Beautiful West Oakland, California

0:00This is 99 % Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. For over a decade now, listeners of this show have heard me say that we're headquartered in beautiful downtown, or now uptown, Oakland, California. These days, the 99 % Invisible team is spread all across the U.S. and Canada. Hey, Chris. But a few of us still live and work in Oakland. And despite how far flung the 99PI team is, there's just something about the city that feels like the spiritual home of our show. I think what makes Oakland home for me is this incredible diversity of like peoples and places that are all sort of contained within it. This is Alexis Madrigal, an Oakland resident himself and one of the hosts of the local public radio call-in show Forum on KQED.

0:49He also happens to be a longtime friend of mine. When I first moved here, you know, 12, 13 years ago, it was kind of like a quarter of the population was white, a quarter of the population was black, a quarter was Latino, and like a quarter was Asian. And, you know, there's tons of working class people. There's tons of non-working class people. And they're all kind of shoved into the same place right in view of this kind of glittering future city of San Francisco. And we're kind of like the back lot, you know, and I love that part of it always made me feel quite at home. And also it really helped me like fall in love with the city.

1:24When you cross the Bay Bridge from San Francisco to Oakland, you don't see some flashy skyline. Instead, your eye is either drawn up to the densely forested hills or down towards the port, where a series of rail lines, shipping containers and massive industrial cranes line the shore. The cranes have become the like official and unofficial symbol of the city. People spray paint them around like people have them on shirts. Like it does represent us in some crucial way. And in part, it's because any route into the city, basically, you end up seeing them. they are kind of our skyscrapers, right? They are this thing which is out of scale with like human life.

2:04In the shadow of those cranes lies the neighborhood of West Oakland. It's a predominantly black working class community. And in Alexis's new book, The Pacific Circuit, he writes about how this neighborhood has been shaped by the global economic forces that connect Oakland to the rest of the world. Every year, billions of dollars worth of stuff gets loaded into a container and onto a cargo ship destined for the Port of Oakland. The supply chain that keeps goods flowing between Asia and the Bay Area has transformed life as we know it today. Products are cheaper. They arrive at your door in a flash.

2:41But all that has a cost. And in West Oakland, the impacts of global trade are felt by residents every day. The story of this neighborhood and its relationship to the port next door tells us a lot about the trade-off cities have made in service of economic growth. It's also a place where people have had to learn how to push back against these enormous financial forces to save their neighborhood, their neighbors, and themselves. So I was hoping that we could start off by going, like, way back. How far back do you want to go? I think I can go all the way back if you want. Let's kind of go all the way back, like maybe.

3:20Railroads. I mean, kind of. I mean, so talk to me about West Oakland. How did this part of the city end up becoming like the center of black life in the Bay Area? Yeah, so Oakland became the black center of the Bay Area basically because of the railroads, right? I mean, people quite famously know about like sort of the porters and the porters had a union and many of them were black. And so that was kind of mixed in with like all kinds of other folks who had come as, you know, immigrants to West Oakland and specifically to sort of the very Western part of West Oakland. And just so people can orient themselves, this is the part that's like right on the Bay.

4:01Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right next to the port. Yeah, so over time, as more Black people came, they just kind of, you know, in the way that many migrants do, ended up kind of clumping in this particular part of the city. And, of course, there were racist restrictions, which got tighter later, but it kind of established the core. And then more and more people kind of came to that. And you started to see this kind of, you know, if you research other black areas in the West, people inevitably call a street with lots of black commercial activity the Harlem of the West. And so it became one of these Harlem's of the West along 7th Street in West Oakland.

4:39And what that meant was there were places where you could get oftentimes southern food because most of the people who were coming up were from the south. So you could get ribs and you could get things that you maybe wouldn't find in the rest of the Oakland area. and music and bars and there were unions and there were just kind of an integrated whole of Black life took place really right there along 7th Street in West Oakland, which then, of course, as more and more Black migrants came, especially to work in the shipyards of World War II, that made that part of town into like a very dense, both lovely and also very difficult place to live as well because it was right in the industrial grime, as intended by city planners at the time.

5:24Right. So let's talk about that. Like, how did Oakland city planners in the early part of the 20th century segregate, divide, and zone black residents into some of the roughest parts of the city? Yeah. So I have Shattuck, who was the sort of planning engineer in Oakland during this sort of early New Deal period in which, you know, the federal government was running all of these kinds of research programs to understand the housing stock and populations inside cities. And part of that task was assembling all of this data on every block in basically urban America. And what they ended up finding in Oakland was that you could sort of segregate off the area where black people lived, intermixed with some white people of various ethnic groups from the area that was still mostly white.

6:13And what they end up recommending is essentially a freeway to cut off the black population and hem them against the sort of industrial shoreline. And this is the freeway that was built in the 1950s that basically split West Oakland in half. I mean, today the neighborhood is still surrounded by highways. But for a long time, one of those highways ran kind of right through the middle of the community. And it pinned sort of the very western part of West Oakland right against the water. That's right. I think it's worth remembering for people that like, well, it might sound nice to live by the shoreline.

6:45You know, the industrial shoreline in this sort of pre-environmental regulations era was disgusting. And so you had the railroads running through. You had factories doing all kinds of stuff. This is still an industrial city. And then you had, you know, that the water itself was toxic and there's sewer outflows and there's all kinds of stuff happening there. So this is the one area of town where essentially Oakland city planners said this is where black people can live and this is where black people must live. So black residents of Oakland were living right by the port. And around that time in the 1950s, the port was also seeing a sort of revolution in the shipping industry with containerization.

7:28And we've actually talked a lot about containerization on the show before with you, in fact. But basically, instead of moving a bunch of small individual boxes on and off of cargo ships, everything was going inside of this like one big box instead. And those big boxes or containers would get dropped off in a yard nearby and a bunch of trucks would come by and take them away. But for this whole operation to work, you basically need a lot of land to store those containers on. Absolutely right. You need hundreds of acres of more or less useless land right on the coast of a major city. You know, it's like, and how do you find that?

8:09And basically the answer that the whole containerization trade came up with was to implant in poor neighborhoods in places adjacent to the big city. So if you think about the first two big container points, you have Newark, which of course is right, you know, outside New York City. And you have Oakland. And so it was the plan, basically, of Oakland City planners for as long as they had had dreams to push out the population of West Oakland so that Oakland's industrial base could take over that whole area. Like they would call it like completely unfit for human habitation, like when it was basically the densest residential neighborhood in the East Bay.

8:53So not only did Oakland city planners segregate this neighborhood with that highway, but they also tried to take over the area and redevelop it for more business down by the port. Yeah, I mean, I think the bargain essentially that the city of Oakland had been wanting to make since the early 1950s was to sacrifice that area as a residential place and the people in it for economic growth at the port. And I think what I found deeply compelling about this particular story is like we've made that tradeoff with black people so many times where we're sort of like, yeah, that's going to hurt some black people, but we're going to redevelop the city.

9:35Right. And this is this is like such a pure example where people saw an economic opportunity and all that was standing in the way were some like black lives. The Port of Oakland started container operations in 1962. As the first container port on the West Coast of the United States, it helped revolutionize global trade. Money started to pour into the Bay Area. But in West Oakland, right next to this booming port, the remaining Black residents were forced to live with increasing levels of pollution. At the time, especially in the 1960s, there is nowhere for Black people to go. There aren't places where they can live because of the racial restrictions that are placed across, you know, the whole country and also very strongly in the Bay Area.

10:19And so people are stuck just living with the sort of these incredible changes to the local economy, which involve tons of diesel trucks running these short routes that are called drayage, you know, in and out of ports and are kind of the oldest, dirtiest trucks that you can find. And so what develops in West Oakland is a localized air quality problem that's really about diesel particulate matter. And diesel particulate matter is bad for people. Like it's bad for your lungs, increases your chance of asthma. It does bad things to your brain. I mean, there's like, it is why people don't want to live in really polluted environments, more or less.

10:57But if it's the only place you can live and this is the growing business of the city, you're kind of stuck. And so that's what happened in West Oakland.

11:09One of the first activist groups to try to grapple with everything happening down by the port were the Black Panthers. The group's headquarters were in West Oakland, so they witnessed firsthand how all these changes affected Black residents in the neighborhood. Prior to containerization, the port had been a place where Black people could find work. But containerization required less manpower. So now the port was both polluting the neighborhood and taking jobs away from its people. The Panthers were very up on the idea that containerization was transforming Oakland. And Huey Newton, you know, who's kind of lead theorist of the Panthers, he writes this essay called The Technology Question, which I think is just it's so ahead of its time and kind of thinking about why global supply chains are important.

11:58And one of the things that he says basically is that like people like the shit that capitalism produces. and that is the trickiest component of it. Like we all like this stuff that comes out of this system that we don't like. And so what do we do about it? And I think I would say the Panthers never really answered that question, but neither have we. I think all of us who are living in our modern world are like, God, I don't like all this stuff that is happening. I don't like this system. I don't like what it does to people. I don't like what it does to workers. I don't like what it does to environment, but I do have the latest iPhone and I have this computer and I have all the things.

12:37I have an electric car and you know what I mean? And I think we've never really been able to tackle that thing, but they were maybe the first to like just pinpoint it so precisely.

12:52After the break, one resident of West Oakland takes on the global supply chain.

13:05And we are back with Alexis Madrigal. And we're talking about his new book, The Pacific Circuit. So Alexis, in the first part of our chat, we talked about how starting in the 1950s, West Oakland was segregated by this highway that ran down through the middle of the neighborhood, which, by the way, was adding to the pollution of the neighborhood in its own right. And then this boom next door at the port comes along and adds even more to the problem. But you write about how in 1989, there's this random, tragic, but also transformational event that happens in Oakland. Yeah, so there's kind of a real before and after in West Oakland, which is this freeway going down because of the 1989 earthquake.

13:43That is the Cypress section of the Nimitz Freeway. And you can see, oh, my God, look at that. The freeway has just completely collapsed. and it comes down in this like deus ex machina kind of way in the sense that the earthquake knocks it down, it would have never come down otherwise, right? There's no way that anyone was going to take down this like connector route, but it comes down and suddenly it changes the possibilities of the entire neighborhood, you know? And of course that change has to be managed and all these things have to happen, but it was just like the way that overnight this structural feature, which has its roots all the way back in the baldly racist suggestion of segregating black people in the west part of West Oakland, it just comes down one day.

14:28And the rest of the neighborhood's history, henceforth, minus that piece of urban infrastructure, is just different. I mean, you talk about this in your book, like people who have basically grown up in a literal shadow of a highway and they never heard birds because there was no nature around. And all of a sudden, on day one, they see light. They see the sky. They hear birds. It's really something.

14:53So this highway comes down and the immediate physical effect is that there's a lot more light and less pollution in West Oakland. But the second less tangible effect is that this highway is gone and it feels to some people like, wow, we have this opportunity. Like some things that might have felt fixed might not be so permanent after all. And that spirit of change is really embodied by one person in your book. So let's introduce everyone to Miss Margaret Gordon. Oh, Miss Margaret Gordon. I didn't actually think I was initially going to have a central character in the way that Miss Margaret became.

15:29But she would go around telling people, before I had decided this at all, she'd be like, he's writing a book about me. And I'd be like, well, you know, Miss Margaret, I just want to know, I'm not sure it's like about you per se, but, you know, and she's like, he's writing a book about me. And eventually it turned out to be more or less what happened. And one reason is I realized an alternate title for this book was Everybody Knows Miss Margaret. Like, she connected up all these different kinds of people because of her work out at the port, but also because of her longtime connections in the community.

16:04It just represented so much of that kind of mid-century boomer black experience in the Bay where, you know, somebody's encounters with the state are both like voluminous and they have lots of them. And many of them are quite negative. And yet what emerges out of that is someone with an incredible read on governmental action and an incredible read on sort of how to work within the constraints of a system that more or less wants to exclude you as, you know, a poor black woman in a neighborhood that's not represented very well. You mentioned Miss Margaret's connections with the port and to the neighborhood.

16:43And in your book, you write about how in the 90s, she started to get active in the community around this air quality problem. Could you tell me more about that? I mean, she was at that time kind of struggling with one of her kids and was trying to be an advocate in the school system. And then she'd go into the schools in West Oakland and like, you know, the nurse would have like a big basket of inhalers labeled with all the kids names. And she'd be like, well, why is it that like all these kids have asthma? And when you say the kids had asthma, you mean there was really an asthma crisis. Like at the time, some studies showed that asthma rates in West Oakland were like seven times the state average.

17:22Yeah. So for a long time in West Oakland, people knew that the air wasn't good. But of course, there's cumulative impacts of all this stuff over time. There's just the increase in truck traffic that occurred over time. And because it was a neighborhood that was essentially sacrificed for the economic growth of the region, it was really treated like, you know, and so what ends up happening is that Miss Margaret, along with some other folks want to get like a handle on like, well, what's happening in this neighborhood? Like the city does not have good visibility into like how this neighborhood works or what it needs.

17:59And so they join up together to create this thing that's eventually called the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project. And that environmental indicators is sort of what they were first after. They basically did survey work. They counted trucks. They looked at government data sources. And they create this essentially set of indicators that says like these are the things that are bad in our neighborhood. These are the things that are good. Here's our strengths. We want to change these things. And it became clear pretty much right away that it was really about the trucks. Yeah. And you have this stat in your book that West Oakland had like thousands of truck trips going through the neighborhood every day.

18:36Because, I mean, at the time, so much of the economy was tied to this port. So the number of things going in and out of this neighborhood is kind of unimaginable. Totally. So the trucks were just like making a mess all over the neighborhood, cracking sidewalks, idling outside your door and all that kind of stuff. And, of course, the pollution itself, which was obvious to everyone who was living there and was as a direct consequence was harming the health of the children in the neighborhood. And so that group essentially becomes the key environmental justice pressure group in West Oakland saying to the city, saying to the port of Oakland, holding their feet to the fire, you must do something.

19:15Like you cannot assume our bad health in your plans. You must account for cleaning up the air and this place, even as you want the economy to grow in the area. So not too long after launch of this group, Margaret Gordon moves from community activists into another role where she really had some say over what happens down at the port and she becomes a port commissioner. And so can you tell me about the significance of her getting appointed to that position? You know, for West Oakland, there had never been a community representative like on this port board, which is just having such a big impact on their lives.

19:54Right. But no one from the community was actually ever there. It was always like real estate developers and, you know, business people, kind of the elite of the city. So to have someone from the area who lives right on 7th Street, who's been dealing with all those impacts on the board, was a huge deal for West Oakland. And I think for Margaret, it really was a high point of her career in terms of having institutional power, power that could be wielded. And she used it to help get this maritime air quality improvement plan instituted. And this was like her plan to rein in emissions from the board.

20:29Yeah. I mean, what that actually has translated into over the years as the changes and reforms that they made have rolled out was that emissions from diesel particulates, so that's, you know, a lot, mostly the stuff coming out of the trucks, fell 98%, at least by some measures. And overall, emissions in the neighborhood fell by a lot. I mean, huge improvement in air quality. And I really do think even the port itself traces it to this maritime air quality improvement plan, which was sort of Margaret's crowning achievement. So I just think, you know, it's one of those things that feels so important, even though it was just, you know, one person getting onto a board.

21:12But that person made an impact because they knew things about what were happening at the neighborhood level that other people didn't. Today, it's clear that Miss Margaret Gordon has done a ton to improve the air quality in West Oakland. But clean air isn't the only thing her neighborhood needs. Because the same racist city planning that put a highway through the middle of the town and trapped black residents next to the port also deprived West Oakland of economic opportunities. And those two things, the need for clean air and the need for jobs, can be hard to balance in a place like Oakland. There's a story in Alexis' book that really illustrates this dynamic, and it has to do with the battle over a decommissioned army base down by the port.

21:57The dispute pits a hotshot local developer, Phil Tagami, up against Miss Margaret. Tagami's plan wants to use the land the old army base sits on to expand the port and create more jobs. Ms. Margaret wants a plan that benefits her community too, but she understandably, after years of fighting for clean air, has some concerns. It's such an interesting situation, what happened out there, because you essentially have two figures in my mind who really are Oakland people. Like, they're deep in the Oakland community. Both of them have these super deep roots, but they're so different. They're just so, so different.

22:36You know, Miss Margaret, environmental justice leader, West Oakland. And then you have kind of Phil Tagami, who's this kind of downtown developer, but who himself, like, didn't go to college, worked his way up as a developer doing ticky tech stuff into eventually being the guy who redid the Fox Theater, you know, one of these old beautiful theaters, which is now, you know, this amazing music venue in downtown Oakland. and then he locks his jaws onto this project of the Army base and essentially cuts what's really quite an innovative deal at the time with a lot of labor groups and stuff where they got a huge percentage of local hire.

23:12So, you know, people from near the project area would get hired. They agreed to a whole bunch of stuff that the labor groups of Oakland and the East Bay really wanted, right? But there was still this kind of environmental thorn in the side And it felt to Miss Margaret that that kind of got brushed aside in the rush to deliver these jobs in the sort of like post-financial crisis years, you know, into Oakland, where I don't know if people remember, but there was a good paying jobs was like one of those kind of catchphrases of the Obama era. And, you know, that's what this was delivering. The whole local power structure was behind it.

23:52They were behind Tagami doing all this stuff. and Margaret kind of got pushed to the side and her environmental concerns were sort of, you know, swept under the rug. Yeah, and this all came to a head with one particular issue because one of the things that was discovered that would be on the table for shipping through this newly expanded port was coal. Dun, dun, dun. Yeah, right. It's like the Sierra Club's got their new national headquarters in Oakland. You know what I mean? It's like the most anti-Trump place, a major city in the country. I think we went in 2016, I think we went 96 % against Trump.

24:26It's pretty similar this time. You know, I mean, this is like the anti, like you cannot imagine a place, I think, that would be less amenable to wanting to have coal be like part of our local economy. And so this export terminal would essentially have run coal cars right through West Oakland. So people were very, they were big mad and there were all these city council meetings and there's all this stuff. It's one of those moments in a city's history where you just realize like, oh, man, like, what can a city do? Like, if a city can't stop this, which the entire city is opposed to, then like, what does that say about power in our modern world?