Natalie Orenstein
Senior Reporter at The Oaklandside
Reporter for @Oaklandside, covering housing and homelessness. Before: @berkeleyside. East Bay born + bred. Would love to talk to you. DMs are off the record
Articles
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1 week ago |
oaklandside.org | Natalie Orenstein
Initial election results show Loren Taylor eking out a slight lead over Barbara Lee, but it’s way too early to tell who will win the heated race for Oakland mayor. The first batch of results published by election officials after 8 p.m. — mostly ballots turned in early — show Taylorwith 49% of the vote and Leewith 45%. The other eight candidates are splitting the rest of the vote.
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1 week ago |
oaklandside.org | Natalie Orenstein
Barabara Lee wants you to vote for her — as well as four other Oakland mayoral hopefuls. Lee released a video outlining her recommended voting strategy on Thursday. In it, she tells viewers to rank her in the number-one slot on their ballots, and then candidates Renia Webb, Suz Robinson, Elizabeth Swaney, and President Cristina Grappo in the second through fifth-place slots. Oakland uses ranked-choice runoffs for mayoral races if no candidate gets over 50% of the vote initially.
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2 weeks ago |
oaklandside.org | Natalie Orenstein
Candidates for public office make countless promises and claims on the campaign trail about the policies and programs they’d pursue if elected. Once on the job, though, they often go a different route, whether because of public pressure, a lack of resources, or a simple change of heart. Luckily, the two most prominent mayoral candidates for the April 15 special election have a history in office that we can look to for hints on how they’d lead Oakland over the next two years.
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2 weeks ago |
oaklandside.org | Natalie Orenstein |Eli Wolfe
On a Sunday in December 2023, Mayor Sheng Thao returned from an event pissed off. When she’d gotten there, she looked at her calendar, where her staff often provided context and logistics, and discovered a lack of any details about the engagement in question. She was livid, and she let them know. “Team,” she began a series of texts to the group that afternoon, “the next event I go to and I have NO fucking logistics in my calendar – see [me] in my office and you will get your first write up.
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2 weeks ago |
oaklandside.org | Natalie Orenstein
Members of the Oakland NAACP branch excoriated two of Sheng Thao’s former staffers at a news conference Monday morning and showered praise on Interim Mayor Kevin Jenkins for firing them. The waterfront event was initially organized to demand that Jenkins terminate Thao’s chief of staff Leigh Hanson and resiliency officer Brandon Harami, both of whom remained employed in the mayor’s office after Thao was recalled.
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RT @TheAtlantic: EXCLUSIVE: The Trump administration has acknowledged that it grabbed a Maryland father with protected status and mistakenl…
I visited the prominent Lake Merritt Lodge homeless shelter after the program moved out in Nov 2024 — and found startling, hazardous conditions. I looked into oversight at the lodge and found a convoluted system that created confusion and, often, chaos. https://t.co/GsIHUtDV06