PHOTO/PETER BROWN
OAKLAND, CA — Redevelopment, privatization and gentrification are stalking Oakland. As condos spring up everywhere, corporations and billionaires with bags of money are buying up massive amounts of property in the city’s arts district, threatening to evict the unique multicultural creativity that has flowered despite Oakland’s poverty. At a meeting of Oakland Creative Neighborhoods Coalition people discussed strategies to prevent displacement from homes and studios (facebook.com/KeepOAKCreative?fref=ts).
Silicon Valley has transmogrified into Silicon Bay. The rise of San Francisco as a tech center has raised rents through the ceiling – $3500/month for one bedroom in SF, $2500+ for Oakland. Such rents drive severe gentrification, dispossessing traditional communities and families, driving out well over 50,000 low-income Oaklanders (mostly African American) since 2000. As developers reconfigure neighborhoods for profit, the African American population has dropped from 50% to 28%.
Oakland, like other cities in California, is victimized by predatory Wall Street schemes to profit by dispossession. Before 2008, sub-prime loans “racialized” the housing market as minorities were sucked into predatory home loans. Then came the massive wave of eviction that hasn’t ended. Now corporations like Oakland’s Waypoint (over $20 billion in distressed East Bay homes) are buying up foreclosures to turn them into rental property. The new “rentership society” is funded like the eviction crisis – by securitizing housing payments. But now it’s rents, instead of mortgages. Already many public workers in San Francisco and Oakland cannot afford to live in the cities they work for.
Massive property grabs are transforming public spaces in Oakland into commodified territory controlled by militarized police and private security forces. The southeast end of Lake Merritt park has been modernized and Oakland’s City Council just voted to privatize the Kaiser Convention Center on this land. The massive building publically owned since 1914, will be filled with shops, entrepreneurs and trendy eateries, rather than the original plan by a local, community-based group to make it into a multi-purpose community center with adjacent Laney Community College to produce 1700 jobs, many for students!
Recently Oakland’s City Council knowingly illegally attempted to sell juicy property on the edge of Lake Merritt to build a luxury hi-rise without low-income housing. This criminality was thoroughly exposed and blocked when East Lake United for Justice took over the council meeting, demanding the use of public land for public benefits.
Now the context becomes clear for the 2009 murder of Oscar Grant and Alan Blueford, as well as the brutal suppression of Occupy Wall Street movement. Corporate developers live by the formula that police create security, security creates investment, investment creates markets, markets demand the militarization and privatization of public space.
The simple ability of an African-American (or any low-income person) to walk down the street in peace in America requires ending killer cops, militarization of police, the prison-industrial complex, the militarized border, the school-to-prison pipeline and the New Jim Crow legal system. Now gentrification must be added to the list. Incremental change won’t work here. Just wanting to live in peace demands the transformation of society. A struggle of this magnitude requires the broadest possible unity of our working class; the foundation for such unity lies in championing the rights of those most devastated and dispossessed by this system.
