The Advocate

Do you believe everyone deserves a safe place to call home? It's a simple question really, but for some people, the answer isn't. As far back as 1944 , we've known that housing is a human right. Even now, when we think of the "American Dream" we think of housing. We imagine a place to live and call our own. So much of our identity and community is intertwined with the place we think of as home. But for many people in San Leandro that's impossible. The minimum wage here is $15.50 per hour . Assuming you are getting shifts full-time, your annual earnings before taxes are $32,240. Meanwhile, the median rent for a studio apartment is $1,849 per month. That's $22,188 per year. You now have $10,052 left for everything else . Oh, but wait, taxes are actually $5,408! Now you only have $4,644 for groceries, utilities, internet, transportation, health insurance, and maybe some clothes to wear. For the entire year. After rent and taxes, you have to live on $387 pe...

( From JTA ) I cannot help but notice a lot of disinformation, ignorance, and bigotry coming from people who call themselves pro-Palestinian and/or pro-Israel as this conflict continues to spiral into ever more suffering. Sometimes, I feel like the best thing I can do when struggling amidst human tragedy is to focus on education as a path for compassion, understanding, and solidarity. Since I am Jewish, I will tell a story of my people. So, I am here to share a little bit about the history of Zionism , which at its core is the belief in the Jewish people's right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. While Zionism has this central core meaning, there are several expressions (or "flavors") of it in practice: political, revisionist, labor, cultural, religious, practical, reform, & radical. There's actually even green Zionism! But all forms tie back, in some form or another to Israel - actually Yisrael, whether Am (the people), Eretz (the land), Medina...

If you don't follow me on Jewish Twitter (Jewitter), you might be surprised that I haven't spoken much about the horrors carried out by Hamas recently, or the terrors by the Israeli government. But I was and have been. Just not here. Because this wasn't the place or the time for me to emotionally process burned and behead Jewish babies alongside the corpses of Israeli women who were raped. The Gazan children orphaned, facing starvation and dehydration while bombs and rockets dropped on their homes. Still, after the initial shock and grief over the loss of life on every side, and after frantic concern for my family in Ramat Gan as well as my wife and children and synagogue (because violence in Israel-Palestine always spills over onto our respective diaspora communities), I'm ready as I'll ever be. Let me be clear: I'm a Zionist and a Palestinian Nationalist. I support a pluralistic and democratic Israel that endures as the fulfillment of the Jewish people's r...

San Leandro currently has 41 Flock "safety" cameras in use around the city. They're meant to help law enforcement catch criminals and stop crimes before they happen. But, like so many well-intended efforts to expand policing, this one presents more dangers and failures than it does results. Indeed, that is the problem with mass surveillance and has been since at least 2001. Recently, the city sought a no-bid contract to expand to 82 Flock cameras throughout the city at the cost of over $1,000,000 without even a policy in place regarding their use or data to support it. However, a group of local leaders came together and were able to successfully advocate for the city council to wait and learn more before taking further action. Why, might you ask? Well, let's break it down for everyone. The ACLU has released a comprehensive report on the multiple problems with these types of AI-driven mass surveillance systems, from improper retention and sharing of data to the incre...

(Photo credit: SF Chronicle ) If you live in the Bay Area, you've probably been inundated with hysteria about the local crime rate from catalytic converter thefts to store burglaries. So what's happening in San Leandro? Well, let's dig into the data.  https://www.sanleandro.org/449/Crime-Analysis . I looked at the December 2022 Uniform Crime Report (UCR) for the most recent data. Total YTD Crimes for 2022 are almost the same as they were in 2019, within 5% of each other. Thankfully, nearly all of that is property crime and not violent crime (property crime is, coincidentally, 95% of all crime in 2022 and 2019). Still, it's hard to call crime going back to pre-pandemic levels as we continue to transition out of the pandemic anything other than a return to normal. Albeit, a still unsatisfactory normal. I say unsatisfactory because total YTD arrests have continued to decrease significantly since 2017, when the high was 2,799 compared to 2022's 1,292. It's unclear ...