their newfound riches into start-up businesses, bigger houses and fancier cars.
Instead, he looked at the wreckage just beyond the glistening tech world — the tent cities beside seemingly every freeway onramp, the destitute neighborhoods — and decided to take a different path. A former motor test technician for Tesla, Burke used $200,000 from his company stock options to buy a corner lot in a struggling Oakland neighborhood to create a new home.
For someone else.
He is in the process of giving the weedy, junk-strewn property in the Lower Bottoms neighborhood to a real estate cooperative, which plans to build as many as six tiny homes for people who might otherwise be driven away by the San Francisco Bay Area’s rapacious real estate market. A deed restriction will keep the homes affordable in perpetuity.
“I saw a hell of a lot of people in need,” said Burke, 46. “If this prevents a conventional developer from displacing people with another $1-million-plus house and it improves the lives of four people, or maybe six people, to me that’s a good multiplier of resources.”
