Professor C.N.E. Corbin Presents on Environmental Disparities 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.
As an environmentalist and urban political ecologist, Professor C.N.E. Corbin’s work focuses on race, class, housing, and access to green spaces with specific attention to how urban “sustainable development” initiatives and environmental policies and practices impact and shape land uses and public park access. Corbin served on the Oakland Parks and Recreation Advisory Commission (PRAC) from 2015-2020 and was the chair of the PRAC from 2019-2020. Dr. Corbin is now an assistant professor at Portland State University in the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning and serves on the Portland Parks Board.
The Two Sides of Environmental Injustice
There are two sides to understanding environmental justice: the uneven distribution of environmental harms and the uneven development of environmental goods. Low-income residents and communities of color, particularly Black residents, have been disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards while also being prevented from benefiting from environmental amenities. We can see this dynamic in the history of Oakland, understood through three eras: Red, Black and Green. In the Red Era, Oakland was a legally segregated city, in the Black Era, Oakland was a Chocolate City (1977-1999), and in the Green Era, Oakland started adopting environmental policies while excluding Black residents.
The Red Era - Capturing, Containing and Contaminating Black Communities for Generations
In the Red Era, as mentioned in the housing session, many Black migrants came to the Bay from the South and many white folks went to the suburbs. This era formed in a particular way due to the Homeowners Loan Corporation structure, the Federal Housing Administration loans, and legal race based segregation.
After the 1929 stock market crash, Roosevelt's New Deal created the Homeowners Refinancing Act of 1933 as a way to quell the dispossession of homes due to the crisis. The Homeowner Loan Corporation provided security grades with the codes A (green) to D (red). The A/green areas were considered to be the best neighborhoods, the pinnacle of what a city should be, followed by B/blue second grade, which were still good, C was considered to be declining, and D/red was considered to be hazardous for investments. Hence, the term redlining. Multiple factors influenced the code designation including housing stock, type of housing, stock, racial demographics, and the surrounding environment.
When you look at a map showing the areas, you see a bifurcation of Oakland into differently valued landscapes, with the hills predominantly in green and blue and the flats in mostly yellow and red. Oakland had five green tracks, this included the Claremont and Montclair neighborhoods which are still considered to be beautiful neighborhoods today. They were situated next to the 500 acre Joaquin Miller Park, which was acquired by Oakland in 1917, and Redwood Regional which is about 1077 acre park. Prior to this area designation, Oakland invested about $500,000 in the Regional Park, which would be equivalent to $9.5 million~ today and at the time it was considered to be the finest recreation center in the United States.
These areas were highly restricted, particularly racially restrictive with protective provisions against occupancies by Black and Asian people. Due to the Homeowners Loan Corporation in conjunction with the Federal Housing Administration, these homes were actually cheaper than fair ordinary rent in Oakland because of the incentives that the government was giving to a mostly white population. This dynamic continues into the development of the suburbs.
Those living in the green areas were granted the backyard, a private green space for their personal enjoyment and entertainment. This is a very different understanding than what we see in the Oakland flats, where the desirable features of the housing stock were described to be the proximity to industries that one could work at. You start seeing the first indicators of environmental injustice in which folks of color are positioned next to factories, which was good for getting to work, but also exposed them to environmental harms. West Oakland was designated a D area and there were odors from the Bay flats, smoke and grime from railroad shops and local industry, while the city's taxes were too high in proportion to income and value. You see both sides of environmental injustice in this situation.
The devaluation of the flats in Oakland made it possible to reduce the land values and remove housing through eminent domain. Dr. Summers talked about urban renewal, which allowed for the freeway system and BART to come through and actually raise homes in these areas. Redlining upheld and solidified racial segregation housing practices, created distinct landscapes in differently valued neighborhoods, and the necessary conditions to devalue and disinvest in Black, Indigenous, Latinx and Asian neighborhoods, homes and land ownership, and literally cleared the way for demolition. White suburban residents were the beneficiary of the dispossession of black and brown homes.
The legacy of the redlining stays in poverty, income inequality, low environmental quality in these areas through the lack of tree canopy coverage, higher ambient temperatures, and diminished home values. We can say that redlining actually captured, contained and contaminated these communities for generations.
The Black Era - New Parks Near Freeways
In the Black Era, Oakland is a Chocolate City where the population is predominantly Black. Other formative aspects of this era include the Fair Housing Act being passed, the last vestiges of white flight out of Oakland, the suburbanization and the outsourcing of jobs, and the implementation of Prop 13 which significantly changes the tax structure.
In terms of environmental issues, you see the second wave of new parks coming in and they are established in the undeveloped land near the freeways. According to the Health Effects Institute Panel, the exposure zone from a highway or major road is approximately 300 to 500 meters and the Mayo Clinic has placed the highest pollution levels around 400 meters from a road and advises to avoid these kinds of areas when exercising.
West Oakland has thirteen parks and prior to 1989, six parks were located within the 500 meters of the Cypress freeway. Three of these parks, DeFremery Park, Raimondi Park and Willow Park, existed prior to the freeway. The freeway construction caused more pollution within those park systems. Even though these formerly redlined areas got more green space, they weren't the same quality of what was happening in the Oakland Hills.
In 1992, the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit brought cities together for the first time to discuss mitigating environmental harms. In 1996, Oakland took up similar language through the Oakland Resolution 72 809. In 1997, there was the Kyoto Protocol and another Oakland resolution looked more closely into environmental, as well as environmental justice, concerns in Oakland. This is when Oakland was a Chocolate City and while unfortunately a lot of people don't think about the Black community as being influenced by environmentalism, you see at this time the Black community moving forward with an environmental justice agenda.
The Green Era
In this era we see the Hope Six project and the erosion of affordable housing, the subprime mortgage scandal happening alongside sustainable development, green master plans as well condos and luxury apartments being built within Oakland. All while it’s important to understand that one's zip code is still the most potent predictor of an individual's health and well-being.
Often the concept of the green city is brought up when discussing transitioning to a more sustainable future. It involves designing the urban area to advance sustainable goals, addressing climate change, improving quality of life, and minimizing negative environmental impacts. The promise of parks in this context is to absorb CO2 and pollutants in the air, reduce flooding and stormwater runoff, and mitigate urban heat island effect. However, parks also create spaces for recreation, food production, wildlife, habitat formation, novel ecosystems, creation and social cultural productions, and placemaking. We see this at Defremery Park and Mosswood, as well as other parks, where Black cultural events serve as network connectors and create spaces for Black joy in spite of gentrification.
Greenlining comes in two parts. The first part is the business practice of investing energy products and services in low-income, minority and disabled communities to increase the profits and expand the economic pie. We hear about greenlining as attracting financing from mainstream communities to the inner city. The second part is environmental, where large areas of land with a mix of uses that are in some combination of public and private ownership are managed specifically for public purposes as recreation, ecological preservation and maintenance of scenic vistas. For example at Lake Merritt, Measure DD passed and $240 million plus was spent to revitalize the area. There has also been some tensions between community members about appropriate park use and appropriate park activities. We also see the Brooklyn Basin Project where there are luxury housing and condos coupled with new park spaces.
However, within the future projections of Oakland, you're not seeing a future black community in these spaces even when the projects are happening in formerly redlined areas. In the renderings of the West Oakland specific plan, Black people are almost completely left out. With these new green space creations, we are also seeing gentrification and displacement from both the home and nature of Black communities and residents living in Oakland, as well as low-income community members.
We see massive evictions and the erosion of affordable homes while we see Oakland implementing a green agenda. As the population increases for the first time in Oakland, we see all racial populations increasing while the Black population decreases. It reflects a continuous, vicious cycle in Oakland over the three eras. We saw the use of eminent domain to remove Black Oaklanders for the creation of a freeway system, for them to get subpar parks in the surplus land that's left after the creation of the freeway system, and then you see the erosion of Black homes again through the Hope Six project. Now we see the creation of Oakland as a green city while we also see the subprime mortgage scandal and the further erosion of affordable homes for the creation of these green master plans, along with the condos and luxury apartments that accompany them.
Afro-Futurism - A Path Forward
Thinking through a Afro-Futurist lens can support us in moving through these dystopian histories and present. Afro-Futurism combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afro-centricity, and magical realism with non-western beliefs. In some cases, it's a total revision of the past with speculation about the future through cultural critiques. EJ (environmental justice) futurism is the idea of visionary speculation grounded in environmental justice which serves as a framework to reimagine, re-envision and recreate socially just societies.
Part of this involves unthinking some of the Eurocentrism, but also unthinking a lot of the dystopic histories that we have unfortunately been forced to live through. We can think about a pivot from the fight against environmental dystopias to an intentional move towards creating practical environmental utopias. What are we going to be fighting for versus against? What does that look like? This is underpinned by decolonization, critical race theory, and feminist/womanist theory. It involves wrestling with the possibilities of environmentally and socially just futures, which opens up the potential for socially just cultural productions in these spaces, grounded in understandings of sovereignty and self determination.
We will conclude with a picture of Wakanda, which we can actually say is the first Black Green City depicted on the screen. We can use this to stir our visions of what that means for Oakland in the future.
