PART III
CHAPTER 7
Shortly after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Dawn Phillips, codirector of programs at the social activist organization Causa Justa∷Just Cause in Oakland, lashed out at the president-elect. “The Trump victory is devastating,” he declared. “Trump has given new voice to deeply rooted white supremacy, gender violence, xenophobia and hatred. Hatred of everything that we are. Hatred of everything that we have struggled against.” Hillary Clinton, he asserted, was only marginally a better choice, saying he was “not ready to support her neoliberal agenda at home and promotion of American empire abroad. Not ready to forget her tone-deaf engagement with Black and immigrant organizers and lack of interest in taking action on race.” For Phillips, the only path remained what it had been, resistance: “We have always resisted. Resisted the lies of the two-party electoral game. Resisted police beatings and murders. Resisted environmental degradation and the evils of corporate polluters. Resisted male violence and transphobia. Resisted the rich bosses and landlords who own the airwaves and politicians.”1 Indeed, as the crucible that brought forth the pioneer labor activism of the Pullman porters in the 1940s, the Black Panthers in the 1960s, and the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements in the first part of the twenty-first century, Oakland was very much the home of resistance. It was also under siege in the twenty-first century from shifts in the modern economy that promised some and threatened others that it would become “the new Brooklyn.” Causa Justa was just one of a number of organizations working to prevent this city’s renaissance from further deepening its existing class and racial divides.
Vexed for years by negative comparisons to its near neighbor across the Bay, San Francisco, Oakland readily drew comparisons to Brooklyn, with its complex relationship to Manhattan and its contemporary renaissance. As Oakland started to benefit from spillover effects of soaring housing prices and demands for more affordable commercial as well as residential space in the Bay Area, the comparisons to Brooklyn were in the local context decidedly unwelcome. For every local entrepreneur anxious to embrace the chances that came with the moniker “Brooklyn by the Bay,” as the New York Times trumpeted the city’s trajectory in a long 2014 essay, there was resistance of the kind Phillips and a host of other activists offered.2 When Trump lashed out at those who defended immigrants through the designation of sanctuary cities, he directed his ire especially at California governor Jerry Brown, a former mayor of Oakland, and at Libby Schaaf, who had been a staff member of Brown’s and was now mayor of Oakland herself.3 If politics and policy were not what activists had wanted in 2016, they could not deny how the condition of those historically marginalized in American cities had become even more precarious, making Oakland a central battleground over issues of race, equity, and development in the Trump era.
A city of just over 300,000 people—95 percent white—in 1940, Oakland boomed during World War II as war contracts accelerated work at the city’s port, the West Coast’s largest shipbuilding center and supply distribution point for the Pacific war basin. New opportunities for work drew a flood of migrants, a large number of whom were African Americans. As the city added another 80,000 residents during the war years, the Black population climbed from 8,462 to 47,562 in 1950, making up some 12 percent of the whole city. Strictly prohibited from residing in better residential areas and refused service in many hotels, bars, and restaurants, Blacks crowded into West Oakland, close to the port and related industrial facilities. Although directed to the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs available, Black workers nonetheless were flush enough in the war years to support a thriving commercial district along Seventh Street, an area that included nightclubs and other cultural attractions of sufficient renown to boost its reputation to that of Pittsburgh’s Hill District, Detroit’s Black Bottom, and Washington, D.C.’s U Street corridor. With the war’s end and Black numbers climbing to nearly a quarter of the population in 1960, Oakland’s Black leadership, fortified by the presence of the West Coast branch of the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a strong branch of the NAACP, sought to secure better housing and job security. The city’s white majority, backed by trade unions barring Black membership and spurred on by the conservative Oakland Tribune, however, maintained a strict color line, in commercial establishments as well as in public schools. With the return to peace, the city demolished temporary housing constructed for war workers, and the city’s Black population crowded into what housing was available in West Oakland, where 85 percent resided.4 Black representation in the state legislature and a Democratic sweep of California in 1958 opened the way to state action barring discrimination in jobs and housing. With passage of a fair employment practices bill in 1959 and a fair housing law in 1963, California led the nation in anticipating the Great Society measures of the mid-1960s. Such progress as had been achieved through a coalition of union and civil rights activists, however, provoked its own backlash, and with Ronald Reagan’s election as governor of California in 1966, the gains Oakland’s Black representatives had done so much to achieve disintegrated.
Such setbacks might have been countered in Oakland with the continued growth of the Black population, but the prospect of victories in the city faltered as white residents began to move to other locations and as urban renewal actions, for highways as well as new construction, ripped through West Oakland. A strident opponent of public subsidies for public housing, the Oakland Tribune embraced urban renewal, buttressed with further government subsidies, because it promised to increase real estate values. Targeting a fifty-block mixed-use industrial and residential area between Seventh and Fourteenth Streets, known as the Acorn and described as West Oakland’s worst slum, planners called for the introduction of middle-income housing and new industry. Because 70 percent of those faced with losing their places of residence were Black and the loss of war housing had further exacerbated crowding in West Oakland, the NAACP challenged the plan in court. Thwarted there, activists managed to prevent the complete demolition of another section of West Oakland, forcing planners to embrace rehabilitation of existing structures instead. But with the completion of the Cypress Freeway in 1958 and the further disruption that accompanied installation of stops—eight in Oakland alone—for the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART) in the 1970s, West Oakland was divided by highways that cut the area off from the rest of the city, all the while making decent housing for African Americans even harder to come by. It was more than a decade before replacement housing was available on the cleared Acorn land. In the meantime, the cumulative effect of redevelopment was to force ten thousand West Oakland residents to find other residential locations. In Oakland, as in other American cities, historian Robert Self concludes, urban renewal constituted “a redistribution of property from homeowners and small businesspeople to private industry and corporations, and a redistribution of poor and middling homeowners and renters from one slum to another.”5
Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program found initial support in Oakland through its promise to underwrite Black self-determination. But neither through its community action nor its Model Cities programs did the federally driven effort to combat poverty and associated racial segregation gain material headway. Philosophically flawed, Robert Self concludes, “its structure and funding streams encouraged a civic struggle over meager resources.… When faced with its own internal failings as well as determined local opposition in cities like Oakland, it collapsed altogether.”6 It was with the failure of liberal measures that the Black Panthers emerged. Identified nationally with their radical rhetoric and threatening actions, the Panthers were more warmly embraced within Oakland, as a number of recent historical evaluations have demonstrated.7 But as much as the power of dissent survived retaliatory state actions aimed at their destruction, the Panthers by the late 1970s were a broken organization. If their social welfare policies continued in alternative form, the threat to the established order of power and privilege weakened considerably.
One legacy the Panthers provided was a political awareness generated by the organization’s own entry into electoral politics, and in 1977 the city elected its first Black mayor, Lionel Wilson. The first African American to have been appointed a judge in California, Wilson sought to empower the city’s previously excluded Black community by hiring more Black police and other city workers and introducing a civilian review board to monitor the police. He also changed the city’s bidding system to increase the number of contracts for minority vendors. Fiscal pressures, deepened by passage of California Proposition 13 in 1978 and the collapse of the city’s downtown retail sector, forced Wilson to turn to big development projects in hopes of boosting the revenues necessary to maintain services. City prospects only worsened, however, when Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis relocated his team to Los Angeles in 1982 and the Rouse Company backed out of a commitment to a $350 million regional retail center in the heart of the city in 1985. The closure of the Kahn’s department store a year earlier, following the closure of three other department stores over the previous decade, devastated the downtown.8 The city’s Black population reached 157,484—51 percent—in 1980. At the same time the white population dropped sharply, by 90,000 between 1970 and 1990, to 32.5 percent. Neither Wilson nor his immediate successor could escape the stigma of a minority city burdened by high social costs. Over the next twenty years, however, Oakland changed dramatically in social composition, if not entirely in its economic prospects, as the 2010 census figures showed the white population edging up to 34.5 percent and the Black population dropping precipitously to 25.3 percent. What happened?
Clearly, Oakland’s strategic position at the heart of a thriving Bay Area was a central part of the story. After years of losing industry and population to other area locations that combined aggressive measures to attract industry while at the same time maintaining exclusionary measures to keep their residents white and relatively affluent,9 multiple factors contributed to a slow but significant process of recentralization. Such trends often need political intervention to take hold, however, and by all accounts the difference in Oakland’s trajectory was the election of former California governor Jerry Brown as mayor in 1999. Widely referred to as “Governor Moonbeam” for his countercultural and New Age affectations, Brown moved to Oakland in 1992 after his third failed run for president. Drawn to local office by the prospects of blending development with environmental justice, Brown campaigned on a vision of a city that would be “in harmony with the environment and in harmony with itself.” In a crowded field, following years of stagnation and perceived corruption and ineptitude, Brown rode his fame to victory, securing 60 percent of the vote.
Brown’s early days drew the favor of the twin pillars of the eastern liberal media as the New York Times described him in its lead as “the star mayor” and longtime California observer Lou Cannon of the Washington Post ran an approving story under the headline “Mayor’s ‘Magic’ Turns City’s Luck Around.” The details for such praise lay in the relocation of several big businesses from San Francisco to Oakland coupled with eighteen further developments in the works, anticipated to bring 3,800 new housing units and a 16 percent drop in Oakland’s high crime rate.10 As such accolades might suggest, Brown’s priorities lay more with attracting capital than solving the city’s persistent social problems. Indeed, he received no greater praise for his initiatives than from Heather MacDonald, a resident expert on crime for the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research in New York City. Recognizing the “real concerns of his constituents,” MacDonald claimed, Brown pivoted from criticizing income inequality brought on by global capitalists issued through his weekly talk show on the leftist Pacifica radio station to promoting loosened regulations, tightened welfare rules, and charter schools in addition to getting tough on crime. In his “fervent crusade to resuscitate this still-lovely city, long associated with urban failure,” MacDonald declared, Brown was endorsing “an emerging national consensus regarding what cities need in order to flourish—public safety, order, decent schools, and a respect for private creativity.”11
The centerpiece of Brown’s effort to revitalize Oakland was the goal of reversing outmigration by attracting ten thousand new residents to the city. Unveiled in his inauguration address, the “10K plan,” as it was popularly referred to, would foster, Brown claimed, a new “Ecopolis,” where an environment-friendly city could reduce suburban sprawl by producing “elegantly dense” downtown housing linked to public transportation. Built on New Urbanist, Smart Growth, and Transit Village principles, Brown’s vision focused on a variety of new condominium projects at the heart of the city intended to provide an upscale twenty-four-hour commercial economy. To advance his vision, the New York Times reported, “he cut generous deals with developers, streamlined the approval process and pushed aside city officials who stood in the way.” Before long, the Times further reported, empty lots were transformed into apartment buildings, and new bars and restaurants were spurring night life and a growing arts scene. Critics called the process “Jerryfication,” to which Brown retorted that the city needed fewer people who were living on subsidies and more who had disposable income that could go to art galleries and restaurants. To speed up the process, he pivoted from the promises he had made in his campaign to exempt more Oakland projects from the state’s lengthy environmental review process.12
For a signature project, Brown secured $60 million in subsidies to induce the national developer Forest City Enterprises to construct the Uptown, a three-building apartment complex in what was once a vibrant downtown shopping district. A 1,040-unit mixed-use development designed by a leading New Urbanist firm, Calthorpe Associates, the Uptown project immediately drew the attention of housing activists who had drawn on federal credits to build affordable housing downtown during the lean years of the 1990s. Their demands for inclusionary provisions for the new development met strong resistance, none more than from Brown who made the unfortunate reference to their work as “slumification” while addressing one of their meetings. “Spoken in a room full of affordable housing advocates,” one of those present reported, “his characterization lent credibility to the view that the 10K was a racialized vision serving middle- and upper-class whites, mostly San Francisco commuters, while fostering gentrification and displacement.” In response, a Coalition for Workforce Housing formed to bring activists together with nonprofit housing developers and social service providers to demand that 25 percent of the 10K housing be affordable to households earning $35,000 or less; the city enact a “Just Cause for Eviction” ordinance and not displace residents for the 10K; and the 10K preserve single-room occupancy hotels and downtown social services for extremely low-income people. While their demands addressed the 10K overall, the real target was the largest and highest-profile development—the Uptown.13
What followed was a community-driven process starting with a “gentrification tour” and a protest that spilled over into and ultimately upended a charrette organized by Peter Calthorpe. Rather than pushing for an inclusionary housing provision for the project, activists proposed to design their own space within the complex and turn management over to Forest City. In 2004, after a year of protest and negotiations, the city council approved an agreement that authorized the Coalition for Workforce Housing to develop one of six city blocks involved with the architect of their choice. Abiding by New Urbanist principles, the affordable component ultimately constituted 25 percent of all units. Forest City got the subsidy it had sought, and Oakland remained the only major city in the Bay Area without an inclusionary zoning ordinance.14 Described on Calthorpe’s web page in terms that reflected Jerry Brown’s ambitions for the downtown as “a 24-hour-community that improved neighborhood safety and spurred retail and entertainment activity,” the Uptown’s own profile said nothing about its affordable housing component.15
Brown fell short of his goal of adding 10,000 new residents during his two terms in office, as new building slowed during the recession that emerged in 2008. In his years in office, 3,549 of the 6,000 new units he wanted constructed had been completed, with another 2,149 approved but not yet built. Fewer than 400 of those units could be classified as affordable. Between 1998 and 2002 rents increased 100 percent and the number of “no fault” evictions tripled.16 Still, the city’s population fell almost 10,000 in the first decade of the new century, as the regional technology boom responsible for so much of the increased demand for property collapsed. A reluctant candidate as Brown’s successor, Ron Dellums, the nephew of Pullman porters union vice president C. L. Dellums, returned to politics after a prominent career in Congress and a few years as a lobbyist to eke out a mayoral victory in 2006. Embracing a highly participatory approach to governance through the creation of a number of citizen task forces, Dellums managed to extend some civilian control over the police and to protect industrial jobs at the port from giving way to alternative investment opportunities.17 Lacking the will or all the tools he needed to deal effectively with the recession and its negative fiscal effects, however, Dellums stepped down after one term. The rapid rise of real estate values and the transformation of residential areas outside the downtown took hold during the administration of his successor, Jean Quan.
The real estate boom that marked the second decade of the new century brought anything but equal benefits to area residents. The run-up to the 2008 recession saw renewed demand as new homeowners were attracted by easy credit terms. When recession hit, these buyers suffered. Between 2006 and 2011, 10,508 homes—more than 7 percent of the city’s households—were foreclosed and repossessed, largely in West and East Oakland, where African Americans had concentrated for years. According to a 2012 report by the nonprofit research organization Urban Strategies Council, large investors, most of them not based in Oakland, bought up 45 percent of bank-owned properties. Before long, homes that had sold for as little as $135,000 were renting at more than $3,000 a month. According to a 2014 report in the East Bay Express, one investor, Neill Sullivan, founder of the Sullivan Management Company, convinced a network of San Francisco hedge fund investors in 2008 to give him approximately $23 million to buy up foreclosed, bank-owned properties, largely in West Oakland, where he assembled hundreds of houses at approximately half their pre-recession value. Among those connected to the loans was the liberal hedge fund billionaire Thomas Steyer. In what had to be a colossal lapse in judgment, given the circumstances, a spokesperson for Sullivan reportedly stated in 2012 that the company wanted “to bring in good, productive people and really change the area.” Indeed, as rents rose, evictions soared, and renters joined owners whose homes had been foreclosed scrambling for alternative housing. It was hardly an understatement when the author of the United Strategies report concluded, “Decades of disinvestment and uneven development in East and West Oakland established a perfect storm of opportunity, misfortune, and ultimately, exploitation. The excessive risk, rampant speculation, and lack of adequate regulation that fueled the bubble leading up to the housing crisis is—in many ways—upon us once again.”18
A former community activist who started an organization, Save Our Schools, before getting elected herself to the Oakland School Board and later to the city council, Quan embraced the cause of equitable development. She suffered irreputable damage a year into her term, however, when a massive show of police power to break up an Occupy demonstration resulted in multiple injuries and recriminations. Quan pointed to the role of violent agitators, who she claimed had taken control of the protests, as justification for the crackdown.19 While some might have accepted her argument, she managed to aggravate differences with her natural constituency when she convinced the city council to hire a team of consultants headed by William Bratton to evaluate the city’s troubled police department. Bratton’s reputation promoting stop-and-frisk and zero-tolerance policies while serving as chief of police under New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani generated immediate concern among African Americans. When rising costs prompted Quan to cut social allocations from her budget, she followed Jerry Brown’s example by calling for another ten thousand new residents. Although she was careful to say that she would direct new building along transportation corridors to help neighborhoods throughout the city, she nonetheless offered her own record of redevelopment as a reason for reelection.20 That was not to be, as one-term member of the city council Libby Schaaf won the nonpartisan race with just under 63 percent of the vote.
Brought to national prominence when she alerted city residents to imminent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in February 2018, Schaaf’s term in office was more critically defined by her efforts to grapple with the costs and consequences of accelerated growth. “The moment I decided to run for this office,” Schaaf confessed, “I recognized that for the first time in decades, the opportunity for revitalization was right on our doorstep.” But prosperity was bringing new problems as well as opportunities. Between 2010 and 2016 Oakland gained more than 26,000 jobs, and its unemployment rate dropped below the national average for the first time in more than two decades. In the process, fair market rents doubled between 2011 and 2015, helping make it the nation’s eighth most expensive city. “Oakland’s renaissance is not touching those folks who lived through its period of neglect,” Governing Magazine’s Alan Greenblatt quoted a former city manager as saying. “Schaaf has spent her entire life waiting for Oakland to be ready for its comeback. Now that it’s happening, success may have come too fast for the city to handle.”21
Revitalization took many forms in contemporary Oakland, but there was at least one theme that put new construction in the same camp as downtown development in other booming cities discussed here, most notably Washington, D.C.: the targeted consumers were young, tech savvy, and culturally active. Among the most celebrated new projects in Oakland were Lampwork Lofts, completed in 2014, and the historic rehabilitation of an abandoned General Electric light plant in West Oakland, which according to a writer for Urban Land, constituted 92 “chic, edgy apartments.” Another favorite of the same author was the Hive, a mixed-use project with 105 units at the Nineteenth Street BART station that included “creative office space used by tech and other business startups, as well as a restaurant with outdoor seating, a microbrewery, a bakery, other retail and office tenants, plus a large gathering space for events.” Described by the San Francisco Chronicle as tailor-made for social justice crusaders, the Hive, according to Signature Development Group president Mike Ghielmetti, was intended to become a modern-day Bell Labs, a revolutionary think tank without corporate ID cards or lab coats. Part of a converted row of car dealerships, the larger project anticipated 3.7 million square feet of new development over the next twenty-five years and an additional 1,800 residential units. As part of the Broadway Valdez Select District, the city took advantage of Jerry Brown’s success in streamlining review from environmental regulators to move some 3,000 vacant lots along the corridor into development.22
Ghielmetti was equally effusive about the conversion of an underutilized 64-acre former industrial site on the waterfront, Brooklyn Basin. Intended to encompass 3,100 new residential units; 200,000 square feet of commercial space; marinas; and 30 acres of recreational space and parkland, the new development floundered from its inception in 2006 until Mayor Quan managed to secure outside funding through a friend she met at Berkeley graduate school from the Chinese firm Zarsion Holdings. With an initial investment in 2013 from Zarsion of $28 million for housing construction, Signature described the project on its website as “an integrative urban design in support of the environment, economy, and community” boosted by a shopping district centered around a new marina that would add “maritime recreation and visual interest to the neighborhood.” Undoubtedly sensitive to rising fears of gentrification in the area, Signature also described its planning process as “truly collaborative,” the result of “several years collaborating with community partners, urban planners, and government to gain a deep understanding of what people want for their City.”23 As in so many other projects nationally, such claims for inclusivity were only partially true.
Fearing the spillover effects of so much concentrated new development, representatives of nearby neighborhoods, both those that were economically stable and those with high levels of concentrated poverty, sought commitments for affordable housing for the types of families and seniors that lived nearby and for the hiring and training of local workers. Following years of meetings with officials, organizers secured a legally binding cooperation agreement in 2006 guaranteeing that the Oakland Redevelopment Agency would buy two of the Brooklyn Basin parcels and contract with a developer to build 465 units of affordable housing, open to seniors and families making up to 60 percent of the area median income (which came to about $56,000 in 2015). Several years later they secured another binding agreement for job training and placement. When development stalled during the recession and when the Oakland Redevelopment Authority dissolved in 2013 after Jerry Brown as governor secured legislation eliminating such agencies across the state, arguing that the money could be better used elsewhere, the deals collapsed. Three years later the state came up with $45 million in support of affordability, a measure Signature readily embraced.24 Achieving true diversity as the company promised would prove difficult, as a number of critics pointed out, and meanwhile further development generated growing resistance.
Such big projects were in line with earlier renewal initiatives involving wide-scale redevelopment, and they almost inevitably provoked opposition through the memories associated with the displacement that accompanied them. Even when a more finite and environmentally acceptable plan appeared, as it did in envisioning a transit village at the West Oakland BART terminal, criticism followed. A mere six-minute ride away from San Francisco’s overheated housing market, West Oakland was a natural location for younger professionals to find housing. With competition building for existing units, longtime residents joined to draw up their own plan for development. Known as the West Oakland Specific Plan, the document they produced called for zoning changes to identify a handful of “opportunity areas” where development could be directed to vacant and underutilized properties and sites without displacement of existing housing. Approved by a four-to-two margin at a June 2014 Oakland Planning Commission meeting, the plan evoked considerable opposition from critics, including flyers that circulated that day encouraging opponents to “vandalize developments and gentrifying businesses.” At issue was the lack of a specific commitment to affordable housing. Defending the plan was the developer of the market-rate ninety-two-unit Lampwork Lofts, who claimed it would provide developers a level of certainty that would encourage them to undertake additional projects.25
Oakland’s long history of social justice advocacy meant that there was no dearth of opposition to such proposals. In addition to United Strategies Council, Oakland was the home to several other major social justice organizations, notably Causa Justa::Just Cause and PolicyLink. Active in seeking community benefits from a number of development projects in Oakland, Causa Justa published its own comprehensive report and policy recommendations in 2014, Development Without Displacement. Pointing both to the loss of homes and the rise of evictions from the recession and its aftermath, the report called for a series of protections to both renters and homeowners.26 While some were more accepting of the rise in home prices, including East Oakland councilman Larry Reid, pointing to the benefits to those willing to sell and the advantages of attracting more middle class-residents,27 activists were not satisfied with existing protections. Unwilling to leave such protections only in the hands of nonprofit organizations, organizers pushed for and achieved the establishment of a new city Department of Race and Equity in 2015. Based on similar government departments in Seattle and Portland and describing its mission “to create a city where our diversity has been maintained, racial disparities have been eliminated and racial equity has been achieved,” the department assumed responsibilities for advancing equitable housing and health care policies, creating more jobs, and considering universal preschool. In laying out its goals, the department listed a dozen or so obstacles to racial equity, concluding that it would do its best to “increase awareness of racial inequity, its root causes and how it is perpetuated by institutions and systems.”28
Figure 23. Generated as part of the West Oakland Specific Plan, adopted in 2014, the transit village concept that emerged at the city’s closest BART connection to San Francisco embraced what its developers called “radical placemaking,” a branded location based on community, authenticity, locality, and memory. Despite its intention to enhance community assets, the plan evoked fears of further gentrification and loss of the area’s longtime identity as a center of Black life. Courtesy JRDV Urban International.
White, Jewish, and as a member of the council, a representative of one of the city’s most affluent areas, Mayor Libby Schaaf nonetheless embraced the goal of equity. As a member of the city council, she had voted for a tenant protection ordinance and pressed for a higher city minimum wage, an action that was overwhelmingly supported by popular vote in the city’s 2014 election. As mayor, she endorsed the city council’s commission of a study in September 2015 to put into effect “A Roadmap Toward Equity” that built on Causa Justa’s 2014 report. Produced by another Oakland equity organization, PolicyLink, with broad support across the city’s ethnic and political spectrum, Oakland at Home, issued in 2016 with another strong endorsement from the mayor, detailed a number of steps intended to protect renters and homeowners from displacement, including infrastructure and housing bonds and cap-and-trade funds.29 Putting the report into effect proved difficult, however, as different parties wrestled over how high fees should be and when they might be implemented.
Seeing the need both for new market-rate housing to accommodate the continuing influx of professionals and additional affordable housing options, the report called for 17,000 new units in each category in the coming years. To ensure affordability, the report called for impact fees on new development. Such fees, which were already in effect in a number of Bay Area jurisdictions, had been proposed twice during Jerry Brown’s early tenure as mayor, only to be rejected in spite of their endorsement by a select commission charged with advancing inclusionary housing. With Schaaf’s election, the council tried to navigate between demands of housing activists for action and those of developers who warned that setting the fee too high would bring new construction to a halt. In the end Schaaf endorsed and the city council approved fees that started well below those of nearby Berkeley and rose only over a number of years, on the theory that developers would have enough time to deal with the additional costs. Realizing that such accommodation would neither satisfy critics nor generate the fees necessary to preserve affordability in the city, Schaaf announced a more comprehensive set of housing objectives, most of which had been in Causa Justa’s report, including $105 million in bonds for affordable housing and another $250 million devoted to infrastructure improvements.30 Council approval for impact fees came two weeks after the city issued a ninety-day moratorium on rent increases.31
Even as Schaaf announced her own housing proposals, activists gathered signatures to put what they called “Renters Upgrade” on the November 2016 ballot for approval. Described as going “much further than the Mayor’s plan in providing immediate relief to Oakland renters facing evictions, landlord abuse, and impossible rent increases,” the initiative proposed to place an absolute 5 percent per year cap on rent increases, place more housing units under rent control, and ensure a tenant-majority Rent Board. In expanding eviction protections under Oakland’s existing Just Cause for Eviction Ordinance so that the rules would apply to virtually all apartments in the city, the measure would have covered for the first time apartment units built after 1983 and would have brought as much as 45 percent more of Oakland’s rental housing under just cause protection.32 An amended measure that covered homes built only before 1995 passed instead, and a year later the pace of increase in rents and home sales had slowed as new construction, both subsidized and market rate, reached record highs. Spurring such investments in large part were the publicly funded measures Causa Justa had proposed and Mayor Schaaf had endorsed: $580 million in bonds to support affordable housing, $100 million for infrastructure, and another $60 million in state cap-and-trade funds through California’s Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities Program for building new transit-oriented affordable housing projects.33
With such success behind them, activists still saw another loophole in development: the disposition of public land. Brought to public attention especially through evolving plans for the Oakland Coliseum, built in 1966 and remaining in joint ownership of the county and city, the sale of public land fell under no uniform rules in the city, though under the state’s Surplus Land Act affordable housing developers were supposed to be given the first opportunity for purchase. When activists learned that a prime site at the Lake Merritt redevelopment area across from downtown was being considered for sale to for-profit developers to build a 24-story, 298-unit, market-rate housing tower, they organized resistance under the name of the East 12th Coalition. Carrying their opposition as far as shutting down a city council meeting, they nonetheless failed to reverse the council’s intent until a story leaked that the city attorney had advised the council and the mayor that the proposed deal violated state law. Subsequently, the lead developer, UrbanCore, found a new partner from the community, the East Bay Local Development Corporation, to propose a revised plan with 25 percent of the units reserved as affordable. It was a singular victory for activists, but their larger effort to implement a policy based on the earlier recommendations of the 2015 housing equity report under the banner “public land for public good” fell short, at least initially, as the city council debated how best to balance social goals with anticipated revenues. With a staff report for the council at hand that argued selling public land at a discount meant shortchanging the city of funds that could otherwise be directed to social purposes, including a housing trust fund, a vote was postponed until December 2018. Then the council finally endorsed a proposal to deposit all proceeds from future sales of unused city-owned land into an affordable housing trust fund while also offering that land to developers agreeing to sell at least half their homes at below-market rates. The ruling, which affected only twenty of the more than one thousand sites owned by the city, was expected to generate at least eight hundred below-market rate homes.34
Over several decades, Oakland had clearly reversed its downward trajectory. Jerry Brown’s efforts to revitalize the central city stirred resentments and fostered further inequities, but the process proceeded quite differently from earlier renewal efforts that had catered to the automobile and its suburban owners as a way of bolstering the city’s finances. With Brown, development proceeded along lines established and promoted by “smart growth” advocates aiming to build up a denser, mixed-use and mixed-heritage character at the core. By 2015 the historic downtown, concentrated near Broadway and relying heavily on its BART mass transit stations to concentrate growth as well as to encourage commuting in and out of the city, had accumulated 84,000 jobs. The number of housing units had grown by 5,000 since the turn of the century, making it possible for 20,000 people to live in the heart of the city. The San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) proposed another 50,000 jobs downtown that would be laced into the organic character of the area, as it had developed both a diverse population and a culturally rich environment.35
The city’s effort to guide such development through a “downtown specific plan” proceeded with much the same perspective. An early draft, which laid out a vision of pedestrian-filled promenades and outdoor cafes, sleek electric streetcars and public parks, prompted considerable criticism, however, from residents convinced that the effort lacked sufficient attention to issues of gentrification and affordability. In January 2016, the city responded by setting a fresh direction, charging a new set of consultants with a mandate to “apply a social and racial framework.” Its subsequent “equity working group meetings” tied housing, affordability, jobs, training, and economic opportunity, among other factors, to the principles laid out in Causa Justa’s “Roadmap Toward Equity” report.36 For SPUR, the new direction was too much. Complaining that the new planning process had fallen into the thrall of “displacement without development,” Oakland director Robert Ogilvie called for a bolder approach that would generate more housing at all income levels. In order to achieve downtown’s full potential, he argued, “we need to make sure new projects aren’t burdened by unsustainable exactions or requirements.”37
The balance between growth and equity remained an enduring problem, and Ogilvie’s concerns represented but a variation on those raised with other socially driven regulations aimed at protecting renters and ensuring affordable housing options. Yet Oakland’s dilemma remained. In spite of Oakland’s rising prosperity—indeed because of it—enduring inequalities were getting worse. According to a 2016 PolicyLink report, nearly half of rental households in Oakland were cost-burdened, meaning they spent more than 30 percent of their total income on housing. That condition extended to 63 percent of Black renters. Over the previous three decades income for full-time workers at the bottom tenth had declined by 19 percent while income for those at the top tenth increased by 39 percent.38 Many initiatives sought to address the imbalance, including efforts to increase the number of single-room occupancy units in the city. But even as the city announced those plans, developers converted a number of such units to market-rate apartments.
Despite Oakland’s new protections for its most vulnerable residents, the city continued to face difficult challenges, none less than in East Oakland, where reinvestment and associated pressure on rents had yet to materialize. The immediate cause was the dated sports complex that served as home to the city’s three professional teams, each anxious to upgrade its stadium, with the usual demand for subsidies to do so. Bound by budgetary as well as ideological constraints, Oakland and its partner in owning the Coliseum, Alameda County, where both the Athletics and the Raiders played their home games, remained firmly opposed to subsidizing new facilities. The city also resisted calls to replace the adjacent Oracle Arena, where the Golden State Warriors played. As early as 2005, the A’s began exploring options in other California cities, while the Raiders sought out alternatives in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Prompted by news that the Warriors were considering moving across the bay to San Francisco and seeking a means of diverting attention from the Occupy controversy that engulfed her administration as mayor, Jean Quan unveiled in 2011 an ambitious proposal to build a massive sports village at the Coliseum site. Dubbed “Coliseum City,” the project, designed to be privately funded, would include a new ballpark for the A’s, a new stadium for the Raiders, and a new arena for the Warriors, along with a convention center, hotel, and retail strip. Subsequently described by the Oakland Planning Department as a blueprint for creating a world-class sports, entertainment, and science and technology district constituting a “healthy and equitable urban showcase for the region,” the project nonetheless prompted vigorous resistance from local residents.39
As ambitions for the hundred-acre site expanded to include the possibilities of high-tech development and luxury housing that could go for $3,000 a month per unit, fears mounted that rising rents could displace both low-income residents and small businesses. While proponents stated their hope that affordable housing would be part of the redevelopment, they had to admit four years into the planning process that it would be up to the developer to meet that obligation. At a town hall gathering in March 2016 called by a coalition of labor unions, environmental health groups, and housing rights groups under the banner of Oakland United, Esther Goolsby opened the meeting by decrying a project “that’s not for us, with luxury housing, high-end shops; jobs that aren’t for us, poor air quality and no affordable transit.” Another participant added, “Oakland is in a development boom right now, and we feel vulnerable. Black folks are getting displaced. We want our community to remain the community we’ve invested in for decades.” The East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, which had fought for community benefits in conjunction with the Brooklyn Basin, joined in, claiming on its website that the San Diego–based developer, New City LLC, was refusing to discuss community concerns in advancing its plan.40
When New City dropped its plans for the site based on a complex proposal to fund it through revenue bonds to be repaid by fees derived from new uses, plans for the Coliseum site floundered and both the Warriors and the Raiders announced plans to relocate, the former to San Francisco, the latter to Las Vegas, both following their seasons ending in 2019. It was left to the A’s, then, to revive the Coliseum proposal, which it did in November 2018, with a plan to buy the land owned by the city and county for $134 million—the amount of accumulated debt on it—and turn it into a mixed-use development. In return, the A’s sought access to the Howard marine terminal near the upscale Jack London section of the waterfront, where they would build a new stadium along with new housing and retail facilities at their own expense. “The No. 1 principle is really that this is bigger than baseball,” team president David Kaval asserted. “This is something that can really help transform Oakland, deal with a lot of the challenges the city has had over the years, and bring economic vitality, job opportunities and housing opportunities as part of this ballpark neighborhood.” Rather than suggesting that profits in East Oakland would enable the waterfront investment, Kaval added, “We’ve been there 50 years. We have a great sense of the importance of that development on the future of East Oakland.… We wanted to honor East Oakland. We wanted to make sure it was part of the plan, and there wasn’t any thinking we were abandoning that part of the city.”41
Figure 24. Plan for the new Oakland A’s baseball stadium. Located at a prime site on the West Oakland waterfront, the proposed new stadium trod a fine line between incorporating nearby community interests while still accepting subsidies for transportation infrastructure that would make it a magnet for regional investment and use. Courtesy Oakland Athletics.
The new proposal did nothing to dampen concerns about development in East Oakland. Mayor Libby Schaaf criticized Alameda County for selling its share of the land to the A’s without requiring any provision for affordable housing in the new complex in return, but the city seemed limited in its own effort to tie development to community needs.42 While the A’s planned to refashion the Coliseum as a facility for local recreation and to maintain the Oracle facility for concerts and local events, the impact of a technical college and market-rate housing on the site reignited earlier concerns about displacement. The A’s offered no immediate proposal for a formal community benefits agreement. In contrast, because keeping a professional team in the city remained a critical priority, the waterfront stadium proposal sailed through a variety of reviews by state and local authorities, despite the need for environmental remediation to the site and opposition from longshore workers who considered the sports facility an incompatible use to their work at the port, which owned the land. Under terms agreed to provisionally by the Port of Oakland, the A’s would pay $3.8 million a year for use of the land. While the stadium would be privately financed, the California State Senate, by unanimous vote, authorized the creation of an infrastructure financing district making available for transportation needs taxes generated on the site.43 The A’s helped their case not just by touting $3 billion in new investment and five thousand new jobs, but by partnering with an environmental justice organization, the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, to fashion a community benefits agreement for area residents as the team sought final clearance for building the new stadium. Notably, negotiations to secure agreement were required to use existing conditions of racial disparities data from the 2019 Oakland Race and Equity Baseline Indicators report to establish baselines.44
Figure 25. Plan for a reconstituted Oakland Coliseum, East Oakland. In the proposed conversion of the dated facility, the A’s envisioned an upgraded, mixed-use complex suitable for business as well as recreation, a product some residents feared would foster gentrification. Courtesy Oakland Athletics.
Oakland’s “Equity Indicators” assessment emerged as a product of an evaluation system developed by the City University of New York’s Institute for State and Local Government. One of five cities, including Pittsburgh, chosen to pioneer the method, Oakland embraced a baseline quantitative framework that could be used by city staff and community members to better understand the impacts of race and to measure inequities. Covering seventy-two different areas, the final report gave Oakland a disappointing overall score of 33.5 out of 100. Although neighborhood life scored a relatively high 50.6, scores for public health (25.0) and public safety (17.3) were much lower, clearly reflecting underlying disparities at the heart of the revitalizing city. In accepting the report, however, the city affirmed its commitment to “keep building on the foundation of this report, to promote dialogue with Oakland’s diverse communities, and to develop policies, programs and partnerships that reduce these inequities, so we build a future where every Oaklander can thrive.”45 Far from achieving equity, resistance had nonetheless achieved a lasting effect in gaining acceptance for an objective set of measures for its aspirations.