The state of black housing in Oakland

By Denise Matthis

For many black Californians, Oakland’s housing crisis is nothing new. Institutional racism in government policy and the residential housing market has long made finding a clean, secure, and affordable home in California more difficult for the state’s 2.2 million black residents than white residents. The aftermath of New Deal-era redlining, which considered black communities unsuitable for federally subsidized mortgages, is clearly evident not just where black Californians now live but also where gentrification and displacement tensions are most acute in the state.

Article 34, a still-unrepealed provision of the state Constitution that mandates local referendums before lower-income housing can be constructed in a California city, has kept affordable housing out of wealthy, predominantly white neighborhoods for decades.

ARTICLE 34

Californians voted in 1950 to include a clause in the state Constitution that makes it more difficult for disadvantaged people to find housing.

Article 34, which is still in force, requires voter approval before constructing public housing in a community. When it was passed, the real estate industry claimed that taxpayers should have a say in low-income housing developments as they were publicly funded projects like roads or schools.

The campaign also played on racial concerns about neighborhood integration and used heated rhetoric on the need to fight socialism.

For decades, the law thwarted low-income home development in California, including the abandonment of public housing in Los Angeles’ Chavez Ravine neighborhood in favor of the construction of Dodger Stadium. Article 34 has hampered attempts to integrate suburban communities throughout the state. It resulted in a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that allowed government policies that discriminate against disadvantaged people to be enforced nationally.

OvER-REPRESENTED IN HOMELESS COUNTS

In comparison to other states, California has a comparatively small black population. Although non-Hispanic black residents account for more than 10% of the population in densely populated areas such as New York and Texas, they account for just around 5.5 percent of Californians, a proportion comparable to the black populations of Kansas and Wisconsin.

However, almost 30 percent of the more than 150,000 Californians homeless on any given night are black people. Like Marin County and San Francisco, several Bay Area districts have among the highest rates of homeless blacks in the country. No other major California ethnic group outnumbers black people in the state’s homeless population.

BLACK HOUSEHOLDS PUSHED TO SUBURBS

Not only are more wealthy, youthful, white Californians relocating into recently redeveloped downtown areas, driving down segregation rates. Rapid increases in housing prices have pushed many black tenants out of larger coastal communities and into old, previously mainly white suburbs over the last few decades. While black populations in major cities such as Oakland and Los Angeles have declined, black families have increased in farflung suburbs such as Palmdale in Antioch and Southern California in the Bay Area.

GROUND zERO FOR DISPLACEMENT

In the 1940s, Oakland was a pivotal destination for Black Families migrating from the south; in the 1950s, it was home to a “Harlem of the West” blues and jazz scene; in the 1960s, it was the cradle of the Black Panther Party.

The region’s extreme housing crisis is the greatest threat to working-class black families who have survived decades of racist policies. Oakland has one of the rapidly increasing in the country, owing to the nation’s most expensive real estate in San Francisco and the closeby Silicon Valley tech boom.

While black residents comprised nearly half of Oakland’s population in 1980, that figure had fallen to 28 percent by 2010 and, if current trends persist, could fall to 16 percent within the next decade. Some have been relocated to far-flung suburbs or central California towns that are several hours away. Others have gone back to the south.

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References

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/23/blackcalifornians-housing-crisis-by-the-numbers/ https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-affordablehousing-constitution-20190203-story.html