99% Invisible - Beautiful West Oakland, California

Episode Date: March 18, 2025

When global trade reshapes a city, who pays the price—and who fights back?Beautiful West Oakland, California Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and get exclusive access to bonus episodes. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus.

This 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 US and Canada. Hey Chris. But a few of us still live and work in Oakland. And despite how far flung the 99-I-P-I 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. He also happens to be a long time 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. 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 backlot, 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. When 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 lie on the shore. The cranes have become the official and unofficial symbol of the city. People spray paint them around, people have them on shirts.

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. In 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. But 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 you want to go? I think I can go all the way back. Let's kind of go all the way back. Railroads. 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. Yeah, right next to the port Yes like right on the bay and 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've researched 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 and 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 World War II, that made that part of town into 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. Right. So let's talk about that. How did Oakland city planners in the industrial grime as intended by city planners at the time. Right. So let's talk about that. 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 Shaddock, who was the planning engineer in Oakland during this early New Deal period in which 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 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. What they end up recommending is essentially a freeway to cut off the black population and hem them against the industrial shoreline. 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 a 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, while it might sound nice to live by the shoreline, 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 that the water itself was toxic, and there are sewer outflows, and there's

all kinds of stuff happening there. And 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 and 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. 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? And 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. They would call it completely unfit for human habitation, when it was basically the densest residential neighborhood in the East Bay.

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 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 trade-off with black people so many times

where we're sort of like, yeah, that's gonna hurt some black people, but we're gonna redevelop the city, right? And 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. 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 the whole country and also very strongly in the Bay Area. And so people are stuck just living with these sort of these incredible changes to the local economy, which involve tons of diesel trucks running these short routes that are called dredge, 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. But 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. One 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 the 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.

And one of the things that he says basically is 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 that Panther's 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 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. I 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. After the break, one resident of West Oakland takes on the global supply chain. We are back with Alexis Matricle.

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. That is the Cypress section of the Nimitz freeway going down because of the 1989 earthquake. That 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. And then since the earthquake knocks it down, it would have never come down otherwise, right? There's no way that anyone was gonna 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 and 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. So 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. 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 Ms. Margaret Gordon.

Oh, Ms. Margaret Gordon. I didn't actually think I was initially going to have a central character in the way that Miss Margaret became, but 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 note, I'm not sure it's like about you per se,

but you know, I, 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. It just represented so much of that kind of mid-century boomer black experience in the

Bay, where somebody's encounters with the state are both 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 how to work within the constraints of a system that more or less wants to exclude you as a poor black woman in a neighborhood that's not represented very well. You mentioned Ms. Margaret's connections with the port and to the neighborhood. And 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, you know, 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. Yeah, 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 shit, 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. And 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. 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. Because 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. And 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 it 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. Like 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 lunch 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 on this port board, which is just having such a big impact on their lives, right? But no one from the community was actually ever there. It was always like real estate developers and 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, which is a huge deal for West Oakland. And I think for Margaret, it really was the kind of high point of her career in terms of having, you know, 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 port. Yeah. 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, most of 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, but 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 Ms. 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's book that really illustrates this dynamic and it has to do with the battle over a decommissioned army base down by the port. The dispute pits a hotshot local developer, Phil Tagami, up against Ms. 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, you 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 tiki-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. So 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 Ms. 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

like kind of catch phrases of the Obama era. And you know, that's what this was delivering the whole local power structure was behind it. They 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 this year, clubs 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 and it's pretty similar this time. 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, what can a city do? Like if a city can't stop this, which the entire city is opposed to,

then what does that say about power in our modern world? Totally, and it's also like, this is all that global trade economy trying to plow its way through West Oakland again. Right, totally. And basically what Oakland has tried to do is like file multiple lawsuits against the developer,

but they keep losing because the contract Agami has with the city basically says that he can do it, that he can ship the coal if he wants to. Absolutely, I mean, litigation after litigation, just by delaying it, you're kind of waging like siege financial warfare. And so to this day, as we're recording here, it still doesn't exist as a coal export terminal.

Like it doesn't, it's not there exist as a coal export terminal. It's not there, you know? And the fight continues all these years on. Pete Slauson And at least for me, what I find so interesting about this whole fight over the Army base is just how these things have a tendency to grind everything to a halt. I mean, it's been more than 25 years since the old Army base was decommissioned and still neither the city nor the developer have figured out how to use this piece of land to benefit the city. And you know, don't get me wrong, like I don't want it to be a coal terminal either. Like I think that sucks. But I would love it if the city would build something because

between the housing crisis and the climate crisis and everything else, we are going to need to build things and build them pretty fast. I sometimes, because we know we have to rebuild so much infrastructure for climate change, I at times worry about the ability of activists to stop things from getting built, transmission lines, other things. And one of the things that I hope people

would take away from this book, Phil Tagami at one point says to me, if you brush with Robert Moses, you have to rinse with Jane Jacobs, or you could have gotten it the other way. That's a real 99P reference there for you. And I kind of feel like wherever you are on the spectrum of building stuff, if you're going to brush with Tagami, you've got to rinse with Miss Margaret. If you're going to spectrum of building stuff, if you're gonna brush with Togami, you gotta rinse with Miss Margaret.

If you're gonna brush with Miss Margaret, you gotta rinse with Togami, because it is fundamentally kind of a different thing to try to build a whole bunch of new stuff, which we do know we actually need to do. We cannot actually just freeze everything. So for me, it's almost like it's less, you know, like hero and villain, although there's that component to it.

And it's more like each of these people contains a piece of what the future world needs to be. And the thing that must be there is you must actually want good things for the place where you are, which is not, I'm not always sure about that in all cases, but then, you know, people can have different ways of getting to like a good world, you are, which is not, I'm not always sure about that in all cases. But then, you know, people can have different ways of getting to, like, a good world, you know, and I'm still hoping that Phil gives up on the project and everyone can celebrate. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. So we've talked about, I don't know, like, 100 years of Oakland history. How do you think this global economic order that was born right here out of those cranes by the port? How do you think it's changed life in the city? I think to get to you know an obvious point about Oakland that must be addressed it's like Oakland has swapped out a huge percentage of its population for higher income less black people and We have really brutal crime still and now I think demographically shocking the income levels of Oakland relative to its crime rates. I think

people, it's almost like an outlier in that way. The city could not gentrify its way to safety, security, and vibrancy. Instead, we gentrified the hell out of Oakland, and there's empty stores everywhere, empty ground floor retail everywhere. We've got high real estate prices and low everything else. And it's like, as long as things are market-driven in this way, the only thing rich people can do to a place is make the price go up. And I think everyone who lives in poor neighborhoods knows that, which is why gentrification has the name that it does,. And I think everyone who lives in poor neighborhoods knows that, which is why gentrification

has the name that it does, even though I think on its own terms, trying to fight gentrification in the narrow sense by keeping urban change from happening has failed. And you can look around and see the results of that. And so I kind of feel like we might be at a bit of like a low point for this, like how we think about what needs to change in cities because we're kind of at a bit of like a low point for this, like how we think about what needs to change in cities

because we're kind of at the end of a line of a bunch of different theories about how to make cities better. And now we get to try something else. Well, Alexis, thank you so much for talking with me. Thanks so much for the book. I really enjoyed our conversation. I appreciate it.

Thank you so much, talking with me. Thanks so much for the book. I really enjoyed our conversation. I appreciate it. Thank you so much, Roman. Thanks, 99PI. Alexis Madrigal's new book, The Pacific Circuit, is available everywhere right now. Go check it out. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Jason DeLeon and edited by Kelly Prime, mixed by Martin Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real. Kathy Tew is our executive producer, Kurt Kolstad is the digital director,

Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Barupe, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Ley, Lashma Dawn, Joe Rosenberg, Jacob Medina Gleason, and me Roman Mars. The 99% of visible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part the SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building, in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California. You can find us on Blue Sky as well as our own Discord server. There's a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.