Malo Hutson

Amid a growing housing affordability crisis across California, Berkeley topped SFGate’s list of the most expensive college towns in the country.

By the time Richie Smith was 13, she was used to being told to enter through the back door of a restaurant. So when her family moved from Oklahoma to South Berkeley in 1949, Smith was amazed by the vibrant Black community she found.

A report was presented at a Thursday meeting in the campus’s Multicultural Community Center to discuss campus initiatives to improve food justice and community health in Richmond.

The Berkeley Food Institute recently awarded a $50,000 research grant to a campus research team to analyze the Oakland Unified School District’s new nutritional system.

At a special briefing Friday morning, city personnel introduced a resilience strategy that addresses interconnected stressors facing the city, including natural disaster response, renewable energy, climate change and racial equity, among other issues.

South Berkeley residents are mobilizing around a city project to revitalize their neighborhood, which some worry could spell displacement and proliferate patterns of gentrification seen across the Bay Area.

Over the last couple of years, there has been a noticeable increase in media coverage of gentrification and the rise of Bay Area urban real estate prices. Below is meant to be an explanation of what gentrification is and why the issue of affordability in cities has become such a high-profile topic lately.