Professor Brandi Summers and Alan Dones Present on Housing at the Black New Deal Symposium
The Black New Deal Symposium was held on February 26th and kicked off a phase of legislative research and development on how we can address the harms committed to Black Oaklanders after decades of systemic racism embedded in public policy and programs. There were six focus area sessions throughout the day: public safety, housing, environment, education, arts & culture, and community economics. Over a series of articles, the history, ideas, and strategies that were discussed in each focus area session will be shared.
Brandi T. Summers, PhD, is assistant professor of Geography at UC Berkeley, and is founding co-director of the Berkeley Lab for Speculative Urbanisms. Her research examines the relationship between and function of race, space, urban infrastructure, and architecture. Alan Dones is a Black Oakland developer born and raised in Oakland. This session shared the conditions that have led in part to the staggering levels of Black displacement and dispossession in Oakland. Below is a synthesis of their two separate presentations, beginning with Brandi Summers.
Oakland’s Wartime Industries and Black Migrants
There was one point when West Oakland housed nearly 80% of Oakland’s Black population and was the heart and the center of Black Oakland. Black, as well as white, migration from the South was accelerated after World War I and II due to the availability of jobs in the wartime industries. West Oakland's ideal location along the Bay lent it to become the center for shipping, shipbuilding, toolmaking, and raw material production. The Bay Area in general became one of the largest and fastest growing urban areas during the World War Two era. The Black population expanded at that time as the demand for workers in the shipyards grew, more than 50,000 Black migrants came to the Bay Area between 1942 - 1945. From 1940 to 1950, the percentage of Black residents in West Oakland in particular increased from 16% of the population to 61%. In 1940, 15%, of all black households in West Oakland were overcrowded. In1950, 31% were overcrowded.
This rapid influx of new residents to Oakland meant that there wasn't enough housing for migrants. From April 1941- September 1942, the vacancy rate in Oakland dropped from just 2% to .06%. The housing shortage led to the expansion of homeless, unsheltered families in Oakland streets. Despite shipyard workers earning decent wages, they couldn't get adequate housing, which is not unlike our current crisis that we're experiencing today. Oakland City officials expressed concern over the visibility of what they thought were hideous trailer home camps and shanty towns, they argued that this propagated crime and lower property values. Black West Oakland residents were over represented in public housing, given their exclusion from private sector housing programs like home registries, home conversion programs and building loans, which were exclusively available for white residents.
As a result in 1949, all of West Oakland was officially considered blighted by Oakland City Council. The migration of black southerners emerged as a way to classify black people as refugees and temporary citizens of Oakland. This logic made it easy for the city to make way for demolition via what they called slum clearance. This ended up being the primary method that was used to ensure progress and ultimately lead to what James Baldwin has called Negro removal.
Redevelopment and Demolition of Oakland: Acorn
One example in 1956, the newly formed Oakland Redevelopment Agency announced plans for the Acorn area redevelopment project. They designated about 50 blocks in West Oakland to be demolished and this was the first of five major slum clearance areas in the city at the time. The Acorn plan made no provision for public housing, despite the fact that the overwhelming poor population was occurring in the district at this location. The Acorn project at the time was celebrated by city officials and developers as a way to potentially attract white residents and was historically, one of the nation's first attempts at reverse integration. It didn't work.
Black folks in the Acorn region attempted to stop the demolition of their homes by suing the city on the grounds that black homeowners were losing their properties without having anywhere else to go. Ultimately, they lacked the political power to fight the destruction. Federal courts in San Francisco sided with the redevelopment agency and between April 1962 - May 1965, crews destroyed the majority of the 610 structures that comprise the neighborhood. That land that was laid bare had been home to 4300 residents that ended up being displaced. A significant number of Black families were forced to go to other parts of the city like North Oakland and East Oakland, causing those areas to become increasingly overcrowded. Between 1960-1966, West Oakland lost 25% of its population and overall in Oakland during that time period,11,800 units were destroyed, 67% within the poverty target areas.
A City Intentionally Divided Across Racial Lines
With this dramatic demographic transformation, the real estate industry wanted to keep these folks away from the affluent districts in the city in order to protect their property values. The expansion of the federally subsidized interstate highway system, such as those that choke off West Oakland, decimated Black communities through this era. Since the construction was often routed through Black and lower income neighborhoods, it contributed to blight and installed infrastructural impediments to social and logistical circulation, but it also accelerated the deterioration of formally robust Black commercial and cultural hubs such as Seventh Street. As a result, clear racial boundaries were starting to take hold in the city in order to protect the economic interests of the city.
Oakland as a Colony for the Imperial Suburbs
The development of the suburbs hindered Oakland progress during the same years and remade the form, the economy and the culture of several different metropolitan regions in the country, but specifically in the Bay Area. Federal government and local policies ended up institutionalizing discrimination and difference by giving resources mostly to white homeowners in the suburbs, while taking money from these growing Black cities specifically, like Oakland. Significantly, it has led to the gradual accumulation of wealth that white families were able to accrue more readily than Black families. The federal government, the real estate industry, and also related institutions expressly provided opportunities and capital for white families to have access to immeasurable opportunities while denying Black people from taking any part of it.
Racism Codified
Between 1955 -1966, 163,000 white people left Oakland causing the white population to drop 56% due to multiple incentives that were given, including low housing costs. Government insured mortgages made it cheaper to buy a house in the suburbs than to rent in Oakland. Between 1933 - 1963, the Federal Housing Administration ensured $199 billion worth of mortgages, and half of all suburban homes built in the 1950s and the 1960s across the country had FHA mortgages. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration explicitly codified racism into the FHA underwriting manual, which in 1938, said "it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial groups." The federal government supported suburbs that prohibited Black people from buying houses through active policy that precluded folks who were not white from receiving suburban mortgages, and so the FHA also ensured very few loans in actual cities, including Oakland that most black people were confined to.
Restrictive Covenants
To make matters worse, the FHA also recommended that suburbs develop restrictive covenants, which forbade black people and other racialized minorities from buying property. There were restrictive covenants all the way up until 1948, when they were outlawed, but places like San Leandro turned covenants into neighborhood Protective Associations. It wasn't until 1968 that the federal fair housing legislation led to policies that prohibited this kind of activity. At the same time, they still enforced this idea and belief that non-white people lowered property values and posed a larger investment risk than white people. So the impact, of course, was very significant. Less than 1% of new housing that was built in the US between 1935-1952 went to Black and other people of color.
Redlining
Relatedly, city districts, including those in the Bay were classified by the government based on perceived investment risks which is where we hear the term redlining. Neighborhoods that were considered desirable in Oakland and other places were given an A rating and colored green, those in the least desirable areas were given a D rating and coded red. These rankings were determined by building age, the conditions of the building, neighborhoods amenities and infrastructure. However, the most important factor that determined neighborhoods classification was its racial composition. What this meant was that even if you had a small black population area, it would get a D rating and that disqualified the residents in that particular area from government insured loans. This made it harder for developers to get money to build in these red areas, hence the term redlining.
All of these factors and so many more led the Black Panther Party to regularly refer to the unequal growth of the East Bay suburbs in comparison to Oakland, as this imperial state exploiting a colony.
Black-Led Development Today In Oakland
Alan Dones discussed how when Black individuals and communities are able to participate in real estate ownership, whether it's a single family home or a high rise office building, they are able to use that real estate equity to raise capital and truly participate in the economic opportunities that come up in an area.
When Black people are able to not only own real estate, but also lead in the development of real estate, we get to make critical decisions about who we hire to design, who we hire to build, who we hire to work in the facilities that are built there, and the future ownership of the small businesses and the home ownership opportunities we design for.
Right now in Oakland, we're living in an environment where even though people of color constitute a majority of the population and contribute to the tax base, when you look at our skyline, the people that are developing our skyline don't reflect the majority of the population of Oakland. The money that was aggregated to build these high rises were in many regards, in most respects, money that we contributed to and a lot of the skyline is built by institutional capital. You have negative consequences that come out of that lack of ability to participate as developers, as facilitators, as well as owners of property and it impacts our community.
A tool for raising funds for development projects is a new type of tax increment financing called an Enhanced Infrastructure Financing Districts (EIFD). It works by freezing the property tax revenues that flow from a designated project area to the city, county, and other taxing entities at the “base level” in the current year. Additional tax revenue in future years (the “increment”) is diverted into a separate pool of money, which can be used either to pay for improvements directly or to pay back bonds issued against the anticipated tax increment revenue.
