Business
Once Vilified, BP Now Getting Credit for Gulf Tourism Boom
In this Wednesday, May 13, 2015 photo, tourists line the beaches in Gulf Shores, Ala. Industry officials say Gulf Coast tourism is surging, five years after the BP oil spill. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
JAY REEVES, Associated Press
ORANGE BEACH, Ala. (AP) — With the Memorial Day holiday here, fallout from the oil spill that left Gulf Coast beaches smeared with gooey tar balls and scared away visitors in 2010 is being credited, oddly, with something no one imagined back then: An increase in tourism in the region.
Five years after the BP disaster, the petroleum giant that was vilified during heated town hall meetings for killing a way of life is now being praised by some along the coast for spending more than $230 million to help lure visitors back to an area that some feared would die because of the spill.
Questions remain about the long-term environmental impacts of the BP disaster, with a report released just last week finding a definite link between the spill and a record die-off of the bottlenose dolphins that tourists love to spot along the northern Gulf Coast. Pockets of oil still blot the sea floor and spots along Louisiana’s coast.
Meanwhile, many are still wrangling with BP over spill-related claims. Attorneys for businesses and individuals claiming damages from the spill announced a $211 million settlement last week with Transocean Ltd., owner of the failed Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.
Yet, at the same time, parking lots are full outside the same coastal hotels and condominium towers that struggled for business and slashed prices while crude was pouring into the gulf off Louisiana’s coast in 2010.
Visitors bob in surf where oil once washed in, and some restaurants have 90-minute waits for dinner on the weekend. Tourist business has doubled in Alabama’s largest beach towns since before the spill, officials say, and Pensacola Beach, Florida, is so clogged with visitors that traffic is a primary problem.
Many attribute the change in large part to the millions of dollars that BP spent on tourism grants and advertising that promoted the Gulf Coast nationwide to people who previously didn’t even realize that Alabama and Mississippi had coastlines.
“I’ve traveled as recently as the spring to California and there were people there who were saying, ‘Hey, I saw those commercials about Alabama,” said coastal condominium developer Bill Brett. “I really think those commercials helped.”
Brett is an owner of Brett/Robinson Real Estate, where he said business is up about 30 percent since the year before the spill. The company has developed 19 buildings with more than 3,200 condo units on the Alabama coast, including one that was finished with a $37 million settlement from BP after the spill.
The tourism surge isn’t happening in a vacuum: Many U.S. attractions have seen big increases during the same period as the economy recovered following the 2008 financial crisis and Americans returned to the road.
The theme parks of Orlando, Florida, helped draw a record 62 million visitors to the city last year, and the U.S. Travel Association expects Americans to spend about 5 percent more this Memorial Day than last.
But back in 2010, there were questions and fears over whether the tourist economy of the northern Gulf Coast would ever recover from the spill. Residents feared that images of oil-soaked birds and blackened beaches would permanently change travel patterns and leave towns like Gulf Shores, Alabama, and Destin, Florida, as the forgotten coast.
Ted Scarritt, who offers tourist cruises in Orange Beach aboard his 53-foot catamaran “Wild Hearts,” remembers crying and praying while the spill was happening. Scarritt, who also owns a beach service company, purchased the sailboat only months before the spill and had to keep it out of the oil-marred waters that summer.
Today all that seems like a bad, distant dream as he watches clear gulf waters slide past the hull during an afternoon of sailing off Alabama’s coast.
“We’re just amazingly thankful,” said Scarritt. “I think our area has recovered profoundly. You can look at the water right now, you can look at the beach. We’re fine.”
Picking up shells in the surf at Pensacola Beach, Autumn Ventling of Nashville, Tennessee, didn’t realize the spill ever occurred; she was just 18 at the time. Today, she said the white-sand beach and emerald-colored water appear beautiful, just like so many other beaches on the Gulf Coast.
“I can’t tell anything happened,” said Ventling, 23.
Part of that is because of a massive cleanup program BP conducted on beaches after the spill. For months, big machines with metal sifters dug deep to remove remaining mats of tar from the sand, which was then spread back on the seashore.
While the cleanup work was going on, BP was also shelling out cash to revive tourism.
BP spokesman Jason Ryan said the company provided $179 million in tourism promotion grants to the gulf states of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi, and it aired commercials nationally touting the region as recently as early 2013. The company hasn’t disclosed the cost of the spots, he said.
But under an agreement with plaintiff’s attorney who sued over the spill, BP provided another $57 million for private groups and government to promote tourism and seafood on the Gulf Coast.
The rebound has been a relief to people like Jeanne Dailey, owner of Newman-Dailey Vacation Rentals in Destin.
During the long summer of 2010, Dailey spent many sleepless nights fearing oil would wash ashore and kill the tourism business. The Destin area never got the heavy patches of oil that polluted Alabama beaches, Mississippi coastal islands and the boot of Louisiana, but the perception that the entire coast was coated in oil prompted hundreds of vacationers to cancel travel plans, she said.
“Once I made peace with the fact that I might have to declare bankruptcy, things started to get better,” she said.
BP’s ad campaign combined with sales incentives combined to lure people back to the area eventually led to a strong rebound, Dailey said. Five years later, her business is thriving and preparing to mark its 30th anniversary.
___
AP writer Melissa Nelson-Gabriel contributed to this story from Pensacola Beach, Florida.
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Business
OPINION: 57,000 Empty Apartments and Not a Word of Apology – City Limits
BLACKPRESSUSA NEWSWIRE — “Short-term rental income was, for many of these families, not a luxury. It was the margin between keeping the house and losing it. Local Law 18 closed that door, and the people who closed it are now waving away 57,000 empty apartments as statistical noise.”
Every indicator in New York City’s housing market is pointing in the wrong direction.
Rents are at historic highs. Foreclosure notices are climbing in Black and brown neighborhoods that never fully recovered from the last crisis. Deed theft, the predatory stripping of generational wealth from families who built their equity over decades, continues to devastate communities from Brownsville to Jamaica.
On top of all these factors, there were more than 57,000 rent-stabilized apartments sitting completely empty as of April last year. That number grew by 8,000 units in a single year, with the sharpest increases hitting Brooklyn and Queens hardest.
Brooklyn and Queens. My neighborhoods. Your neighborhoods.
You would think that news of 57,000 empty affordable apartments in the middle of a housing emergency would produce outrage, emergency hearings, and demands for accountability. Instead, New Yorkers got a collective shrug from opinion leaders.
Read that again: 57,000 families could be housed in those apartments. Households currently paying market rent, doubled up, couch-surfing, or one missed paycheck away from the street could have relief. And silence from the city’s housing leadership, activists, and coalitions.
In my experience as chair of the Subcommittee on Affordable Housing in the Assembly, that is not advocacy. That is surrender.
These are the same voices, the same institutions, the same political class that successfully lobbied to effectively ban short-term rentals in New York City through Local Law 18. At its peak, Airbnb had roughly 20,000 listings in New York City, nearly a third the number of apartments currently sitting vacant and padlocked in the rent-stabilized system. The campaign against those listings was relentless, loud, and wrapped in the language of affordability and housing justice.
Where is that energy now?
Where are the press conferences about landlords warehousing stabilized units while families sleep in shelters? Where is the legislation with teeth? Where is the outrage that was apparently plentiful when a Black homeowner in Bed Stuy wanted to rent out her spare bedroom to make ends meet?
Because that is exactly who Local Law 18 hit hardest. Not the corporate bad actors. Not the hedge funds. The struggling homeowner, disproportionately Black, disproportionately in Brooklyn and Queens, who used their home as a small economic engine to survive in a city that grows more expensive by the month.
Those families were told their activity was destabilizing the housing market. Those families were fined, delisted, and legislated out of a livelihood. And now we learn that 57,000 stabilized units are sitting empty while rents spiral and foreclosures mount, and the response from housing advocates is essentially: that’s just how big numbers work.
This is not sound policy. This is politics. And the communities paying the price know the difference.
I have spoken with homeowners across Central Brooklyn who are barely holding on. They bought their homes, sometimes one generation removed from the Great Migration, and they have watched the equity they built become both their greatest asset and their greatest vulnerability. Predatory lenders, deed theft schemes, and rising property taxes all circle that equity like wolves.
Short-term rental income was, for many of these families, not a luxury. It was the margin between keeping the house and losing it. Local Law 18 closed that door, and the people who closed it are now waving away 57,000 empty apartments as statistical noise.
Everyone in this fight knows what needs to happen but will not say it out loud: Local Law 18 needs reform. Common sense reform. The kind that distinguishes between an investor running a ghost hotel and a homeowner renting a room. The kind that actually targets bad actors instead of penalizing the most economically vulnerable property owners in the city.
I hear it in private conversations with elected officials, with housing attorneys, with planners. The consensus is there. The political will is not, because the same advocacy groups and political donors who pushed the original law are still in the room, and nobody wants to take their call.
What this moment requires is courage, not calculation.
Every month that passes with 57,000 empty stabilized apartments is a month of families in crisis, of shelter costs ballooning, of neighborhoods destabilizing. Every month that Local Law 18 remains unreformed is another month a Black homeowner in Flatbush or Hollis faces impossible choices that wealthier New Yorkers simply never have to make.
You cannot ban the small and ignore the large. You cannot mobilize armies of lobbyists against a homeowner’s spare bedroom while shrugging at tens of thousands of warehoused affordable units. You cannot claim to stand for housing justice and then tell 57,000 families worth of empty apartments that the math just works out this way.
The hypocrisy has to stop. Politics have to give way to people. And the officials and advocates who have the power to fix this, who know what needs to be done, have to decide which side they are actually on.
Because from where I stand, in the communities I have served for decades, it is very clear who is being left out in the cold.
Dr. Annette Robinson is a former member of both the State Assembly and City Council in Brooklyn.
Black History
NABJ Convention Brings Black Journalists, Civic Leaders Together in Atlanta
Among the conference’s most closely watched sessions was Thursday’s Newsmaker Plenary, where House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries discussed the national political climate with NABJ President Errin Haines. Journalist Joy-Ann Reid later led a fireside conversation with legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, creator of the term “intersectionality,” and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the 1619 Project.
ATLANTA—The 52nd National Association of Black Journalists conference brought thousands of journalists, students, media executives and civic leaders to Atlanta Aug. 12-16 for its 2026 Convention and Career Fair, a five-day gathering centered on the theme “Our Revolution: Truth, Power and Black Journalism.”
Among the conference’s most closely watched sessions was Thursday’s Newsmaker Plenary, where House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries discussed the national political climate with NABJ President Errin Haines. Journalist Joy-Ann Reid later led a fireside conversation with legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, creator of the term “intersectionality,” and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the 1619 Project.
The plenary also turned toward grief, accountability and justice as the parents of 18-year-old Nolan Wells, Christine Wells-Wonsley and Elmore Wonsley, appeared with civil rights attorney Ben Crump and the Rev. Al Sharpton. Crump was also the attorney for Trayvon Martin’s, Michael Brown’s, and Tamir Rice’s families. Moderated by journalist Tiffany Cross, the Wells family’s appearance focused on unanswered questions surrounding Nolan’s July death in Mississippi and calls for a federal review.
Reid and journalist Don Lemon also joined a separate discussion with Cross, columnist Michael Harriot and journalist Chandra Whitfield about career disruption, resilience and building independent platforms as Black journalists face layoffs and wider media industry upheaval.
Across generations, attendees exchanged ideas about sustaining careers and serving Black communities.
The gathering reflected NABJ’s long-standing role as both professional home and public forum for Black journalists. For Black-owned legacy newspapers, including ours, the Atlanta convention reinforced a familiar mandate: defend truth, elevate Black voices and connect national debates over politics, justice and media power to the communities most affected.
Black History
$5 Billion Coliseum Vision Puts Oakland Jobs, Businesses at Center
Reynolds said Black and Brown contractors have historically lacked the bonding, insurance, equipment and staffing required to compete for large contracts because they were denied opportunities to expand.
OAKLAND – A sweeping, multiphase redevelopment of the Oakland Coliseum site led by Ray Bobbitt, president of the African American Sports and Entertainment Group (AASEG), and businessman James “Jim” Reynolds Jr., could eventually attract between $3 billion and $5 billion in investment.
Reynolds said the first phase, estimated at $1 billion to $1.5 billion, could include housing, hotels, restaurants, entertainment venues, open space and opportunities for local small businesses.
“We are going to transform the entire area with housing, hotels, with an infrastructure that benefits the community,” Reynolds said.
He also wants to attract major entertainment partners and position Oakland to compete with venues in San Francisco and San Jose. Reynolds said the city already possesses natural assets that other cities spend fortunes trying to create.
“One of the most naturally beautiful cities I’ve ever been to,” he said. “In Oakland, if you do nothing, it’s beautiful naturally: lakes, the mountains, the scenery, the open space, the weather.”
Reynolds’ vision, however, extends beyond buildings and entertainment. He is also focused on which businesses receive contracts and which residents benefit from the jobs and economic opportunities the project creates.
Reynolds said Black and Brown contractors have historically lacked the bonding, insurance, equipment and staffing required to compete for large contracts because they were denied opportunities to expand.
“Why would you build a big business when you know no one was going to hire you to do the job?” Reynolds asked.
He recalled working with longtime business partner Earvin “Magic” Johnson to encourage minority-owned firms to compete for larger contracts. About 1,000 businesses attended one outreach event after receiving assurances that opportunities to serve as prime contractors were real.
Reynolds wants to bring the same approach to Oakland.
“I don’t need goals and set-asides to figure out how to give Black companies a chance to be a prime,” he said.
He also wants Black businesses to move beyond seeking only small portions of projects or subcontracting roles.
“When we run the concessions, we pick who has a concession,” Reynolds said, citing partnerships involving Johnson, LL Cool J and Stephen A. Smith.
The same principle should apply to construction, entrepreneurship and workforce development, he said.
“Job training and opportunities to have Blacks lead something like this matter,” Reynolds said.
Reynolds also wants young Oakland residents connected to the jobs and career pathways created by the redevelopment.
“They’re going to have jobs, job training, and opportunities to work,” Reynolds said.
He rejects assumptions that Black youth and Black-owned companies cannot manage major responsibilities.
“I’m not going to sit here like others who have been in positions like this and doubt that Black people can do certain things,” Reynolds said.
For Reynolds and Bobbitt, the Coliseum redevelopment is an opportunity to create more than a replacement for the professional sports teams Oakland lost. Bobbitt contributes deep Oakland roots, community relationships and years of persistence, while Reynolds brings capital-market experience, global business relationships and a record of structuring enormous transactions.
Together, they envision a destination that attracts visitors while creating jobs, businesses and ownership opportunities for Oakland residents.
“Thank you, Jim, for believing in Oakland and investing,” Bobbitt said.
CEO of the Oakland African American Chamber of Commerce Cathy Adams, who wrote a letter of support for AASEG at a time when many doubted the feasibility of their goals, said the Coliseum area development plan will become the example of how Black-owned businesses and contractors can help close the disparity gap in Oakland.
Next week, Part 2: Len Turner and local business owners can benefit.
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OPINION: 57,000 Empty Apartments and Not a Word of Apology – City Limits
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Business
Once Vilified, BP Now Getting Credit for Gulf Tourism Boom
In this Wednesday, May 13, 2015 photo, tourists line the beaches in Gulf Shores, Ala. Industry officials say Gulf Coast tourism is surging, five years after the BP oil spill. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
JAY REEVES, Associated Press
ORANGE BEACH, Ala. (AP) — With the Memorial Day holiday here, fallout from the oil spill that left Gulf Coast beaches smeared with gooey tar balls and scared away visitors in 2010 is being credited, oddly, with something no one imagined back then: An increase in tourism in the region.
Five years after the BP disaster, the petroleum giant that was vilified during heated town hall meetings for killing a way of life is now being praised by some along the coast for spending more than $230 million to help lure visitors back to an area that some feared would die because of the spill.
Questions remain about the long-term environmental impacts of the BP disaster, with a report released just last week finding a definite link between the spill and a record die-off of the bottlenose dolphins that tourists love to spot along the northern Gulf Coast. Pockets of oil still blot the sea floor and spots along Louisiana’s coast.
Meanwhile, many are still wrangling with BP over spill-related claims. Attorneys for businesses and individuals claiming damages from the spill announced a $211 million settlement last week with Transocean Ltd., owner of the failed Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.
Yet, at the same time, parking lots are full outside the same coastal hotels and condominium towers that struggled for business and slashed prices while crude was pouring into the gulf off Louisiana’s coast in 2010.
Visitors bob in surf where oil once washed in, and some restaurants have 90-minute waits for dinner on the weekend. Tourist business has doubled in Alabama’s largest beach towns since before the spill, officials say, and Pensacola Beach, Florida, is so clogged with visitors that traffic is a primary problem.
Many attribute the change in large part to the millions of dollars that BP spent on tourism grants and advertising that promoted the Gulf Coast nationwide to people who previously didn’t even realize that Alabama and Mississippi had coastlines.
“I’ve traveled as recently as the spring to California and there were people there who were saying, ‘Hey, I saw those commercials about Alabama,” said coastal condominium developer Bill Brett. “I really think those commercials helped.”
Brett is an owner of Brett/Robinson Real Estate, where he said business is up about 30 percent since the year before the spill. The company has developed 19 buildings with more than 3,200 condo units on the Alabama coast, including one that was finished with a $37 million settlement from BP after the spill.
The tourism surge isn’t happening in a vacuum: Many U.S. attractions have seen big increases during the same period as the economy recovered following the 2008 financial crisis and Americans returned to the road.
The theme parks of Orlando, Florida, helped draw a record 62 million visitors to the city last year, and the U.S. Travel Association expects Americans to spend about 5 percent more this Memorial Day than last.
But back in 2010, there were questions and fears over whether the tourist economy of the northern Gulf Coast would ever recover from the spill. Residents feared that images of oil-soaked birds and blackened beaches would permanently change travel patterns and leave towns like Gulf Shores, Alabama, and Destin, Florida, as the forgotten coast.
Ted Scarritt, who offers tourist cruises in Orange Beach aboard his 53-foot catamaran “Wild Hearts,” remembers crying and praying while the spill was happening. Scarritt, who also owns a beach service company, purchased the sailboat only months before the spill and had to keep it out of the oil-marred waters that summer.
Today all that seems like a bad, distant dream as he watches clear gulf waters slide past the hull during an afternoon of sailing off Alabama’s coast.
“We’re just amazingly thankful,” said Scarritt. “I think our area has recovered profoundly. You can look at the water right now, you can look at the beach. We’re fine.”
Picking up shells in the surf at Pensacola Beach, Autumn Ventling of Nashville, Tennessee, didn’t realize the spill ever occurred; she was just 18 at the time. Today, she said the white-sand beach and emerald-colored water appear beautiful, just like so many other beaches on the Gulf Coast.
“I can’t tell anything happened,” said Ventling, 23.
Part of that is because of a massive cleanup program BP conducted on beaches after the spill. For months, big machines with metal sifters dug deep to remove remaining mats of tar from the sand, which was then spread back on the seashore.
While the cleanup work was going on, BP was also shelling out cash to revive tourism.
BP spokesman Jason Ryan said the company provided $179 million in tourism promotion grants to the gulf states of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi, and it aired commercials nationally touting the region as recently as early 2013. The company hasn’t disclosed the cost of the spots, he said.
But under an agreement with plaintiff’s attorney who sued over the spill, BP provided another $57 million for private groups and government to promote tourism and seafood on the Gulf Coast.
The rebound has been a relief to people like Jeanne Dailey, owner of Newman-Dailey Vacation Rentals in Destin.
During the long summer of 2010, Dailey spent many sleepless nights fearing oil would wash ashore and kill the tourism business. The Destin area never got the heavy patches of oil that polluted Alabama beaches, Mississippi coastal islands and the boot of Louisiana, but the perception that the entire coast was coated in oil prompted hundreds of vacationers to cancel travel plans, she said.
“Once I made peace with the fact that I might have to declare bankruptcy, things started to get better,” she said.
BP’s ad campaign combined with sales incentives combined to lure people back to the area eventually led to a strong rebound, Dailey said. Five years later, her business is thriving and preparing to mark its 30th anniversary.
___
AP writer Melissa Nelson-Gabriel contributed to this story from Pensacola Beach, Florida.
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Business
OPINION: 57,000 Empty Apartments and Not a Word of Apology – City Limits
BLACKPRESSUSA NEWSWIRE — “Short-term rental income was, for many of these families, not a luxury. It was the margin between keeping the house and losing it. Local Law 18 closed that door, and the people who closed it are now waving away 57,000 empty apartments as statistical noise.”
Every indicator in New York City’s housing market is pointing in the wrong direction.
Rents are at historic highs. Foreclosure notices are climbing in Black and brown neighborhoods that never fully recovered from the last crisis. Deed theft, the predatory stripping of generational wealth from families who built their equity over decades, continues to devastate communities from Brownsville to Jamaica.
On top of all these factors, there were more than 57,000 rent-stabilized apartments sitting completely empty as of April last year. That number grew by 8,000 units in a single year, with the sharpest increases hitting Brooklyn and Queens hardest.
Brooklyn and Queens. My neighborhoods. Your neighborhoods.
You would think that news of 57,000 empty affordable apartments in the middle of a housing emergency would produce outrage, emergency hearings, and demands for accountability. Instead, New Yorkers got a collective shrug from opinion leaders.
Read that again: 57,000 families could be housed in those apartments. Households currently paying market rent, doubled up, couch-surfing, or one missed paycheck away from the street could have relief. And silence from the city’s housing leadership, activists, and coalitions.
In my experience as chair of the Subcommittee on Affordable Housing in the Assembly, that is not advocacy. That is surrender.
These are the same voices, the same institutions, the same political class that successfully lobbied to effectively ban short-term rentals in New York City through Local Law 18. At its peak, Airbnb had roughly 20,000 listings in New York City, nearly a third the number of apartments currently sitting vacant and padlocked in the rent-stabilized system. The campaign against those listings was relentless, loud, and wrapped in the language of affordability and housing justice.
Where is that energy now?
Where are the press conferences about landlords warehousing stabilized units while families sleep in shelters? Where is the legislation with teeth? Where is the outrage that was apparently plentiful when a Black homeowner in Bed Stuy wanted to rent out her spare bedroom to make ends meet?
Because that is exactly who Local Law 18 hit hardest. Not the corporate bad actors. Not the hedge funds. The struggling homeowner, disproportionately Black, disproportionately in Brooklyn and Queens, who used their home as a small economic engine to survive in a city that grows more expensive by the month.
Those families were told their activity was destabilizing the housing market. Those families were fined, delisted, and legislated out of a livelihood. And now we learn that 57,000 stabilized units are sitting empty while rents spiral and foreclosures mount, and the response from housing advocates is essentially: that’s just how big numbers work.
This is not sound policy. This is politics. And the communities paying the price know the difference.
I have spoken with homeowners across Central Brooklyn who are barely holding on. They bought their homes, sometimes one generation removed from the Great Migration, and they have watched the equity they built become both their greatest asset and their greatest vulnerability. Predatory lenders, deed theft schemes, and rising property taxes all circle that equity like wolves.
Short-term rental income was, for many of these families, not a luxury. It was the margin between keeping the house and losing it. Local Law 18 closed that door, and the people who closed it are now waving away 57,000 empty apartments as statistical noise.
Everyone in this fight knows what needs to happen but will not say it out loud: Local Law 18 needs reform. Common sense reform. The kind that distinguishes between an investor running a ghost hotel and a homeowner renting a room. The kind that actually targets bad actors instead of penalizing the most economically vulnerable property owners in the city.
I hear it in private conversations with elected officials, with housing attorneys, with planners. The consensus is there. The political will is not, because the same advocacy groups and political donors who pushed the original law are still in the room, and nobody wants to take their call.
What this moment requires is courage, not calculation.
Every month that passes with 57,000 empty stabilized apartments is a month of families in crisis, of shelter costs ballooning, of neighborhoods destabilizing. Every month that Local Law 18 remains unreformed is another month a Black homeowner in Flatbush or Hollis faces impossible choices that wealthier New Yorkers simply never have to make.
You cannot ban the small and ignore the large. You cannot mobilize armies of lobbyists against a homeowner’s spare bedroom while shrugging at tens of thousands of warehoused affordable units. You cannot claim to stand for housing justice and then tell 57,000 families worth of empty apartments that the math just works out this way.
The hypocrisy has to stop. Politics have to give way to people. And the officials and advocates who have the power to fix this, who know what needs to be done, have to decide which side they are actually on.
Because from where I stand, in the communities I have served for decades, it is very clear who is being left out in the cold.
Dr. Annette Robinson is a former member of both the State Assembly and City Council in Brooklyn.
Black History
NABJ Convention Brings Black Journalists, Civic Leaders Together in Atlanta
Among the conference’s most closely watched sessions was Thursday’s Newsmaker Plenary, where House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries discussed the national political climate with NABJ President Errin Haines. Journalist Joy-Ann Reid later led a fireside conversation with legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, creator of the term “intersectionality,” and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the 1619 Project.
ATLANTA—The 52nd National Association of Black Journalists conference brought thousands of journalists, students, media executives and civic leaders to Atlanta Aug. 12-16 for its 2026 Convention and Career Fair, a five-day gathering centered on the theme “Our Revolution: Truth, Power and Black Journalism.”
Among the conference’s most closely watched sessions was Thursday’s Newsmaker Plenary, where House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries discussed the national political climate with NABJ President Errin Haines. Journalist Joy-Ann Reid later led a fireside conversation with legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, creator of the term “intersectionality,” and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the 1619 Project.
The plenary also turned toward grief, accountability and justice as the parents of 18-year-old Nolan Wells, Christine Wells-Wonsley and Elmore Wonsley, appeared with civil rights attorney Ben Crump and the Rev. Al Sharpton. Crump was also the attorney for Trayvon Martin’s, Michael Brown’s, and Tamir Rice’s families. Moderated by journalist Tiffany Cross, the Wells family’s appearance focused on unanswered questions surrounding Nolan’s July death in Mississippi and calls for a federal review.
Reid and journalist Don Lemon also joined a separate discussion with Cross, columnist Michael Harriot and journalist Chandra Whitfield about career disruption, resilience and building independent platforms as Black journalists face layoffs and wider media industry upheaval.
Across generations, attendees exchanged ideas about sustaining careers and serving Black communities.
The gathering reflected NABJ’s long-standing role as both professional home and public forum for Black journalists. For Black-owned legacy newspapers, including ours, the Atlanta convention reinforced a familiar mandate: defend truth, elevate Black voices and connect national debates over politics, justice and media power to the communities most affected.
Black History
$5 Billion Coliseum Vision Puts Oakland Jobs, Businesses at Center
Reynolds said Black and Brown contractors have historically lacked the bonding, insurance, equipment and staffing required to compete for large contracts because they were denied opportunities to expand.
OAKLAND – A sweeping, multiphase redevelopment of the Oakland Coliseum site led by Ray Bobbitt, president of the African American Sports and Entertainment Group (AASEG), and businessman James “Jim” Reynolds Jr., could eventually attract between $3 billion and $5 billion in investment.
Reynolds said the first phase, estimated at $1 billion to $1.5 billion, could include housing, hotels, restaurants, entertainment venues, open space and opportunities for local small businesses.
“We are going to transform the entire area with housing, hotels, with an infrastructure that benefits the community,” Reynolds said.
He also wants to attract major entertainment partners and position Oakland to compete with venues in San Francisco and San Jose. Reynolds said the city already possesses natural assets that other cities spend fortunes trying to create.
“One of the most naturally beautiful cities I’ve ever been to,” he said. “In Oakland, if you do nothing, it’s beautiful naturally: lakes, the mountains, the scenery, the open space, the weather.”
Reynolds’ vision, however, extends beyond buildings and entertainment. He is also focused on which businesses receive contracts and which residents benefit from the jobs and economic opportunities the project creates.
Reynolds said Black and Brown contractors have historically lacked the bonding, insurance, equipment and staffing required to compete for large contracts because they were denied opportunities to expand.
“Why would you build a big business when you know no one was going to hire you to do the job?” Reynolds asked.
He recalled working with longtime business partner Earvin “Magic” Johnson to encourage minority-owned firms to compete for larger contracts. About 1,000 businesses attended one outreach event after receiving assurances that opportunities to serve as prime contractors were real.
Reynolds wants to bring the same approach to Oakland.
“I don’t need goals and set-asides to figure out how to give Black companies a chance to be a prime,” he said.
He also wants Black businesses to move beyond seeking only small portions of projects or subcontracting roles.
“When we run the concessions, we pick who has a concession,” Reynolds said, citing partnerships involving Johnson, LL Cool J and Stephen A. Smith.
The same principle should apply to construction, entrepreneurship and workforce development, he said.
“Job training and opportunities to have Blacks lead something like this matter,” Reynolds said.
Reynolds also wants young Oakland residents connected to the jobs and career pathways created by the redevelopment.
“They’re going to have jobs, job training, and opportunities to work,” Reynolds said.
He rejects assumptions that Black youth and Black-owned companies cannot manage major responsibilities.
“I’m not going to sit here like others who have been in positions like this and doubt that Black people can do certain things,” Reynolds said.
For Reynolds and Bobbitt, the Coliseum redevelopment is an opportunity to create more than a replacement for the professional sports teams Oakland lost. Bobbitt contributes deep Oakland roots, community relationships and years of persistence, while Reynolds brings capital-market experience, global business relationships and a record of structuring enormous transactions.
Together, they envision a destination that attracts visitors while creating jobs, businesses and ownership opportunities for Oakland residents.
“Thank you, Jim, for believing in Oakland and investing,” Bobbitt said.
CEO of the Oakland African American Chamber of Commerce Cathy Adams, who wrote a letter of support for AASEG at a time when many doubted the feasibility of their goals, said the Coliseum area development plan will become the example of how Black-owned businesses and contractors can help close the disparity gap in Oakland.
Next week, Part 2: Len Turner and local business owners can benefit.
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