The Book Page -- CCR -- Kamala Harris Connection -- August 23, 2024

Locator: 48440CCR.

From another blog:

Updates

August 23, 2024: I posted the original note on September 16, 2022. 

This book on CCR provides an excellent discussion of the "inequality" in the East Bay / Oakland. That was the first time I had heard of the flatlands / hillsides of Oakland. The higher up the hillside one lived, the wealthier one was. The poorest lived at the bottom of the hills, in the "Flatlands." The University of Richmond, Oakland, CA, provides an interactive map: "Mappping Inequality" (link here). This all became a "thing" again when Kamala Harris mentioned that she and her family grew up in the "Flatflands" when they lived in the East Bay / Oakland.

August 23, 2024: from "Mapping Inequality" --

In the city of Oakland, California, real estate interests by the 1920s had carved neighborhoods into long narrow strips marked by income and elevation. They thereby embedded a class and racial regime literally into the physical terrain.

Located directly east of San Francisco, across the waters of San Francisco Bay, Oakland rises from tidal flats into ridgelines of successively higher hills. In the era of HOLC and FHA redlining, native-born white, European immigrant, Black, Latino/a, and Asian American working-class communities characterized the "flatlands," where blue-collar neighborhoods abutted the port, railroads, and factories.

Middle-class and elite white neighborhoods developed further east, in higher and often hilly terrain that ascended dramatically into what locals called the "Oakland hills." One 1930s booster publication indelibly captured this geography.

"High above the turmoil of traffic and hustle of business," it rhapsodized, "are homes tucked away among the tree-covered slopes." This contrast between the multi-racial, industrial flatland neighborhoods and the verdant, garden-like, and largely white hillside districts defined Oakland in the twentieth century. On the 1937 HOLC map—which includes the adjacent, smaller East Bay cities of Berkeley, Albany, Alameda, Piedmont, Emeryville, and San Leandro—one can immediately identify this class and racial geography.

Every flatland neighborhood, running from Berkeley south into Oakland and from Oakland southeast toward San Leandro, was marked with the "hazardous" red.

Adjacent neighborhoods just to the east were identified as "declining."

In all, the 1937 HOLC survey concluded that nearly two-thirds of the residential neighborhoods of the East Bay were in some state of "decline." Notably, this included West Oakland and North Oakland, the birthplace of the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s, as well as South Berkeley, the home of Byron Rumford, one of only two Black State legislators in the immediate postwar decades and sponsor of the "Rumford Act," California's 1963 fair housing law.

East Bay flatland neighborhoods had long served as a "port of entry" for migrating workers, the first place of settlement where rents were reasonable and jobs nearby.

Working-class refugees from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake settled here. So did successive waves of railroad, dock, and factory workers, as Oakland by the 1920s had become a bustling port and warehouse city and an important regional railroad shipping hub. By the 1940s, Oakland was not exactly the "Detroit of the West," as a local booster bragged (although at least six automobile or tractor factories called the East Bay home), but it was nevertheless a thriving industrial city with a multi-racial working class. West Oakland, in particular, was a "marvelous mixture of people," one resident who went on to serve in the California Assembly recalled. "We had every nationality that we knew of in that neighborhood. We had Chinese. We had Mexican, Portuguese, Greek, Italian, Yugoslav. Our immediate neighbor was a Black family."

With a few exceptions, the 1937 HOLC appraisers characterized the East Bay flatlands in derogatory terms. Race was central to those calculations. West Oakland neighborhoods south of San Pablo Avenue were summed up this way: "Old type houses and cottages, tenement tendencies. Heterogeneous mixture of all races." In a flatland neighborhood southeast of Lake Merritt, appraisers insisted that "infiltration of Negroes necessitates hazardous rating." One flatland neighborhood with a significant Black residential population, South Berkeley, was characterized as a "high grade Negro area," where "good loans can be made [...] if care is exercised," but was still "redlined" with the hazardous rating. In all, the language of the HOLC appraisers was a racial grammar, an idiom, that communicated to mortgage lenders, banks, and government agencies which neighborhoods were deemed unfit for investment.

Much further east, in the Oakland and Berkeley hills, FHA financing by 1937 was already leading to new construction for middle- and upper-class white home buyers. These neighborhoods were perched high above the bay with gorgeous views of San Francisco. "Most of the new construction has been financed with FHA loans," the HOLC reported of the hillside district known as Wilshire Heights near Joaquin Miller Park. In a nearby neighborhood, known as Oakmore, new homes were also "largely financed by FHA loans." Even in the Great Depression years of the late 1930s, these "tree-covered slopes" were attractive for developers, who built speculative homes on the assumption that buyers would eventually materialize.

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Democratic National Convention, 2024

Link here.