In the third installment of a collaboration between the University of California Press and Carnegie California, Carnegie nonresident scholar Kiran Jain speaks with Mitchell Schwarzer about his book Hella Town: Oakland’s History of Development and Disruption.
The interview has been edited from the original conversation.
Kiran Jain: What were the main points you were aiming to capture in this book?
Mitchell Schwarzer: I had written two articles about Oakland. One was about City Center, the urban renewal effort, and the other was about Jack London Square and its attempt to match Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. In writing those articles, there were a lot of other stories about Oakland that weren’t known. There weren’t any serious books about the history of Oakland’s development. At that point, I thought it was a good idea to embark upon a whole book project.
Kiran Jain: Could you talk more about the history of Oakland, and how it informs how cities take shape?
Mitchell Schwarzer: You can divide Oakland’s history roughly into three parts. The first part would be from the founding of Oakland, in the middle nineteenth century, which gets a big jumpstart by the location of the western terminus of the transcontinental railroad in West Oakland at Oakland Point. Oakland becomes one of the four major urban centers of the Bay Area: Berkeley, Oakland, Alameda, and San Francisco. That first era goes [until] the middle twentieth century. In that period, Oakland grew dramatically in area, population, and economic vitality. It became the major industrial center of Northern California. The railroad terminus becomes a secondary shipping port after San Francisco.
But during that whole period, Oakland is in the shadow of San Francisco, and to this day, that complicates things. Oakland during that first period, thinks: We have more flatland. We’re on the continental side of the Bay. We have a much better climate. We should be the center city. We should be the dominant city in the Bay Area and Northern California. Many business leaders and political figures think that’s possible. And the earthquake of 1906 lends credence to that. A lot of San Francisco residents and businesses came to Oakland after most of San Francisco was destroyed.
There’s a kind of push and pull between Oakland and San Francisco in the years that followed. Oakland did not develop a tourist industry like San Francisco. You couldn’t do the things you did at Fisherman’s Wharf there.
But certain things did happen. The city gained, in the 1960s, four major league sports teams. No city of Oakland’s size did that, ever. It started with the football Raiders, then the Oakland Athletics, then the basketball Warriors, and there was even an NHL hockey team for a short period. Oakland becomes the major port because of containerization. San Francisco and its finger piers just weren’t equipped for that. There wasn’t space, freeway access, or railway access in San Francisco, so Oakland gained two big victories during the 1960s.
The second period of Oakland’s history is roughly from the late 1940s to the end of the century, to the election of Jerry Brown [as mayor] in 1998, when Oakland is beset by a shrinking population, declining industry, and escalating crime. Oakland had been the center of the automobile industry in Northern California. It had a larger shipbuilding economy, canneries, electronics, General Electric, and more.
Kiran Jain: You mentioned the birth of Clorox.
Mitchell Schwarzer: Clorox was born here and is still one of the largest companies in Oakland. But General Electric and the canneries are all gone. General Motors is gone. All those businesses, beginning with the shipyards in the ’50s, closed, and Oakland’s industrial economy basically collapsed by the end of the century. A lot of the businesses move overseas. Some move to other parts of the Bay Area, the South Bay in particular. The automotive plants move first to Fremont. So, you see a de-industrialization of Oakland that is occurring over the last several decades of the twentieth century.
The city’s demography also changes. In the first period of Oakland’s history, it’s largely a white city, over 90 percent. People are surprised when they find that out.
Kiran Jain: Until when, would you say?
Mitchell Schwarzer: Circa 1940. At that point, Oakland had a small Asian and Latino population, 2 to 4 percent each, and it had a small Black population, about 2.5 percent. But it was over 90 percent white, and the city government and business community were white. They were building housing and industries and parks for their vision of that largely white city.
What happened with the onset of the Second World War was a large Black migration to Oakland. The city’s Black population went from about 2.5 percent in 1940 to 48 percent by 1980. It’s a tremendous increase, and there’s a white migration out during this same period.
White residents are leaving for the suburbs and the newly developed upper hills within city limits. The freeways were built in that period, and they provide access to the new suburbs for industrial, residential, and commercial development. The suburbs were, however, completely restrictive in terms of who can live there. Black people cannot move there, and neither can the Asian or Latino communities. Government programs are aiding this effort. The city changed from being a city that was largely white and oriented toward the benefit of most of those people to being a city that’s turning more than half minority by 1980. Industry is declining, so jobs are going away. And the city government, the old business-political hierarchy, like Mayors Clifford Rishell and John Reading, they’re very slow in adapting to this change.
The main effort in the ’50s and ’60s into the early ’70s was to figure out a way to keep whites and business in Oakland and to make Oakland somehow the business center of the East Bay, even though politically it’s not connected to Fremont or Walnut Creek. There were a lot of efforts made, like City Center, which tore out much of the heart of downtown to bring in a big shopping mall, skyscrapers, and office development. Most of that didn’t happen.
Oakland attempted to do what San Francisco was doing in the postwar period: girding itself into being a city of white-collar employment, as industry was leaving. San Francisco succeeded. Of course it later paid the price because of all the office workers nowadays who are not going into those offices. Back then, though, besides offices, San Francisco built hotels, a convention center, and tourist facilities. Oakland tried to do the same things in that period, and couldn’t.
Kiran Jain: Why did San Francisco succeed, whereas Oakland didn’t?
Mitchell Schwarzer: Largely because San Francisco was always the metropolitan center. It was seen as the prestigious address. Why did Joe Lacob move the Warriors over to San Francisco much later? The money and prestige are there. San Francisco has an international reputation. For corporations, Bechtel is one of the largest construction engineering firms in the world. The founders lived in Oakland, Stephen Bechtel and his son, and they did a lot of Oakland philanthropy, but they located the company in San Francisco. The vast majority of corporate headquarters were in San Francisco. So when Oakland tried to lure in offices and a big shopping mall downtown, it didn’t work because Oakland wasn’t a comparable draw to San Francisco. The poverty rate was much higher. The minority percentage was much larger, especially the Black population, particularly around downtown.
To have a shopping mall in the middle of downtown, the key demographics they wanted were white women from the Hills and suburbs. The department stores did their studies, and said, “They’re not going to come to downtown Oakland.” Sadly, Oakland ended up destroying the shopping environment it had for working-class Black and white residents and did not get the kind of upper-end shopping center for wealthy white residents who didn’t live and wouldn’t shop downtown. The same problem occurred with Jack London Square, largely around public safety. Crime started to grow in Oakland during the ’60s, during deindustrialization. That huge population of Black people that came from the South suddenly found themselves without employment opportunities. The factories are closing, and they can’t get jobs with department stores, restaurants, or city government. That’s all changed since, but at the time employment discrimination was pervasive.
Kiran Jain: C.L. Dellums, the political activist, talks about how three types of jobs were available.
Mitchell Schwarzer: Yes, jobs in ships, the railroads, or something illegal. Oakland’s crime problem became serious by the early ’70s, and it’s remained so for the last fifty years. That’s another big impediment to Oakland being a place that can lure business and the kinds of opportunities that San Francisco has. People are scared. Office development didn’t come in a big wave as it did across the bay. The shopping mall never came. Oakland found itself at the end of the second period, the end of the ’90s, like many cities in the Midwest and other parts of the country that declined and saw their downtowns become shells.
That is where you get the third period, this past twenty-five years, which Jerry Brown inaugurates in 1998 and then other mayors continue it. Oakland realizes it can’t compete directly with San Francisco. We have to accept that and do things that make sense for Oakland. What are those things? A big one—we’ve got to shore up downtown. I remember downtown in the early 1980s was scary. You wouldn’t go walk at night at all.
One bright spot was Chinatown, a 24/7 district because it had residents, restaurants, and businesses that catered to the residents. Brown and others saw that and said, “We need to make more of downtown like Chinatown.” In other words, we need to build housing in large quantities all around downtown, so the residents will start to incubate the businesses, and others will come as well. That was his 10K plan, to bring in affluent residents. We need to have people who can even out the economic spectrum, which was tending, by the early ’90s, toward becoming a much poorer city.
Kiran Jain: You talk about City Center because it almost sounds like it was tone-deaf land use planning, given where Oakland was as a city, and who the planners wanted to attract, right? Maybe that’s one of the reasons why City Center never took off.
There’s also another prevalent land use that you mentioned in your book, which is freeways. You mentioned that Oakland lacked the students and activists of Berkeley, and the elites and alternative cultures of San Francisco. Both those groups fought back freeway extensions in favor of these quality-of-life issues, but not in Oakland. Can you describe what the rise of the automobile did to the city, the tradeoffs, and how that impacted how we experience Oakland?
Mitchell Schwarzer: Oakland built four freeways: the 880, the 580, the 24, and the smaller Warren Freeway in the Hills. There were plans to build four more. San Francisco had ten to twelve planned, and they only built a single complete one, the 101. Berkeley stopped the Warren at its intersection with Highway 24. It would have gone down Ashby Avenue to meet up with Interstate 80, right past the Claremont Hotel.
When the 880 was built, the first Oakland freeway, it slammed through Chinatown and the main Mexican community west of Broadway. Then it plowed, as the two-level Cypress Viaduct, to get to what was called the distribution structure for the Bay Bridge—dividing West Oakland in half.
In a lot of cities, you take the freeway and put it through the path of least resistance, through the minority communities because they have far less political power. So, highway planners in Sacramento in the 1940s and 1950s plotted it through Oakland’s Asian, Latino, and Black communities. By the time they started building 580, which is the one that runs on the edge of Lake Merritt, there was some resistance from the wealthier white, middle-class communities that were in the path, but they still built that 580, with just a couple of minor adjustments.
The Warren happened similarly. It was less controversial because that area was hardly developed at all. The 24 probably had the most resistance. It went through Rockridge, which is one of the wealthier parts of Oakland, but it, too, got through. So, the wealthier parts of Oakland in the ’60s and early ’70s still didn’t have the kind of political clout or community-led resistance that you had in San Francisco and Berkeley.
BART [Bay Area Rapid Transit] is similar. In Berkeley, they undergrounded all of BART, and Berkeley paid for it. Oakland only has three underground stations. All the other stations are above ground and much more disruptive to the urban environments that they pass through. West Oakland is a great example of a station that should have been underground, yet it is above. It destroyed the Seventh Street Commercial District in the 1960s, which was the center of Black commerce, nightclubs, restaurants, and businesses. Comparatively, BART in San Francisco’s Mission District has two underground stations. West Oakland is a lot like the Mission District. Why didn’t they do it there?
Kiran Jain: Why didn’t they?
Mitchell Schwarzer: It was racist attitudes toward Black neighborhoods or neighborhoods that were majority-minority. You don’t find it said that way, but the attitude was: In those areas, we don’t have to underground them. And secondly, because we’re not thinking of them in the same way we’re thinking of the stations in San Francisco. If you look at the way BART functions, they built large parking lots around most of the Oakland stations. They didn’t do that in the Mission or Balboa Park in San Francisco. Glen Park doesn’t have a big parking lot. You have to go just south of San Francisco to Daly City to get a parking lot, whereas in Oakland has big parking lots for all but two downtown stations. The goal of BART was to have white workers and commuters drive down from the Hills, park at BART, and take it into Oakland or San Francisco. So the stations were not seen as fully serving their neighborhoods. They were seen as automobile and rapid rail spots for commuters.
Kiran Jain: I’m so glad you brought up this example of West Oakland. When I think of an example of resilience in Oakland, West Oakland comes to mind. Before the freeways went in, it was known as the Harlem of the West. Then in 1989 [the Loma Prieta] earthquake happened, and the community seemed to wake up and say, “Wait, we don’t want a freeway.” There was this tragedy of the freeway [collapse] and the deaths that ensued because of the earthquake, and the community organized itself. What happened?
Mitchell Schwarzer: The community was affected by urban renewal. Most of Oakland’s large slum clearance was in West Oakland. They were also traumatized by the BART, a huge regional postal facility, and the freeway. In fewer than twenty years, from the late 1950s into the early ’70s, the district was torn asunder. The residents just didn’t know what to do, and they tried to fight a bit, but they didn’t have the tools and the power. They amassed that power during the later Johnson administration when they started to change community groups from being adjuncts. OCCUR [Oakland Citizens Committee for Urban Renewal] is a good example of a community group formed in the ’50s to assist urban renewal. It was a business orientation in the ’70s. OCCUR is now a community group aimed at protecting the residents’ quality of life. It’s gone 180 degrees.
The urban renewal was well-intended on some levels but poorly intended on a lot of other levels.For instance, Acorn Urban Renewal aimed to make the poor Acorn neighborhood of West Oakland half white and half middle class. It ended with remaining pretty much all Black residents and still very poor. Whites in the 1960s had better options in the suburbs and apartment districts springing up around Lake Merritt. So the urban renewal didn’t work very well.
By the time the earthquake happens, there’s a community environment in West Oakland that says, “We are not going to take any more disruption of that scale. You’re not going to rebuild the freeway where it was.”
First, the freeway and Caltrans [California Department of Transportation] knew they couldn’t build a two-level freeway. They had to build Mandela Parkway on one level. It would have to be wider. So, a compromised solution was developed to put it on the edge of West Oakland and occupy land that didn’t require tearing down any more housing or businesses. It was like Octavia Boulevard in San Francisco, where the central freeway came down, and that’s a good tale of two boulevards. In San Francisco, Octavia Boulevard has experienced significant residential and commercial development. It’s very successful. Mandela Parkway in West Oakland is not used as much and has not seen much development, although lately there are some new cafes and restaurants on the parkway and nearby. There’s hope.
That brings you into the third period of Oakland, where you have this attempt to restore downtown by Brown and other mayors, especially Libby Schaaf. That’s been somewhat successful. But each time Oakland had big pushes to develop downtown, they were met with a disaster, like the Great Recession or the COVID-19 pandemic, both of which stymied things.
Now a lot of residents live in the downtown. It’s still not the kind of active district we’d want to see, but it’s improved a great deal. Many more cafes, restaurants and services. A lot of the neighborhoods in these past twenty-five years have also seen a big changes, and that’s what makes the past twenty-five years very different. You have a lot of residents, and some businesses moving to Oakland, because San Francisco and the West Bay are so expensive. I did that myself. You could buy a house for half the price and still can. There has been a huge residential influx that has brought in investment and stabilized a lot of neighborhoods.
There’s been one other big change in this recent period that was started by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Virtually no non-Northern European immigrants came to the United States from the mid-’20s to the early ’70s. And that meant very little immigration and accounts for the great Black migration from the South. They were citizens and a source of labor from the 1940s through 1970s. After the new immigration act, we now have had a huge immigration from East Asia and Latin America, and they have changed much of Oakland. Much of East Oakland is now Asian and Latino because of that, and they’ve revitalized neighborhoods.
So, you see two kinds of influxes. An influx of wealthier whites moved to the Foothills and stabilized those neighborhoods. Then, you see huge, more entry-level immigrants coming, who have moved along the International Boulevard Corridor and Ethiopian immigrants along the Telegraph Avenue Corridor in North Oakland. The demographics have completely changed from being largely a Black and white American city in 1980 to now one of the most diverse cities in the country.
Kiran Jain: That’s what’s so exciting to me about Oakland—that there’s this concept that if you truly think about what it means to be this multiracial democracy at the local level, Oakland holds a lot of promise for that. But there are these existential challenges.
You talked about affordable housing. We used to say if water displaced Black residents in New Orleans because of Katrina, housing prices were displacing Black residents in Oakland, and we saw it in the past twenty-five years. What’s interesting to note is that a lot of these residents are moving to the outer East Bay. Given all of this, the tech boom in Silicon Valley, and how that’s impacted housing prices in Oakland, how do housing and these economic inequities that you articulate in your book threaten this promise of a multiracial democracy?
Mitchell Schwarzer: It’s calmed down a little, but Oakland has been facing a serious set of problems. The crime is as bad as it’s ever been, and that’s scaring people off. Rents have gone down a bit. Housing prices have gone down, whereas they haven’t in other parts of the Bay Area. If you’ve read Wallace Stegner, you’ll see Palo Alto and Los Altos were once middle class. The West Bay is now super wealthy, everywhere from Saratoga to Marin County. It’s inevitable if those same trends continue—like huge production of very high-paying tech jobs—more of the East Bay, including Oakland, will become upper-middle-class, gentrified, and poorer residents will be displaced.
I don’t know any American city that’s been able to stop gentrification if the forces for that phenomenon are present. The solution: build, build, build. You should build much more market-rate and affordable housing, but at the same time, there’s this problem in the Bay Area where residents develop a high-quality lifestyle, and they want to keep it. They fight change, greater density. So, the phenomenon of NIMBYism arises, where they fight off new development projects. In recent years, activists and poorer Oakland residents have become NIMBYs too, worried that improvements such as bike lanes, new transit, and new businesses will lead to gentrification and displacement.
Marin County is a great example of extreme NIMBYism. It has the same population today that it had forty years ago. It has hardly grown. They kept BART out. They’re continuing to fight affordable housing. This happens throughout the Bay Area. Steph Curry, the [Golden State] Warriors [basketball] star, was opposed to affordable housing in Atherton, not far from where he lives. He took a rather strange position. It was affecting him, and he became a NIMBY.
But we need to have a lot more affordable housing and market-rate housing in Oakland. Oakland needs to grow dramatically in terms of population. There’s awareness on some people’s part that that needs to happen because another new characteristic of Oakland in the twenty-first century: it has lost a lot of its institutions. We lost our newspaper, the Oakland Tribune. The formerly wonderful East Bay Express is a shell of itself. And for a city not to have newspapers means we don’t have discourse. People don’t know what’s going on. There’s The Oaklandside, but it has only a couple of articles a day and nothing on weekends.
We’ve also lost several colleges: Holy Names College closed, and my college, California College of the Arts, closed its Oakland campus. Mills College changed completely and is now part of Northeastern University. All our sports teams are gone. So, we’ve lost a lot of institutions, and that’s troubling because to be a full city, you need to have all these kinds of institutions. We’re becoming a big residential suburb with a lot of the problems of inner cities, without the kind of institutions to accompany that.
On this account San Francisco has done much better. To take an example, the Oakland Museum has not expanded, substantially, since it was finished in 1969. They’ve added a couple of teeny pieces. The DeYoung, Cal Academy, Exploratorium, and SFMOMA have completely reconceived themselves— magnificent new facilities. And what that speaks to is that today, Oakland is an impoverished city. The city now faces chronic budget deficits and cuts to most services. It has a lot of middle- and upper-middle-class residents, but it doesn’t have the kind of wealthy residents that could work on public-private partnerships that make things happen, like keeping the newspaper, the colleges, the sports teams here.
The money is in the West Bay, and that’s where the serious philanthropic money is. I go around San Francisco a lot, and the neighborhoods are thriving. The parks are beautiful and well-maintained. In Oakland, the parks are falling apart because there’s no money for them. So much of the money goes for policing because of the crime problem. We’re in a tough situation, where you have an energetic, great population, but at the same time, there’s not the money to make things better. Fortunately, there’s a growing cohort of businesspeople, real estate developers, high tech entrepreneurs, and financiers who have realized that the “money vacuum” is a serious problem and that the kind of public-private partnerships that brought Oakland its museum, sports complex, and other wonderful amenities can function once again. Cities need to move forward. Standing still means slipping backward, and not in a sense of going back to the past, but sliding downhill.
Kiran Jain: You are not alone in this view. Are there any kind of bright spots that could help turn this around? As we talked about at the outset, Oakland has all this promise, and it also gives a lot of heartbreak. Where do we go from here?
Mitchell Schwarzer: The latest bright spot may be political. There is a growing awareness that Oakland, during the Occupy [Wall Street] Movement, and then later during Black Lives Matter, became the progressive center of the Bay Area, because Berkeley and San Francisco got much wealthier. Yet in those ideological movements and the politicians that align with them there is a lack of pragmatic attitudes about how to run a city. You can’t run a city with hopes and dreams only. You have to make deals and compromises. You have to fill the potholes, respond to the 911 calls, clean up the parks, keep the budget under control, and reform the governmental structure when needed. Politicians have to work in harmony with the police and business, and that hasn’t been the case in the past couple of years. Hopefully, the recall of Mayor Sheng Thao (and awareness of her subsequent indictment for severe corruption) will open the door for a new mayor to take a more pragmatic approach to city governance, one whose success is measured by results, not slogans.
