Hayward and County have no actual empathy toward the so-called “low-income,” “underserved” populations they are entrusted to serve. The billion dollar, money-making nonprofit machinery that sucks the taxpayer dollars down the nonprofit sewer is only poised to take in more money. Outcome and success is measured in how many back pats and styrofoam-cup luncheons they serve to themselves. “100% client satisfaction” their powerpoint slide will show! Great! Things must be getting better off by all this taxpayer money pumped into the sewer.

Hayward and County don’t acknowledge the stress they cause to residents by allowing taxpayer-subsidized developers, like Eden Housing Inc., to come into our neighborhood and tell us they will do whatever they want to our only high priority biological resource (i.e. urban wildlife habitat) “BECAUSE THEY OWN IT.” (www.saverubymeadow.org

In 2024, Alameda County and Supervisor Nate Miley will ask us to vote for him again, and to vote for more Measure A1 housing bond money, to save all those poor desperate people contributing to crime and trash. Bond money is a loan, paid back at least double by property taxes or sales taxes. Measure A1 housing bond money requires that its housing projects are voter approved. The fact that voters voted initially for Measure A1 is cited by County as “voter approval”–so go ahead developers, like Eden Housing Inc., and destroy whatever you want. (https://www.change.org/p/alameda-county-board-of-supervisors-save-ruby-meadow-from-destruction

Hayward and County don’t acknowledge what it’s like to have no control over your surroundings and to have to listen to chainsaws killing large old trees, tractors crunching buildings down into rubble, huge earth slammers pounding tunnels into rock…Instead of using the remaining residents left behind the failed 238 project as examples of how to uplift a suffering community, Hayward and County prefer to keep it quiet. Get rid of the tenants, it’s the border, it’s unincorporated, who really cares? Alameda County Planning Director: “We didn’t expect this much opposition.” shhhhhhh

Justine: a former caltrans tenant who waited decades, paying rent to the State of California and hoping for the chance to eventually own her home if the 238 freeway was canceled. She lived there before the State took possession in the 1970’s for the freeway. She was a powerful woman, a smart woman, an educated woman, who got caught up in drug addiction. Despite her lifelong struggles, she married and raised children in that home, hoping and waiting for housing stability, for them, for her grandchildren.

…Justine: The County’s Housing Element showed that the houses were to be torn down if the freeway was canceled. The whole neighborhood was to be apartments stretching from the Mesa Verde condos to the City Center apartments. After the freeway was finally canceled in 2010, Justine was the first to purchase her home here, and by doing that she protected the other tenants, because hers was in the middle, blocking the massive apartment development. Justine died of cancer shortly after buying her home for her family. We miss her and remember how hard she worked for the neighborhood, despite her own troubles.

Mario: a Caltrans tenant before my time whose voice I found in the archives and in books. Finding him gave me strength and his life is a constant reminder that we are not the first, nor the last, and that what we do in our lifetimes matters beyond what we can imagine. Mario’s Caltrans rental was on A Street, the last Castro Valley home before the creek, by the A Street bridge. He is in the archives because he spoke up whenever he could at government meetings about the 238 freeway. Most of those meetings were run by Hayward and Hayward made most of the decisions with Caltrans. Mario was told by the Hayward City Council to stop showing up because he didn’t live in Hayward. 

…Mario: He spoke up against the freeway because it was planned to go directly OVER Ruby Meadow and the senior center/theater area by Carlos Bee Park, where the creeks come into confluence. The 238 freeway plan proposed preserving Ruby Meadow as “mitigation” for the environmental damage done if the freeway were built. Caltrans claimed that having the 238 freeway overhead would not affect raptors hunting and breeding at the meadow. Mario spoke up for the trees and deer and birds and the life in the meadow that he saw every day. He also complained about the condition of his rental. Like most Caltrans tenants, he did home repairs himself. Rental habitability ordinance is county law and Caltrans, a State agency, is above that. One night Mario burned to death in his home on Ruby Meadow. Where he died at Ruby Meadow by the creek is planned and approved by H.A.R.D and Eden Housing, Inc. and Alameda County to become a parking lot.

The names of people and the lives impacted by the 238 freeway project go on and on and on. The earth is sacred here because it remains unpaved earth in the dense urban East SF Bay only because of its unusual and complex history. To County and to Hayward, nothing matters but the bottom line–money. This is despite the millions upon millions upon millions of dollars being pumped into the nonprofit machinery to save us all from ourselves. The recent California Senate Bill 1000 (SB 1000 Environmental Justice) requires that impacts and goals are listed. Ruby Meadow and the 238 lands are in an SB 1000 Priority Population neighborhood, but does it matter? The trees chainsawed down this weekend at the creek (Hayward) and the California poppies plowed under this morning (Hayward) and the Ruby Meadow destruction approved by the Alameda County Supervisors and the H.A.R.D. Board say otherwise. The Alameda County Superior Court’s throwing our grassroots protests to Save Ruby Meadow out of Court, during the crushing pandemic, says otherwise.