When I moved to San Francisco, in 1979, people were complaining about how expensive it was. Home prices were beyond reach; rents were high except in the poorest neighborhoods. In fact, the reason I moved to Oakland, in 1987, was because I wanted to buy a condo and couldn’t afford one in San Francisco.
I found a one-bedroom place in Adams Point that I bought for $58,000. I had to borrow money from my mother to make the down payment. It was the most expensive thing I’d ever bought. I still live there. Yes, it’s worth a lot more now, but if I sold it, I wouldn’t be able to afford another place to live in the area. I’d have to move to, I don’t know, Visalia, or someplace in Iowa.
So the current round of anger at high housing prices doesn’t surprise me. Some things never change. Oakland started getting more expensive when people like me migrated here because we couldn’t afford San Francisco. Now, places like Portland and Tracy are the recipients of migrants leaving Oakland because they can’t afford to live here. I didn’t feel like a “gentrifier” for having moved here. I was relatively broke, and lived a simple, frugal life. I just needed a place to live, was fed up with being evicted by roommates who held the lease and who, for one reason or another, wanted me out. This is one reason why the term “gentrification” bothers me. It’s a pejorative thing to say about someone who’s just trying to get by and happens to be able to afford to buy a house or condo or pay high rent.
I’ve had quite a few young friends who have been forced out of Oakland. They include tattoo artists, musicians and some living off the grid, by dealing pot or whatever. I miss every one of them, and I’m sad they had to leave a city they loved. Yet what was Oakland supposed to do to keep them? On nextdoor.com recently, there was [yet another] heated exchange about the evils of gentrification, only this time the conversation turned decidedly race-oriented, with some people arguing since high rents and home prices primarily impact Black and Brown people, these practices are racist and must be combatted.
Okay, but how? I ask this question in all seriousness. If you argue that high home prices are inherently racist, and you take umbrage in this fact and demand that Oakland do something about it, then you’re required to come up with specifics. What would you do about the fact that, according to Zillow, “the typical home value in Oakland is $953,536”?
I mean, it’s all well and good to complain, but what do the complainers propose to do about it? You can’t create a law that instructs a homeowner how much to charge for that home. You can’t compel a landlord to charge tenants less in rent than the landlord wishes to. When Luka’s announced it was leaving, a lot of people were angry about “greedy landlords,” but—aside from shaming them—landlords cannot be told how much they can charge for rent. (Oakland does have rent control, but it’s relatively weak.)
Oakland also can’t mandate that “x” percentage of new housing be affordable, because at some point, builders will refuse to invest here. That may make them greed heads, but it doesn’t change the reality. Builders don’t build for charity, they build for profit. The same is true of business taxes. I just read that Oakland is considering gigantic new taxes on 1,500 “larger” companies, with the money to go into the General Fund. Of course, this City Council always thinks taxes are the answer to Oakland’s problems, but again, how high do they have to go before Clorox, Pandora, Lyft and other large companies bail out? It may feel good to tax the “big boys,” but when they leave, they take jobs and taxes with them, leaving Oakland poorer, with less money to spend on the social services the City Council loves so much.
So there are very few options for legally making Oakland affordable. Besides, our city doesn’t exist on a desert island. It’s in the middle of the Bay Area, surrounded by other cities and suburbs. It’s not as if Oakland can be fenced off and the realities of the real estate market shut out. This is how the system works. After 35 years in my condo, I wish I could move someplace else, but I can’t afford to. So I adjust myself to the circumstances.
We all agree that housing is too expensive throughout the Bay Area, but as I began in this post, it always has been. Nobody has ever been able to figure out a solution. And nobody ever will. Cities change. When I grew up in The Bronx in the 1950s, the borough was a vast middle class Jewish ghetto. Before that, it had been an upper-class countryside where Manhattan’s WASP wealthy built their summer homes. In the 1970s and 1980s The Bronx became predominantly Latino/Hispanic, with Puerto Ricans, Haitians and Dominicans filling up the tenements. In the 1990s and 2000s, The Bronx got gentrified. Cities, like other living organisms, evolve. Some people are hurt in the process, but others thrive. What’s happening in Oakland is natural. If people want to do something about it, they should come up with legal, realistic proposals, not pie-in-the-sky fantasies that have no possibility of happening.
Steve Heimoff