We often looked at lofts or loft-like condos in West Oakland, an area that extends from downtown Oakland towards the San Francisco bay. It shares a northern border with Emeryville and western and southern borders with a curve of the 880 freeway.
When I came to Berkeley for college in 1991 there was a highly publicized funeral parade through West Oakland, held in memory of a local drug dealer. It was shortly after this that the television program 60 Minutes described the area as the most desparate in America. A city-within-a-city that had no grocery store, no bank, and a high school grade-level reading capability percentage of two percent(2%).
More recently the area has been in the news as the result of a group of rogue police officers who referred to themselves as "Rough Riders", who among other things were known to physically abuse suspects and non-suspects in between bouts of planting evidence.
After college, I worked in a neighborhood that was in a kind of demilitarized zone between the accelerating genrtification of Jack London Square and West Oakland. The streets were named after types of trees. To get to work I would pick up BART at the Downtown Berkeley stop and get off at the West Oakland stop. A fifteen (15) minute walk took me past the old Red Star Yeast facility, a Postal Service Driver Training course, and finally along several blocks of renovated brick buildings before reaching the one I worked in.
Some of the buildings along my route were abandoned, almost all of them had chain-link fences separating the sidewalk from pit bulls. In this area I felt physically threatened only once, by a homeless man who stood chest-to-chest with me and took off his shades to show me his fabulously blood-shot eyes. West Oakland proper was different.
An acquaintance of ours was mugged walking from his car to the warehouse he lived in. A. and I were driving through a stretch of the area near a large abandoned building that I'd been wanting to photograph. We approached one intersection at a four-way stop where every visible window seemed to have a mattress in it. We opted for a u-turn and got, as my mom and dad liked to say, the hell out of Dodge.
I bring these things up to add texture and perspective to a discussion of the Bay Area real estate market. Depending on the property, depending on the block, A. and I cannot afford to buy a house in West Oakland. There are a variety of reasons why this is the case, not the least of which is that we aren't prepared to leave the hills and be urban pioneers in the flats.
The geographical distinction between the hills and the flats of the East Bay, is a real thing. Banks generally aren't willing to finance in the flats to the degree that they are in the hills. Local newspaper delivery teams divide the bay area up in to vertical bands, ensuring that everyone gets some of the hills and some of the flats. A kind of iconic manifestation of this distinction involves two local hoops legends. Oakland native and NBA-baller Gary Payton brought Jason Kidd from the hills to the flats to toughen him up, to get the street in his game.
One side note, this distinction between hills and flats doesn't quite exist in Berkeley. Even as I acknowledge that there is real poverty and painful need in Berkeley, it's impossible not to feel that the entire city is either gentrified or gentrifying. I do not believe it is possible to purchase a move-in ready home in Berkeley for less than six hundred thousand dollars. I tried to for several months last year, and couldn't.
Which is one reason why we were looking to move into a loft or loft-like condominium in an area synonymous with economic adversity and racial tension. Two years ago we were very close to moving into a loft in a development on West Grand Avenue; about four city blocks west of Broadway. The unit we looked at had views of the bay bridge and downtown Oakland. The selling agent for the development described the neighborhood as transitional, a guy on the street offered to sell me a pair of shoes and then to go get me a pair of shoes in my size, the day we got the contract a murder was reported 3 blocks away. In that particular instance, the ultimate deterrent wound up being the cost of the property.
A. spent most of last year on the east coast studying at Columbia and then Harvard. I spent a handful of weekends in the spring driving from open house to open house with a real estate agent. Photographing each one, and emailing the images back to A. During a visit back home, she and I participated in a lottery for another West Oakland development, called West End commons.
"West End" referred to both the West End neighborhood of London, and an old name for the neighborhood where the buildings were being placed. An area known for streets with girl names and old victorian row houses.
West End Commons was being developed by the same folks who had built the Magnolia Row project a few blocks away. The architect for both projects was David Baker + Associates, a community minded architecture firm that volunteered its services for projects like a housing development for farm laborers near Half Moon Bay. Their work on Magnolia Row garnered several design awards, and the design of West End Commons was sone of the major selling points for the development.
On the day of the West End Commons lottery, no fewer than two hundred (200) pre-qualified people showed up for a chance at one of six (6) units in the development. There was a tent and a revival atmosphere. The real estate developer introduced membersof the sales team to the crowd one by one, to applause. The development was opened to the street, to the side walk. The weather was perfect and what I felt was optimism and a kind of belief.
One year later though, despite the metaphorical streets that run through it, West End Commons is essentially a gated community. The heralded design of the compound looks oddly sterile amongs the old brick and steel buildings that surround it. Not markedly different from the cookie-cutter apartment complex a few blocks away in Emeryville.
More disconcerting, The zoned-for-storefront spaces that several of the units touted --we'd discussed opening a cafe or small restaurant in ours-- appear to be being used as residential space.
I've no doubt that these things do take time, but am beginning to wonder if this specific type of community-building --the integration of a grafted-on upwardly mobile population with a long-time struggling resident population-- is really what we should be working toward.
My skepticism is derived at least in part from the stretch of Park Boulevard that runs from the Glen View neighborhood up the hill from us, down to Lake Merrit. A casual estimate of the populated storefronts along Park would suggest a 60% vacancy rate - despite the density of culturally-diverse, and relative financially secure persons living just north of Park Boulevard. I'm not basing these assumptions on much, just the relative density of folks donating to either democratic or republican parties in amounts exceeding one thousand dollars.
The Park Boulevard vacancy rate, of course, has everything to do with the still and yet more diverse population that lives to the south of Park Boulevard - East Oakland. An area known for "sideshows", crime, and good, cheap ethnic food.
The East Bay is simply running out of affordable housing. The various constituencies of its diverse population are not limiting themselves to neighborhood borders based on distinctions and assupmtions that the real estate market has rendered much less relevant. And, to be sure, "the haves" are bringing this to a head.
Once a transplanted community is established in the outlying areas of a major metroplitan area, they inevitably come in to close contact with the results of decades worth of NIMBY decision-making. Witness the continuing dust up between the residents of Magnolia Row and a nearby recycler.
In West Oakland, multilateral community activism resulted in the closing of the Red Star Yeast facility. The vacant land it used to occupy, and other vacant land will continue to be subject to in-fill development along the lines of Magnolia Row and West End Commons. There are simply too many people willing to assume a mortgage in excess of six hundred thousand dollars for this not to happen.
Each new development seems to be more insulated from the community it has landed in than the last. I've no doubt, for instance, that the tree lined 'lanes' behind the iron gates of West End Commons are, at least in part,a response to the experience of Magnolia Row residents who have to park their cars on the streets.
Which brings us back to our brick house. It was surprisingly easy to wind up here. The first time we went looking at open houses after A.'s trip back east, we stumbled on this place. I'm tempted to call the neighborhood suburban, despite the wall our backyard shares with Oakland High and the border we share with some authentic definition of East Oakland. All of the oakland neighborhoods I've discussed are less than five miles apart from one another.
I don't begrudge anyone --well, hardly anyone-- anything, but it doesn't seem like we've found a way to make this work. The plainest example of this is the city of Piedmont incorporating itself to opt out of the complexity of being part of Oakland.
