“A Tough Climb” panel discussion centered around housing insecurity in Contra Costa County took place Oct. 3 at Los Medanos College in the Student Union and focused on taking a deeper look into the issue.
The panel was made up of a variety of perspectives from city government officials, county housing representatives and students featured in the project. The elected officials included the Pittsburg Mayor Shanelle Scales-Preston, Antioch Mayor Lamar Thorpe and the Brentwood Vice Mayor Susannah Meyer. Additionally, members of the ACCE Action non-profit were part of the panel, Nicole Arrington and Christian Copeland, whose organization advocates for housing justice in the community.
Each of the elected officials described their unique perspective on housing in their cities, with possible solutions and resources available.
“We are the only city that offered up our own money to run our hotel to ensure that we’re providing transitional housing for those who have experienced crying homelessness on our streets,” said Antioch Mayor Thorpe. “This is about $2.2 million a year that we paid to run this operation and a lot of those costs come from our ability to want to support people to go into permanent housing.”
“Every city in East County and throughout the state is going to be very different, both in their response and what their personal challenges are,” said Brentwood Vice Mayor Meyer. “I do think Brentwood suffers from a very out of proportion jobs and housing imbalance and I think it’s led to a lot of problems for us. But yes, we 100% can be doing more.”
“But it’s costly. We could do more, and I think we’re gonna continue to see more housing insecurity,” said Pittsburg Mayor Scales-Preston. “And we just continue to look at the job balance and it’s not here. The mayor mentioned ‘we’re one paycheck away,’ but sometimes that’s not a paycheck away.”
A spearheaded effort by Aliyah Ramirez, current editor-in-chief of the campus paper brought the panel to life and was organized by the Honors Club and Experience. Inspired by “A Tough Climb” housing publication the team consisted of reporter Ray Kopf, graphic designer Alexis Ramirez and photographer Katherine Mustar who helped in the effort as well.
The project took over seven months to complete, alongside the California Humanities Emerging Journalist Fellowship Program, the team researched, interviewed, designed and planned the panel after the project was published Sept. 15.
“After planning the event for the past couple of weeks, everything exceeded my expectations,” said Aliyah Ramirez.
“It was planned really well and a lot of work was put into both the production of the project and planning of the panel,” said Kopf.
Kopf also praised Aliyah Ramirez’s efforts for doing “a great job leading the conversation throughout,” as the moderator during the panel.
The event turned out better than the team had hoped as over 160 students and faculty attended.
“We had a full room of students and faculty, ready to learn about housing from our diverse panel,” said Aliyah Ramirez.
As the team reflected on their work surrounding housing in Contra Costa, Kopf said “ I think we all did well with this project and presenting it to our community.” Aliyah Ramirez concludes, “I am proud of how everything turned out.”
