Many members of our community feel powerless to affect increasing gentrification in Oakland.

totally reasonable!What are the options for people to act and respond? How can we affect change? Who are the individuals and groups working on this issue? Please add whatever you like here:

  • Leave. Move from an area of higher prices to an area of lower prices. Have the foresight to do this while you can plan it on your own time: before your building is purchased and you're left scrambling to relocate at the last minute. Gentrification is not going to be stopped, no matter how many rallies, protests, meeting, and community organized events take place and no matter how many land trusts are created. There is already too much money behind this and everyone in a position of power stands to gain too much.
  • Get angry
  • Talk on the internet (acceptable options include tweeting, blogging, commenting on things)
  • Make media, art, performance about it
  • Organize for: rent control and other strong tenants' rights
  • Organize for: recapitalization of our communities (in all sense of the word "recapitalize": funding for people to stay in their homes, invest in schools, etc.)
  • All of the above!
  • We should embrace it. Gentrification will improve Oakland. Nobody has a god given right to live someplace. I wish I could live in Pac Heights or Piedmont, but I can't afford it. That's life.
    • totally serious question, maybe better for SF Wiki- what was Pac Heights or Piedmont like before? was it ever not a fancy, expensive-to-live-in neighborhood? wondering if a better analogy might be the Mission or Noe Valley, or Temescal?
  • Embrace it! So long as the history of Oakland is preserved and celebrated as much as possible. 
  • Wikipedia has lots of examples of strategies that communities use to respond to gentrification.
  • This East Bay Express article talks about new measures that the City is taking starting at the end of 2013 to help people stay in their homes.
  • This KQED audio piece has discussions of different approaches to boost affordable housing.
  • This San Francisco Chronicle article talks about working to increase dense neighborhoods in many cities in the region as one long-term solution.
  • This Atlantic Cities article talks about increasing the housing supply in SF & planning regionally as a solution.
  • This article by a professor in the Department of Planning and Urban Studies at the University of New Orleans discusses:
    • Housing trust funds: "housing trust funds support the creation or of affordable housing through fees from commercial development or real estate transfer taxes"
    • Land Trusts (Oakland has one)
    • Efforts to increase the income of existing community residents (I think of efforts like this as "recapitalizing our community")
  • Increase housing stock by closing I-980.

 

What groups in Oakland already work on gentrification-related issues?

 

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