New subject: [sudo-discuss] WOSP – City of Oakland’s Plan for Gentrification: A Target For Anti-Displacement Activity : Indybay

16 May 2014

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2014/04/18/18754399.php

WOSP – City of Oakland’s Plan for Gentrification: A Target For Anti-Displacement Activity
: Indybay

Advertisement for Public Release of WOSP in Feb. 2014
March 29, 2014 

Snapshot of the State and Capital in the Bay Area

If the Bay Area’s economy was compared to every other national economy in the world, it
would be the 19th largest. The Bay has the highest GDP per capita in the entire United
States, and even outpaces London and Singapore. It captures 40% of the entire flow of
venture capital in the US (p11), which constitutes a higher amount of capital than that
captured during the dot.com boom. While the Bay accounts for only 2.4% of the total jobs
in the US, it has 12% of the computer & electronics manufacturing, 10.3% of software
development, and 8.3% of internet related jobs (p13.) Seven of the top 10 social media
companies are here – Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, Linkedin, Zynga, and Yelp. In
short, the Bay is home to one of the highest concentrations of capital in the world and
mapping out the composition of capital is key for us to situate ourselves as we continue
to engage in class combat. (Footnote #1)

The regional state is well aware of its place within the world economy. Over the past
years, city politicians from the greater Bay Area have come together to generate a 30 year
strategy about how to restructure the region’s housing, employment, and transportation
structures. Plan Bay Area (PBA) was developed by the Association of Bay Area Governments
(ABAG) to carry out the tasks of determining how the state can support and facilitate the
accumulation of capital throughout the region. In order to grease the wheels of the local
capitalist economy, the PBA aims to redevelop housing and transit throughout the Bay; New
units are set to be built, new transportation “hubs” developed, and both of these projects
are to be coordinated across single cities and the bay area as a whole.

PBA aims to align the various metropolitan areas of the Bay in their development of
housing to match projected increases in employment. Internet, computer and electronics
manufacturing, along with professional, scientific and technical services are accounting
for some of the largest contributors to job creation here. PBA states that between early
2011 and late 2013 the Bay Area added more than 200,000 jobs, an increase of 7.5 percent
that is well above the state’s average of 4.5%. PBA is projecting that this area will
continue to outpace the rest of California and the US in its share of job growth due to
the heavy concentration of tech related industries which forms part of the economic base
of Bay Area political economy. (Footnote#2)

West Oakland Specific Plan – One Part of Capital/State’s Total Plan

“Opportunity Sites”

We find ourselves in a city that’s clearly at the crosshairs of the system’s plans for
intentional development and displacement: highly concentrated capital in the Bay Area and
projections of millions of jobs being created in the next 10 years; a strategic plan by
city politicians across the Bay to house these new high wage workers within its multiple
cities; and the ongoing displacement of low wage workers and unemployed people. This is
the situation Oakland Mayor Jean Quan references when she states that she’s seeking to
bring in 10,000 new residents to Oakland while saying nothing about keeping long term
residents and working class people in Oakland.

The city of Oakland has developed a number of “Specific Plans” for the Coliseum, Lake
Merritt and West Oakland in order to smoothly facilitate and attract investment by retail
and tech companies, develop new housing units, and restructure the local transportation
systems. The West Oakland Specific Plan, WOSP (really Jean Quan?!), is one local example
of the city’s plan for carrying out this program of urban capitalist development (footnote
#3).

Emeryville part 2?

The West Oakland Specific Plan is the City of Oakland’s plan to help developers and
incoming high wage populations (both different types of gentrifiers – see footnote #4)
speed up the accumulation of capital in Oakland. It essentially acts as a one stop shop
for financial and retail capitalists to invest in West Oakland without having to go
through the “nuisance” of making Environmental Impact Reports – EIRs – or dealing with
zoning regulations. Instead of having new developments require zoning, and environmental
impact regulations, the WOSP does it all for them and therefore saves money for the
developers, retail chains, and financial interests seeking to build in and make massive
profits in West Oakland. It is the state facilitating the accumulation of capital and
dispossessing long term, and historically black, residents in the process by bringing in
new investment that will increase property values while doing nothing to keep rents for
existing residents from going up.

The WOSP highlights four “Opportunity Sites” as the specific areas of West Oakland to be
developed. The Four areas are the Mandela/West Grand area, the San Pablo corridor, the
area around the BART station on 7th Street and the area next to the Port of Oakland around
3rd Street. These “Opportunity Sites” are determined to be the specific places where
transit, new housing, light industrial and retail outlets will be developed.

In order to “revitalize” these areas, the architects of WOSP have identified various
barriers to development such as “graffiti,” “homeless encampments,” “crime of all types,”
and “blight.” In the eyes of the architects of WOSP, once the barriers to development are
gone there will be a flourishing of “new growth.”

Right . . .

What does this growth look like? A glance at the video accompanying the presentation of
the WOSP to the Oakland Planning Commission featured the familiar architecture and spatial
layout of Emeryville mixed in with your typical Whole Foods store. The development that’s
presented is about attracting an influx of capital investment – retail, industrial, and
high wage residents – and transforming West Oakland into a center of commerce for a new
set of residents. New growth is about raising property values and attracting new residents
and businesses, not improving the situations of those who already live there.

But the planners who put WOSP together would disagree. They are quick to point out that
they have “Chapter 9,” a section of the report that addresses equity and social justice
issues. This is where they explicitly state that they hope to mitigate the “impact of
neighborhood change and displacement on longstanding residents and businesses” (WOSP 9-1.)
However, what one finds in Chapter 9 is little more than an inventory of existing city
agencies and non-profit organizations that provide services to working class people.
Rather than focusing on the needs of long-term and working class residents, WOSP is
re-writing the rules for developers and financial capital to ease their access the city by
re-writing the zoning regulations and providing them with a pre-packaged Environmental
Impact Report. All that’s provided to working class people and renters in West Oakland is
a list of the declining base of social service programs that already exist.

Strategic Orientations for Fighting WOSP

We seek the defeat of the WOSP in all its forms. Given the multiple challenges facing West
Oakland, the burgeoning national and international debates around the hyper-gentrification
of the Bay Area, and the ways in which the West Oakland Specific Plan is being promoted,
we recognize the urgent need for a radical critique and effective action against
gentrification and displacement. However, given these circumstances, we also recognize
that simply being “anti-development” is not the most effective strategy, nor is it
adequate to addressing the structural and conjunctural problems in West Oakland that have
both shaped adverse conditions for local residents and made it a ripe ground for
gentrification.

Our orientation towards this struggle is built around the following core strategic goals:

Reframing the Discussion About Development: We want to re-frame the discussion about
gentrification and improvements to neighborhoods. The city and investors want to convince
us that they know what’s best for West Oakland, and that they can make the type of
improvements that residents really want. The truth is that West Oakland has been
devastated by decades of economic and racial exclusion – for instance, the creation of the
West Oakland BART station destroyed 7th Street as a center of culture, black owned
businesses, and centralized location for community interaction; the 980 freeway cut off
West Oakland from downtown so that white city officials could distance themselves from
black “blighted” neighborhoods in the 1970s; the creation of the Post Office on 7th street
bulldozed three blocks of residential housing with no relocation support for residents.

Residents have real desires and needs for their community to be better served, and “no
improvement” is not a viable option as an alternative to gentrification. However, though
we do want improvements, we don’t want the type of “improvements” that the city and its
developer allies seek to impose on us. The development plans of the city and capitalist
real estate developers are NOT the way to create safer, more vibrant, and economically
dynamic neighborhoods. (Footnote #5)

Gentrification as a Question of Power: Many people in West Oakland want development, so
the question isn’t so much do we want improvements or not. The question should be: who
gets to benefit and make use of the developments? Is it going to be long term black,
latino residents and working class people, or middle class, often white, newcomers who
landlords and developers cater to in order to accumulate high rents. Long term residents
want development like well serviced and fully funded schools and parks, fixed roads,
improved plumbing, clean air, and access to affordable healthy foods, while developers
want development that looks like biotech campuses, an increased police presence, and cafes
that sell expensive coffee. Some of the questions we seek to put out there are: On whose
terms will urban development proceed? Who decides what is implemented and where? Who
benefits from urban development?

Community Control over Community Development: If gentrification and urban development is
an issue of power, therefore, we argue that the only way towards a positive outcome in
West Oakland is for the people themselves to take control of the redevelopment process.
‘Community input’ in an otherwise top-down, technocratic planning process has proven to be
a useless endeavor – mere lip service to inclusivity and equity. The real needs of the
poor, black and brown and working-class communities in West Oakland have either been
ignored, or worse, twisted and used to justify the aggressive neoliberal development
strategies put forward by WOSP. By invoking the classic Black Panther slogan of ‘community
control,’ we are also recognizing the need for a strategy that is locally rooted in
Oakland’s Black proletarian constituency and its historical memory of struggle; one that
emphasizes and prioritizes the material needs and political empowerment of the most
oppressed sectors of urban society. (Footnote #6)

Our on-the-ground strategy is to mobilize activists and community members on two fronts:

Kill the WOSP: We seek to build a strong, vocal force of opposition to the West Oakland
Specific Plan by staging interventions at all city planning meetings, developing and
presenting a clear and coherent critique of the Plan at every point in the approval
process. The mass displacement and “hyper-gentrification” of San Francisco has given us
the opportunity to show what this new mode of urban development looks like, and why it
must be stopped: “West Oakland Will NOT Be the Next San Francisco!” The immediate goal is
to defeat or delay the final vote on WOSP’s Draft Plan and EIR. We’ve approached this goal
thus far by organizing small, but vocal, interventions at the presentation of the WOSP to
the city Planning Commission and the Parks and Recreation Commission.

A People’s Plan for West Oakland: As an alternative to capitalist visions of urban
development, we plan to deeply engage communities in organization and dialogue towards
articulating their own vision of the kind of city they want to live and work in. Inspired
by urban struggles across the world, we are attempting to facilitate the organization and
empowerment of residents to create urban space themselves; to foster the imagination and
social power capable of asserting the power to shape the city according to the needs,
wants, and rhythms of their everyday lives. This is a longer-term community planning
process that will hopefully be realized in a radical, innovative, and concrete strategy
for West Oakland’s redevelopment. (Footnote #6)

—————

Footnotes:

#1: All statistics and information in this paragraph drawn from the “Bay Area Job Growth
to 2040” document prepared for the Association of Bay Area Governments –
http://www.onebayarea.org/pdf/3-9-12/CCSCE_Bay_Area_Job_Growth_to_2040.pdf

#2: All information about Plan Bay Area taken from their “Draft Forecast of Jobs,
Population, and Housing” document –
http://onebayarea.org/pdf/Draft_Plan_Bay_Area/Draft_PBA_Forecast_of_Jobs_Po…

#3: By “urban capitalist development” we refer to the ways in which city policies and
programs are directed toward the benefit of businesses that engage in retail, financial,
and real-estate growth. Cities in the Bay Area are strategic sites for businesses to
invest in because higher wage workers are moving here in order to work at tech companies
in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. This facilitates the creation of a base of consumers
who buy expensive commodities (coffee, clothes, condos, cupcakes, etc) and pay higher
rents. All of this helps businesses in the city generate flows of money, which then
provides the city with a higher sales tax and residential tax base, hence the “urban” in
capitalist development. The city deals with its declining budget from the state by
welcoming wealthier residents, rather than fighting banks, ports, developers and
corporations for higher tax rates that could fund services for working class people.

#4: By “gentrifiers” we refer to three groups: a.) the capitalist developers who flip
houses, redevelop properties, build condos, and rent/sell their properties to high waged
workers and wealthy people; b.) the state bureaucrats such as city planners and other
planning agents who produce documents such as WOSP in order to attract capital to the
city, as well as passing racist laws and zoning regulations; and c.) the individuals whose
high wages allow them to pay higher rents and in an overall sense benefit from
redevelopment projects such as these. This third group, the individual gentrifiers, is
controversial because it is argued that these people do not accumulate capital in the same
way that private developers do. While this is true, we still refer to them as gentrifiers
because of the problematic role that they play once they move into a neighborhood. Some
issues associated with high wage workers moving into neighborhoods such as West Oakland
involve calling and collaborating with the police on a more frequent basis than long-term
residents and organizing private security firms to patrol neighborhoods. Additionally,
many of these “individual” gentrifiers also are/become petty-bourgeois business owners of
high priced organic food shops, cafes, and clothing boutiques. We recognize the challenge
of using gentrifier as a term because it encompasses such a wide range of people and lacks
specificity, while also seeing the value of its accessibility. Throughout this essay we’ve
attempted to refer to specific groups, but we still retain use of gentrifier term because
of its wide use.

#5: We completely acknowledge that there are many different sets of people who compose any
community. Our understanding of the needs and desires of residents comes from our
experiences working alongside long-term residents, organizing around housing issues,
working with young people in the community, and researching the WOSP and its background
alongside people whose lives are directly affected by the plan. Putting forward the
“needs” of West Oakland as a whole is an ongoing project that many are already engaged in
and that we seek to support.

#6: When we say “community control” and “people’s plan” we refer to processes where
working class and black/brown residents, unemployed people, and youth put out their
visions of how the community should be changed. Historically, terms like “community” and
“the people” have been used in ways that obscure and diminish class differences within a
given set of people, and have also been used in ways that facilitate capitalist divisions.
 This has meant that proletarian goals and objectives have been subsumed into middle class
and capitalist projects – aka, populism. However, we choose to use these terms because
they also signify bottom-up, working class and unemployed people’s power and agency as
opposed to top-down state, developer plans for reorganizing the city.

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