The Oakland Healthy Development Guidelines is an innovative, collaborative community planning effort that brought together local residents, housing advocates, social justice organizations, the County Health Department, for-profit and non-profit developers, and the City of Oakland to create citywide developments standards and incentives that promote health and equity. The multi-year, community driven process received major funding from The California Endowment, and addresses topics as diverse as affordable housing, access to healthy food, equitable project employment and tenant protections, environmental health, access to transit, crime prevention through environmental design, and pedestrian design to encourage active transportation.

As a grassroots effort based in community needs and aspirations, the initial draft of the Healthy Development Guidelines had overlap and sometimes conflict with existing City standards and development processes. To address this issue, Raimi + Associates worked to identify how each proposed healthy development standard aligned with existing City requirements, and worked to estimate developer cost, anticipated health impact, applicability to different development types, and levels of resident support for each proposed guideline. As a result of this effort, the coalition is working to pass a City Council resolution endorsing the Healthy Development Guidelines as a framework for healthy, equitable development framework in Oakland, with implementation of specific standards and guidelines delegated to City staff according to short-term and long-term feasibility. The result is a detailed list of development guidelines developed by the community with buy-in from the city.