Episode 4: Tackling Displacement: Gentrification, Housing, and Community Power in Oakland

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"We are always trying to spin our wheels as human beings about how do we fit into this system that was never created for us, the system that we need to figure out how to redo."- Corrina Gould

A transcript, lightly edited for clarity and length, follows.

About This Transcript: This text version of our radio show/podcast is created to make our content more accessible to all audiences. However, it may not be 100% accurate. Some things to keep in mind: The original audio is always the most reliable source. Some words or phrases may be transcribed incorrectly due to audio quality, accents, or overlapping speech. Speaker labels are our best attempt at identification. We welcome your feedback if you spot errors that affect meaning or understanding.

[00:00:00] George Koster: We are opening the archives from when I first launched the show as part of a class at City College of San Francisco's KCSF. Across a decade on air, chronic crises we identified years ago only got worse in the pandemic, and continue to plague our communities today as they struggle to address these familiar crises.

Here's co-host and associate producer Eric Estrada with today's guest.

[00:00:30] Eric E: When we discuss gentrification in the Bay Area, it's easy to focus on the numbers, the rising costs, the changing neighborhoods, and the shifting demographics. But behind those trends are real communities, long-standing local businesses, and families who have called these places home for generations.

Today, we're exploring how we can support and sustain these communities. We'll be discussing thoughtful urban planning, community partnerships, and ways to give local residents a voice in shaping their communities. Joining us are four insightful leaders actively engaged in this work: Jose Corona, director of equity and strategic partnerships from the office of former Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf; Corrina Gould, co-organizer from Indian People Organizing for Change; Junious Williams, CEO of the Urban Strategies Council; and Deborah McCoy, executive director of the Center for Cities and Schools.

Our first voice is Corrina Gould. Thank you for joining us today. Let's start our conversation.

[00:01:34] Corrina Gould: I've been working on protection of sacred sites for the last 20 years of my life. For over 20 years, we've been looking at the different places that my ancestors had actually settled here in the Bay Area prior to anyone else coming here.

And what we found that was there was over 425 shell mounds or burial sites and village sites that are actually within the territory from Vallejo, and it rings the entire Bay Area. I was really glad to be here today to talk about gentrification and displacement, as our ancestors were the first ones to go through that.

Hmm. I'm working currently on creating with a friend of mine who actually just graduated from Mills, Janelle La Rose, on creating a place called Sogorea Te Land Trust, and this land trust is the first urban native women-led land trust in the entire country. We're hoping to look at different parcels of places in the Bay Area that we can open up to folks that are not just native people that have come here, but people from all over in different walks of life.

The reason that we found out that this is an important thing to do was in 2011, after doing all of these walks around the Bay Area to these particular sites, there was a particular site in Vallejo, California, or what's called Glen Cove, um, that had been was supposed to get des- demolished for a park, and it had two of our shell mounds on it.

And we actually had been working for over 12 years with a friend of ours, Wounded Knee De Ocampo, who had always lived there, he was a Miwok man, to save this particular site. In 2011, the city of Vallejo decided that they were going to actually file bankruptcy, and they were going to give to the city, to the park district, $40,000 worth of permitting fees for free in order to demolish this place.

When we decided that there was nothing else we could do, we went to all the EIR meetings, we went to public commenting, we had people from all over the world writing letters trying to protect this site, and nothing worked. And so we ended up actually reoccupying our territory for 109 days, and we were able to create the first cultural easement ever created in this country between a park district, a city planning place, and a federally recognized tribe.

This work actually has pushed us towards creating these places and spaces all over in urban places. So that's what we think of. When we had those places in Sogorea Te where people came from all walks of life, from all colors and ethnicities, to save and protect that space, what we really found was that there was a connection of land and human beings again.

That people really figured out how to take care of one another. And when we look at around today, we realize that many people, including myself, we go in our doors at night, we shut the doors, and we don't talk to our neighbors. We don't know who's around us. We don't know anything except for what our narrow little life is about.

In creating these spaces and places that un- unlike parks and unlike other open spaces or places that are called land trusts, it's about reengaging people back into the land and really healing ourselves around those spaces and places. So that's the work that I do right now currently

[00:04:31] Deborah McKoy: Great. Thank you. Hi, I'm Deborah McCloy from UC Berkeley, the Center for Cities and Schools.

Was a- asked to talk about pathways, right? About your work, your organization, but your own trajectory in that work. So I'll start out with kind of the connection, 'cause I think that's really important across all the conversation, and what really gets interrupted in notions of gentrification, right? The lack of connection.

So the connection to your incredibly powerful work is placemaking, and I'm in the Department of City Planning, and it's this field of placemaking, about how do we make places vibrant and healthy and equitable for all residents, new, old, from wherever you come and wherever you live. And I think that notion of placemaking is a very powerful opportunity that is very central within gentrification because increasingly I just find with technology and all this distributed notion about where communities go and you get access to opportunity everywhere, but it loses that incredible importance of place, and particularly with young people that a lot of our work is focused on.

So really quickly, the Center for Cities and Schools, how many folks have heard of it at UC Berkeley? Maybe a couple? Okay, great. We're an inter- interdisciplinary action research center between the Graduate School of Education and the Department of City Planning. We're in our 12th year, which is amazing 'cause I feel like we just started.

And the whole goal is to really align public education with creating really healthy and vibrant cities. And what's kind of crazy, although in 10 years in our work there's been a lot of change, a huge movement, and schools are no longer really the isolated institutions that they've been in the past. But higher ed and a lot of our professional schools have not really caught up with how do we really create and we conceive of the professions.

There's a physical separation between the Department of City Planning and Education that is a great metaphor for how our schools are connected. They are on the opposite parts of campus, right? City Planning and Education. There's never a course in City Planning about education, right? And similarly, in grad schools of education, and I think Mills has one of the best ones in the region, you may have an urban education class, but I'd say urban is not really understood or unpacked about what that is.

So our focus is to really realign, um, the connection between education and city planning through this notion of placemaking. There are three strategies that we do that. One is public policy. Everything from school facilities, which is never really talked about within education policy, along equitable school facilities, to preparing adult city administrators, city planners, city agency leaders, and school officials to work together on integrated policy and practice called the Plus Leadership Initiative.

You know what I like to say is the heartbeat and my kind of passion about the center, which is the YPLAN. It's a strategy, and it stands for Youth Plan, Learn, Act Now. It's an educational strategy that has evolved about engaging young people. Critically in placemaking, in, in urban planning. And I love it.

It's grown a great deal, starting with West Oakland and McClymonds High School, to now being in nine cities across the nation and five countries, China and Japan. It's an awesome way of thinking about engaging young people in not only local action, but global connections. My own path is one of unexpected turns.

I've never applied for a job in my life, and I think that's still the best way we get jobs. I know there are a handful of students in the room as well. So I think I just get inspired by work and an incredible passionate frustration for what I see that doesn't work. I think I'm committed to secondary education or for other high school, but also K-12 because I was a high school walkout myself.

I'm smart, I can handle stuff, but trauma hits all of us, and kids leave, not because they're not smart, but because we have somewhere else to go that makes more sense to us, right? Mm-hmm. So how do we transform K-12 to be places of identity and places of attraction and meaning-making, right? So that we all feel that it's a place for us to be safe and educated and inspired.

And I think there's a 20 year, or a 30 year trajectory since my own high school experience about really trying to connect the places that we live, learn, love and play and our own development, and we'll talk more about specifics. That's it.

[00:08:31] Jose Corona: Thank, thank you. First of all, thank you everybody for having us here today, and this is my second time in Mills this week.

Uh, I'm a, I'm a huge fan. You're a

[00:08:40] Deborah McKoy: professor now. I'm,

[00:08:41] Jose Corona: I'm a huge fan of Mills. I think everybody who knows me here from Mills will say that. We used to run Inner City Advisors. It was in the other room doing another panel. And I'll start by saying that I don't know if we'll get to unpacking gentrification today.

Really easy issue to tackle, right?

[00:08:55] Deborah McKoy: Mm.

[00:08:55] Jose Corona: What I will say is that candidly, that it's a very... It's a really hard time for me to be in this position. I come from an organization that used to... My background, not just organization background of really dealing with this issue personally through family, but also as an immigrant, but also now here working in the Bay Area for the past 16, 17 years.

And my first experience of gentrification when I worked at Mission Economic Development Agency in the Mission District and saw the first wave of the dotcom boom to Bus Cycle, and saw how this wave of, and I talked about it earlier this week, of wave of, of people that had a great idea, no business plan, displacing people that had- Mm-hmm

amazing businesses. And very profitable businesses that have been doing it for 10, 20 years were being displaced by these ideas. And that was when I really cut my teeth in under- understanding how just wrong the system was. And when you talk about capital, these folks that were getting i- capital by just an idea and a page and what they look like, whereas other people that look like Junius and me and Karina that were not getting the same opportunities were getting displaced because they couldn't access capital, which is critical to them staying in the neighborhoods.

How do they access capital to increase wealth, whether through s- small business ownership or home ownership? So I saw this first wave first-hand in the Mission District, really dedicated my passion to really identifying ways to, to address it, first from the ground up in running Inner City Advisors, to really working with the business community to help these businesses become not only profitable enterprises, but also ones that are responsible and hire people in the community, to hire locally, but also provide good wages and good quality jobs.

And now in this position, I say it's hard because The rate in which people are getting displaced in the city of Oakland is much faster than what I experienced when I was in the Mission District. Mm-hmm. Which is really scary for me. So what are we doing? And we're not doing it fast enough. I- I'll say that.

I'm not sure if we'll come to a solution in a few years, but one of the reasons why I took this job was because there was an opportunity for... I was one of those that said, "I'm never gonna work in government." I had a adverse reaction, and everyone said, "You're gonna go work for government, run for office?"

And I went, "Ugh, no." "This is just not me." That's not who I was, and it kinda still is not.

[00:11:22] Audience: Yeah.

[00:11:23] Jose Corona: I'm a very untraditional guy in, in City Hall right now. But why I took this job was because I saw the opportunity. The only way we were gonna really change, or at least make a dent or slow down th- this wave, was if we really address policy issues and systems change, and really became, and really affected that.

And when I saw this position, I went for it for many reasons, but primarily because I, I really thought that there was a voice needed in City Hall with this perspective that said if you're really serious about equity, if you're really serious about changing the way, the direction the city of Oakland is going right now, you have to engage everybody, you have to create partnerships, but you have to be...

it has to be part of your mission. I got the job, and now I'm here. And the, the main reason, and, and I'll talk more about it later, but I am really focused on using the business community as a vehicle to help invest in addressing the very issues that are getting in this place. So everyone from a small business o- small enterprise to the Ubers of the world, engaging them in a discussion and bringing them to the table, and not sitting across of them and saying, "Here's a list of demands that we want from you," but instead saying, "Look, you came to Oakland because you care about Oakland.

Oakland is an awesome place. It's also very great diversity, great culture institutions, an amazing artist community. Now, we expect you to invest in that." Mm-hmm. So we're engaging invest- in conversation, and lo and behold, Uber didn't give me the finger. They said, "All right, let's talk about it." Mm. So it opened that possibility, and while they haven't written a check to anyone, what they have done is chosen Red Bay Coffee, former IC company.

Red Bay Coffee, great business model, great entrepreneurs, hires formerly incarcerated individuals. They gave the accounts of all San Francisco stores to Red Bay Coffee. For us, it's about leveraging not only their philanthropy and their giving power, it's about leveraging their buying power, their supply chain, their hiring power.

So we're working with them to figure out how to make sure that they hire so that Uber, or any company for that matter, looks- like Oakland in their workforce. And the third one is leveraging their employee base to making sure their employees that live in Oakland get engaged in advancing the very things that we want to advance.

So I'll stop there for now, but, you know, and I'll come back more to the business strategic partnerships piece. But I will say that there's a lot of disparities that we're trying to address, and when we talk about Oakland, Oakland is prospering, but not everybody's benefiting.

[00:13:51] Audience: Thank you, Jose. Junious, would

[00:13:53] Junious Williams: you like to- Good morning.

Junious Williams. I'm CEO of Urban Strategies Council. I'm also here representing the Oakland Community Land Trust, which I'm a co-founder of and currently serve as the chair of the board of directors. Just really briefly about Urban Strategies Council, we're a social impact organization. We use tools of research, policy, innovation, collaboration, and advocacy to achieve equity and social justice.

The primary strategies that we employ in our work is trying to use research and data to direct decision-making and action to build cross-sectoral collaborative leadership to move major social change agendas within the community and doing policy and systems reform to try to structurally alter the way that government, business, and others behave.

We focus on public education, on what we call economic opportunity, which is a combination of economic development, affordable housing, workforce development, and income and asset development, and then community health and safety, especially issues related to our fetish with mass incarceration in this country and the resulting problems that it produces in terms of reentry to neighborhoods that are already highly distressed because of our failure historically to invest in them.

Mm-hmm. We do all of that work through a lens of equity and social justice. Race is the defining design element of America, and there is no issue that you can adequately address if you don't have a race lens on it. As Gunnar Myrdal said, must be 60 years ago, our dissonance with race And our inability to talk about and deal with race is stunning in the sense that it was such a defining characteristic in the evolution of America.

Mm-hmm. And we're not gonna solve social problems in this country until we get comfortable with dealing with what equity is really about, which is treating people differentially and with some advantage if you have historically denied them access to opportunity. That is especially the case with Black folks as it relates to having stripped us of the value of our labor to build America, with Native folks, having stripped them of the very land, and similar with Latino, especially Mexican American populations, who also got stripped of their land with no value.

A word quickly about the Community Land Trust. We do a lot of research related to social phenomenon. We discovered early on and saw some patterns back in the mid-2000s and knew something was going on with respect to the foreclosure crisis when it hit full bloom. There were approximately 17,000 foreclosures.

Mm. The wealth stripping of that for Black and brown families is monumental, and if you look at some of Pew Charitable Trust data and stuff and look at the accumulated wealth of Black and brown people compared to white people and the hit that it took as a result of the foreclosure crisis, we again have an issue of that is embedded in race and that has produced a- and continued patterns of, of inequality I also wanna make a couple of quick comments.

We don't use, except in response to other people, the term gentrification. It is ambiguous and loaded. Some people might consider me as a person who is, works in a nonprofit but was able to buy a house as a gentrifier. It's too loaded. Mm-hmm. And that's why I don't even like to try to unpack, or unpack it. I do, though, know that there's a problem of displacement, that long-term residents here can no longer afford to live here, and therefore, it represents a significant problem.

Some of them people who are coming in are Black, they're Brown, they're Asian. Many of them might be the first generation of real economic prosperity for their families, and as a result of a lot of blood, sweat, and tears of their families that they're in those position, and I have trouble casting them as somehow gentrifiers.

I mean, these are people just like me. I'm one generation removed from a custodian and a nursing aide. It's not like I'm the vaulted gentry intergenerationally, and to put that label on me and similar people, I think confuses it. I would say one other point with respect to my approach. I appreciate what Jose is saying in terms of his work with the business community.

My focus is on government. The largest pool of resources available in terms of capital for about anything that we need to do is government money, over which we can exercise control. I got no control over the Ubers of the world, who in fact have a business model for violating the law. When the young brother on the street adopts a business model of breaking the law, his ass goes to jail.

White boys at Uber ain't going to jail, and they have a very deliberate model of going into- Mm-hmm ... communities all over the world and ignoring the transportation regulation in there and forcing governments to its knees with the market. While I appreciate that they're here, and just like Jose is saying, I'm trying to work with them, too, because when you got a 800-pound gorilla in your cage with you- Mm-hmm

uh, you try to make peace on some level. But I still resent the fact that the underlying principle, and John and some other folks are in another one, if Black people or Black males did what the Uber executives done, we would have them under jails right now, and we're exalting it as one of the profound and most revolutionary business models known yet in the 21st century.

And I focus on government. I know all of my money's in government, and they got an obligation, and I've got a system Little bit archaic, but I can at least vote them out. I can't vote the board of directors or the owners of a Uber or a GM or any of them out. So I can't control them, but I can control what happens with government resources.

And we have wealth that we are spending foolishly on things like incarceration and on other things as opposed to how we use that to invest capital in communities and businesses that would better serve our people.

[00:20:34] Audience: You've gotten an overview of the panel and their work. I wanted to just turn to the audience and then to the panel, and if you would, kind of flesh out a little bit of the forces and elements you've heard from a bit today with regards to housing, education, policy, funds.

So with your help, what I'd like to do is just put up on the board some of the elements and/or forces that are underlying displacement, underlying gentrification, however you wanna couch those terms. So with that, just gonna open it up to the audience. Free market system. And so with private property obviously is the whole housing issue that we talked about.

Maintaining a cultural backbone for a vibrant community. Long-standing businesses being pushed out by the out-of-state landlords. Like falsely putting blame for gentrification, kind of what Mr. Williams was saying. I'm born and raised here in Oakland. Now I work in tech in Oakland, but I can't afford to buy a house here.

And that's, that's troublesome. So I think we push blame on certain groups of people, maybe not really unpacking or understanding what gentrification is really doing. Short-term memory and the rewriting of history. Come in.

Colonialism. Government funding, and reminding the government that it is our money. And so when we are talking about creating investment opportunity in communities, we should be speaking to the community members around the table of who's investing in our community. Connected to that is redlining and historic disenfranchisement.

School-to-prison pipeline and failure of public education, uh, K-12,

and wanting to see, uh, provide relevant training for the emerging job market. I threw up there, uh, people-powered effective grassroots movement building and what we can u- do around neighborhood solidarity circles, neighborhood education circles, using the things like Nextdoor that are actually- Hmm ... uh, connecting neighbors for better or for worse, but we- how we can use those tools for, for good.

[00:22:36] Deborah McKoy: Lack of ownership and people

[00:22:38] Audience: of color-run communities. The seller of, um, investment by, uh, investors and, and the city to finance entrepreneurship in disadvantaged communities, thereby lifting- The community's capal- capital outside the communities So that their, their areas are able to be built up And, and, and sustained and sustainable.

Transparency in- Decision-making. Who is making the decisions? Why they're making the decisions they're making? Exploring the potential for a more participatory system Decision-making around development and capital Basic fact that there's not enough housing in San Francisco Affordable housing

[00:23:25] Junious Williams: Affordable housing, of course The region, yeah.

[00:23:28] Audience: And then tied to that, there are certain, uh, municipalities that refuse to build at all. That idea of treating disadvantaged neighborhoods as cherry cases instead of empowering people. How do we put the power back into the community to do? Because there are, there are creative people within their own communities that don't have access to capital, like you both said, and to move forward with the change that we need.

So allocation of money more. How do we better allocate the monies that

[00:23:56] Deborah McKoy: our government says that we'll grow to those people

[00:23:56] Audience: who need it for the things

they need? Yeah. And I think on top of that, as opposed to just saying there's not money. There is, I think just the wrong people are making the decisions for that money. Writing code without teeth or enforcement resources and doing loopholes, I would say lack of a housing preservation strategy as opposed to a new building strategy.

Um, related to lack of, um, ownership, um, I think recognition of ownership that exists. Something like a nonprofit and the charity versus investment in community. One of the things you see in the nonprofit industrial complex, these are public and private nonprofit sectors where money is trickling down to the third from the top.

The positive role of law and regulation.

It's easy to forget that the government's actually supposed to do certain things and- Did you say the first one was transport? It's import. This is transportation. Correctly. Many years. You know what? I'm just gonna take a few more 'cause we're running out of whiteboard, of course. Yeah. Although, to go over that wall.

Anyone else? Just the general desensitization of, uh, people who are closer to the center of

power to make things.

Right. I'm gonna turn on, on last For all of us in the room, recognizing our own power and perhaps how we're contributing and how every day we vote with our dollars by taking, you know, where we buy, if we're using Uber or Lyft, those very small ways How we put our dollars. All right. I'm gonna turn to the panel and ask them to take a...

You guys have obviously heard. What, what else from your perspective have we not captured that you're working on that you'd like to add to?

[00:25:37] Junious Williams: Well, I'd like to just offer a couple of observations regarding the economic context of this, that some work that we did, uh, a year ago for the city's housing equity roadmap, one of the most telling findings of the research team was the level of housing burden in the city.

We did a geographic analysis of mean income by census tract all over the city, mean purchase price of the housing, mean rental price of units. There is no census tract in the whole city of Oakland where people are not housing burdened. And housing burdened by HUD definition is if you're spending 30% of your income for housing costs.

In fact, over half of the people in the city are what are considered to be severely housing burdened, which means they're spending more than half of their income. What we surmise is happening, and I saw it with my own son who moved back here, is I can afford really with a little strain to, if I'm a high earner in that highest echelon, I could really afford if I wanted to the housing cost there.

What it comes at is the expense of my disposable income. You go down to the uptown area and I wanna go to them clubs and them nice five-star restaurants. So people are making a decision that I'm gonna go down to the next rung of the housing ladder to pay a little less. That pushes people at that level down.

Yeah. You do that all the way down to the bottom of the rung, and a bunch of Black and brown folk in Flatlands ain't got nobody to push out, so they're dispersed to Antioch and Pittsburgh and Vallejo and all of those. But it's a systemic problem on almost every income level in, in the city that it's occurring.

You juxtapose that with the economics of income, a sustainable wage income, and I'm gonna circulate another document, and you can go and see the report that CFED, Citibank, and Urban Strategies released about a month ago. A sustainable wage income for a family of four in Oakland is about $80,000 a year. And if you consider the number of low-income families who ha- only have one wage earner, there ain't a bunch of $80,000 a year jobs out there.

So but that's the circumstance. The point that I wanna make is that we've gotta be realistic about what the sustainable wage is, and throw out minimum wage- Mm-hmm ... discussion. Minimum wage is 12.50. Sustainable wage- Mm-hmm ... is someplace between 17.70 an hour and $18 an hour, assuming two people working full-time.

In order for the typical person as a single person to be able to do that, you're gonna need kind of 3.8 jobs or something, given the average wage. My point is that we've got a structural defect here. We're telling poor people and others, "Get in job training programs and skill up to get income." Well, there ain't a bunch of $80,000 a year jobs out there.

Much of the growth in the economy in the Bay Area is in the service, hospitality, and other industries, none of which... You know, there are those coding jobs that are 80,000, those tech jobs, but most of the growth and most of what is gonna be accessible to the low-income people that we're talking about are entry-level, and we're talking 15 cent- we got a structural problem.

Mm. It is impossible- For many people to earn enough money, low-income people to be able to stay in Oakland, but we keep saying to them, "Go get your training, act together, and if you work hard and all this stuff, it's gonna be okay," it ain't. There are not a commensurate number of jobs for people that would permit them to have a sustainable wage.

So there are a couple of structural economic problems that we're dealing with here that we gotta be realistic about. In fact, I know people don't like to say it or, or hear it, but in some respects and in some neighborhoods in the city, we have lost the displacement battle. We have essentially lost it.

Mm-hmm. And the issue now becomes, what do we do with the people that we failed and are being displaced? And it calls into question issues like policy. One of the things that we're working on right now is that we've got a community benefits agreement on Brooklyn Basin. The city has one with the Army base that are based on residency.

If you are a resident, then the contractors have to hire 50% Oakland residents. Well, what do we do with the fact that all them people are now living in Pittsburgh and Antioch and all of those places who can't establish residency? So my only point is that as much as I wanna keep fighting for the issues of whether or not we can stem the tide of displacement, we also need to be dealing with the reality that it's happened, that there are floods of people, and what does it mean in terms of policy for the city, the fact that we've got probably the Oakland annex out in, what is it, that corridor in Antioch there that so many Oakland families now live in.

What are we gonna do around the fact that we failed them and now they don't qualify for those good jobs that the city is extracting from the developer or in the Army base that are career construction jobs? They ain't eligible for them right now.

[00:31:11] Audience: So how do you roll that down? How do you establish effective equity goals in Oakland?

[00:31:17] Junious Williams: Well, they're a group of base building groups who just declared that they're going to do a ballot measure campaign to attack the deficiencies in rent control, rent stabilization system in the city of Oakland. I can send to somebody, they just sent me the ballot language that they're gonna start the campaign around, but it's a really important point.

We don't have rent control in Oakland, and we got a very defective rent stabilization board and system, and all of that needs to be beefed up because it favors landlords right now. Landlords can raise rents in Oakland, and the onus is on the tenant to initiate action to try to change it. When in many jurisdiction, it's the opposite.

The landlord must go affirmatively to get permission to change it. And you know what that means. The, the just the dynamic of that difference could make a, a difference for a lot of families. All

[00:32:12] Audience: right. I'm gonna turn to Jose, talk a little bit about, we've been talking about government policy. Before we go there, Julius, if you would send me that information or just send it to Carissa, and then we could put it up on the website so people can get educated.

[00:32:23] Junious Williams: Okay

[00:32:25] Audience: So from a government's perspective- Yeah. And you're our government guy here. Sorry about

[00:32:29] Jose Corona: that. Get it. I'll take it.

[00:32:31] Audience: But obviously it goes back to what Julius touched on, the fact that government has the biggest pull funds. Everyone in the room hopefully is registered and votes, and you can vote with your dollars, et cetera.

From your perspective, what do you think are some of the things that the city can do policy-wise to help perhaps set in motion policy and coding? 'Cause a- another big part of this, of course, is coding, and then we get back to our home ownership part, and then of course we get into the housing component as well.

Yeah.

[00:32:57] Jose Corona: I'll try to take a crack at it. I think one of the things that, and Julius mentioned it, the city just released a report on its housing issues. It was taken by Urban Strategies Council. They had also with PolicyLink around the housing equity roadmap, which really calls to protect first and foremost the, the residents already here.

So there's a numerical saying, over the next eight years, protect 17,000. I know it sound- doesn't sound like a lot, but protect 17,000 people from being displaced or units from being displaced from, from the same issues that you described in the back around how do we do that. And there are certain tactics around that, around forcing or making stronger those rent control, and how do we enforce it.

Right now, you're right. I'll be the first one to admit it, that it's not enforced with the same rigor that it should be, so it's getting to that. I think the other thing is the issue that we talked about, that the city of Oakland saw a huge increase in population over the past 10 years, but very little housing was built, and that's not just an Oakland issue, it's a regional issue.

So part of the plan is also creating 17,000 new units of housing over the next eight years. And right now, again, for those of you, you might already know, it's no secret that Oakland doesn't have an inclusion- inclusionary zoning policy. So now it's starting to... It's just about to, I think, propose to city council an impact fee, which goes...

An impact fee to trusted developers to build affordable housing, and that's just the first start. It's not the end all be all. So there's stuff on the housing issue, wh- which is the, the big issue on... And then there's affordability issue- But there's also the ability to afford, so you have to be talking about jobs as well.

[00:34:35] Audience: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:36] Jose Corona: So they go hand in hand. You, you can't just say, "It's just a housing issue." You will keep losing the battle. So how do we ensure that not only the adults that are living in Oakland, but also the young people... Sorry. Are also getting prepared for these jobs of the future? Mm-hmm. You know, Junie says, right, there's not a lot of $80,000 jobs, but we met with PG&E, we met with AC Transit, we've met with BART.

There's a lot of $80,000 jobs there that nobody knows about.

[00:35:00] Audience: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:00] Jose Corona: Because they're not sexy. They're not the coding jobs that everybody wants to put engineers and coders and build the next Mark Zuckerberg. And those jobs, between 40 and 50% of them, across those BART, AC Transit, PG&E, are eligible for retirement.

You're gonna see thousands of jobs over the next few years of people who retire from those institutions, and these are skilled technicians. These are electricians. These are people that if you have that skill, you're gonna have a job whether it's at PG&E, AC Transit or BART, if you're an electrician.

There's another company called Helos Electric, some of the... One of the biggest electrical companies, contractors in the country here in Oakland. Nobody knows about them. So you go to these inner city neighborhoods, you talk to these kids, and they wanna be a coder. But do you have the talent to be a coder?

And by the way, do you know that in technology, only 25% of the coding jobs are actually taking technology? So what about finance? What about operations? What about HR? What about those jobs? Are we doing enough as a community to prepare those kids for those jobs? Because 60, 65% of the jobs in tech are not tech engineering jobs.

So we should be opening up the pool and thinking about how do we position that and how do we shape our workforce system, which is another thing that is under me, is how do we shape this workforce system so we're not placing people in jobs. These organizations that have done that for 15, 20 years of just placing people, and they get money from government.

I keep banging this. I'm getting passionate. You got the

[00:36:22] Deborah McKoy: empty one, though. Good. I'm

[00:36:24] Jose Corona: gonna go this way. These organizations, they've been doing the same tactics for the same... For 20 years, and have our people advanced? Have our people gotten better jobs? No. So we need to look at it differently. We need to really create these workforce development programs, which we are creating.

We have, with an opportune time right now, we owe to actually restructure our workforce investment board in Oakland to be more connected to actually creating jobs of the future and supporting these workforce development programs that are gonna prepare our kids for the future. And then on the education, it's a huge economic development strategy.

The mayor just launched the Oakland Promise- Mm-hmm ... Cradle to Career initiative that starts at birth to ensure that we set the expectation that every kid in Oakland- is gonna graduate from college. 'Cause right now only 10%, so 10 out of 100 kids and ninth graders in Oakland graduate from college. Only 10.

That's unacceptable. If you hear the mayor talk about it, I mean, it even though it pisses me off, all she talks about the Oakland Promise, but it's a great initiative. It's a great start looking at the future. But then you also have to be working on the conditions, 'cause as Junie said, this Oakland kid might be a kid in Oakland schools today- Yeah

but next week he might get displaced or she might get displaced and they might be in Antioch anymore. That's right. So all this Oakland Promise might be for naught if we're not talking about securing the conditions, the housing, the jobs- Mm ... and even the public safety to making sure that our streets are safe, to make sure that our e- kids are able to walk to school safely.

Around housing policy, there's workforce development policy. I can't say enough around the business community that we have to be engaging them. We can't just vilify the tech industry, and many of my friends are in tech, and these are people that are born and raised in Oakland. So we can't just be so generalist about vilifying one industry.

We have to go deeper into that, and we have to be engaged in the community. And yes, Uber's a bunch of douchebags. I get it. I get it. But that douchebag has money. Yeah. And I'm not afraid to rob Peter to pay Paul. I'm not. I've... For me, that's okay. If they're able to invest in the very things that everybody in this room cares about- Hold

[00:38:27] Deborah McKoy: me accountable.

Yeah ...

[00:38:28] Jose Corona: and hold them accountable to that- Yeah ... then I'm okay with that. Mm-hmm. And maybe, you know, call me whatever you want- But I'm okay with that.

[00:38:38] Audience: To that point, Jose, are there programs or policies you are in the midst of putting together to engage our private sector? Well, yeah. And then I would add to that the private sector, and then there's a comment about the nonprofit sector.

So is there a thought within the city's purview of trying to integrate the private sector, public sector together with then... I'm gonna turn to Deborah, talk a little bit about education, Karina as well, 'cause th- th- they're all completely interwoven.

[00:39:01] Jose Corona: Yes. So I think someone mentioned the 12th Street parcel.

Yes, city was wrong in how it approached it, and I think part of the problem there was that the City of Oakland didn't have a policy around how it uses its publicly-owned land. And now- Mm-hmm ... part of this housing cabinet that came out is actually creating a policy of how it uses its publicly-owned land, its city-owned, for public benefit.

Before, there was no policy. It was on a case-by-case basis. So it could be negotiated by Junius, as a developer, came to me and said, "I have this great thing to build." And before, Oakland suffered from just being able to like, "Oh, just give us anything." Mm-hmm. Bring capital. Now we can say, "No. It's not about luxury development.

This is publicly-owned land that has to have public benefit to it." So there's that, a publicly-owned plot. Someone also mentioned participatory. So w- we just allocated, or we worked with, through city council and through Michelle Burch from Housing and Community Development, to allocate some of the CDBG funding by participatory budgeting process.

That's two and a half million out of millions of CDBG money, but that's a start. Mm-hmm. So we wanna encourage more participatory budgeting in the way we allocate public funds.

[00:40:11] Eric E: You are listening to Voices of the Community. We're at the halfway point of our archive highlight episode. Our panel today is helping us unpack gentrification in Oakland and the Bay Area and how it affects our communities. We rely on your support to produce these stories. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation at voicesofthecommunity.com.

While you're there, you can dive deeper into this episode and explore our other series. Now let's get back to the discussion

[00:40:41] Audience: Both Deborah and Kunmi both been en- engaged in education, and we heard from some of our participants today that the education program K through 12 is somewhat broken. Can you share with us a little bit about either policy you're creating, models that you've seen work, recommendations?

[00:40:56] Deborah McKoy: I think I'd quickly just say f- not just a K-12 lens, but a K-16 lens, particularly being at Mills where I think the higher ed is a huge part of the trajectory you need to think about. One is it's so important, the, the focus on housing, and the federal government has completely stepped away from really a lot of its housing investment around equity role.

It's obviously a huge part of it, but there's a real big focus of housing policy is school policy. And we tend to think of them in silos, but where you live, where you get access to live in 75% of the districts across the country drive where you go to school. So that's just a housing policy, a school policy is a really important frame for how we think about connecting the sectors and connecting this work, and it's often kept in silos.

It's, again, it's shifting across the country, but it's a really important lens. But that's Oakland,

[00:41:40] Junious Williams: and that's significant in Oakland- It's- ... because of the choice model and charters, right?

[00:41:44] Deborah McKoy: So it's more in Oakland than other places. So the first... There are four key points that I would make on this line of schools.

One is attendance policy, which is driven often by where you live in housing. Oakland has largely been a neighborhood-based housing model, so where you live, particularly in the elementary school and the middle school, is based on where you have an address. In Berkeley, it's one of the oldest desegregation policies, and it is decoupled.

And in San Francisco, they've changed it a lot, but you have a much more of a equity focus on where you go to school and where you live. I know in Oakland right now, there's a lot of shifting on how to do that. There's a big framing of the superintendent around equity. It is a very difficult issue around the school attendance policy and choice.

Choice policy to many education reformers mean, oh, it's gonna be the great night, the great silver bullet, but it's often choices for whom. So who gets to make those choices is very much driven by who owns housing and who has access to that information. So one is attendance policy, and we can talk more specifically about that.

Second is absolutely teacher housing. So we're actually working with Oakland Unified right now a bit on really thinking about teacher housing. If you can't retain and attract high-quality teachers, forget whatever education models we've got going out there. Teachers are so core how to provide a high-quality education system that prepares us for both jobs and democracy, right?

Th- they're both equally important from our perspective. So teacher housing is enormously important. Oakland is trying to do some interesting stuff. It is controversial. I will say that right now. It's been in the papers. It's so intuitive. Yes, you wanna give good teacher housing. It's a great idea, whether it's through a mortgage or rental assistance or building a new development.

I will say from a teaching perspective, teachers are like, "Just pay us more, so we don't need to be subsidized for housing. Why... You would never subsidize lawyers. Why are you subsidizing teachers?" So- We are trying to help inform the issue, but it's complex, right? But teacher housing is critical. The retention of quality teachers, what are the drivers pushing our chi- particularly teachers of color.

So the majority of our education teaching force is white, right? And with that comes the white privilege that comes into our teaching no matter what and how enlightened many of us white teachers wanna be. There is a real priority that needs to happen about educating, re- attracting and retaining teachers of color in our communities, and that has, again, to do with housing as well as how much we pay those teachers.

So that's third. The fourth, which is really amazing, and it's not spoken about enough, but universities are huge real estate agents and brokers. Berkeley owns so much property, right? In Oakland, in Richmond. There's this huge new issue around... And I'm gonna get in trouble if anyone's from UC Berkeley here, but, you know, this global campus, which is great about the new global education, but it's largely driven by real estate ownership of what land Berkeley owns in Richmond and waterfront property, and there are huge issues around gentrification.

Again, higher ed, not just as a form of preparing our future workforce, but as real estate brokers, particularly when UC is largely bankrupt. I mean, we are just-- We don't have public investment now. Less than nine percent of our budget comes from the state. It's not really a public institution. So what do they have?

They have real estate, as do many public school districts. So it's another important player in how we think about this work. That's it. And I can get to some policies, but that's good enough Okay. Cool.

[00:45:03] Corrina Gould: I think that one of the things I wanted to say is that all these brilliant ideas up here about what's going wrong, I think one of the major groups of folks that we have left out in our conversation are children and women that are pregnant, and women that are on aid.

And how do they fit into this category of gentrification and being pushed out? And how is it that the needs are being met of these children and of these women that need the access to programming so that they can get the jobs that are $80,000 at Barton, PG&E, and AC Transit? That those things are a disconnect, you know.

And I, I work in K to 12 education through the American Indian Child Resource Center. Mm. I'm the Title VII coordinator for Office of Indian Ed for the last 10 years in Oakland Unified School District. Oakland Unified School District has bounced us back and forth to a different person that's a liaison between our agency and Oakland Unified School District for the 10 years that I've been there in that same job.

And it's been really difficult. Our children that are American Indian in Oakland Unified School District are about 300 students, so we're often invisibilized. And so when we talk about education, we have to talk about these populations that are invisibilized on purpose, that they don't disaggregate the information on American Indian students, on Pacific Islander students, on students that are LGBT.

And we have to talk about higher education. When we get our kids there- Mm-hmm ... how do we keep them there? Mm-hmm. When you're looking at students that are having to pay exorbitant- Mm-hmm ... amounts of money to be educated in the United States, when many of the students that goes to Mills and goes to UC Berkeley are homeless and can't- Mm-hmm

afford to feed themselves. Mm-hmm. When they're trying to figure out how to do this as first-generation students going into these large places of education. So these are people that are on the outskirts that nobody's talking about, that has to do with those folks that are putting money back into our communities, right?

And so for me, it's like, how do we begin those conversations because we're talking about... I'm working with a program right now of- Of particular people that are looking at... There's this process in Oakland Unified School District about the African American achievement, right? Mm-hmm. They're looking at male achievement, right?

And then there's a group of folks that are saying, "Well, what about the young girl?" They are getting, young women of color are getting disproportionately suspended, expelled out of Oakland Unified School District, sexually harassed, and nobody is talking about these particular things. So we're always talking about it through a male lens, even a male color of lens.

Mm-hmm. So we're not talking about these issues that are important. So for me, it's like how do we begin to have those conversations as well? How do we begin to talk about education when we want our kids to go to school, right? I want my kids to go to school, right? Yeah. I want my grandchildren to go to school.

But at this moment, I have a niece that's living with two children in my upstairs bedrooms right now, and she cannot afford any place. I have a daughter with a grandson that's living in a room someplace else because that's where they choose to live. I have another daughter that has two children that live in Oakland, but are going to be displaced really soon because they can't afford to live here.

So we're being moved out of our traditional homelands as well. There's another layer of the colonization that continues to happen because we're also invisibilized. So there's all of these invisible pockets of people that are here or we're working with in Oakland because we are so huge, right? Oakland comes and there's, uh, I think 47 different languages that are spoken in Oakland alone.

I think one... I'm getting a little off track, but one of the things I wanted to also talk about is that how you can choose in Oakland to go to school, right? I know that as a mom that put their kids through O- Oakland Unified School District, that I filled out that paperwork in December and found out every March that my kids were going to their local school.

Mm. Today we find out. Today they will find out. Yeah, I'm gonna check my phone. Every single year that I've put a... They went to their local schools. So I don't think that actually works. Mm-hmm. I think that we have a beautiful population of community-based schools that are charters here, that we have choices in that kind of way, and there's also a long waiting list to get into there.

So only certain kids get into those ones as well. So we're looking at populations of kids that are being displaced. I'm on the board of the Oakland Street Academy. Mm. And I'm a graduate from there. Been there for a lot of years, and I think that school works- Mm-hmm ... with our student populations. Mm-hmm. I actually funnel a lot of the American Indian st- students there because they can actually finish.

Most of our kids don't graduate because they never get to high school. Most of our students, actually, they drop out in eighth grade, and then there's no way to track them. Oakland Unified's like they're disappeared, but they're actually still here within our city limits. So our students, when we get them to actually graduate, which is probably around 10 or 11 kids a year, is pretty big, right?

10 or 11 American Indian students that graduate a year. And then of those, we probably get three or four into college. And even our best students that we're able to work with to get them to college, to get them to all of these great places, they're so fearful that they can't survive. So maybe one of them will make it.

So it's really discouraging that we are working in systems that don't work for us. Mm-hmm. For me, it's about taking apart this system that doesn't work and to recreate it. We're always trying to spin our wheels as human beings about how do we fit into this system that was never created for us. Mm-hmm. The system that we need to figure out how to redo this, right?

How do we do this in a different kind of way? In middle school, I actually homeschooled my daughters because it was just horrendous the way the school district- Mm-hmm ... was being at that time. Mm. And it actually worked. They actually did well. They excelled in high school. They actually were able to get into colleges in the, uh, San Francisco State and San Jose State.

But it's problematic that I'm working full time- Mm-hmm ... and I have to do that, right? Yeah. So how do moms, single moms deal with these kinds of things? Those are the things that I think that we need to talk about. Those are the real people that are here. Those are the women that aren't able to work those 3.8 jobs in order to stay here in Oakland and should have the opportunity to do that.

I think rent control is way beyond time to talk about. We're talking about rent control now when people are being charged, somebody said $1,000 for a room? Yeah. Right? So rent control of what? What are we r- what are we controlling, right? Yeah. We're controlling that the landlord's able to hold you down to $2,300 for a two-bedroom apartment, and you get to stay there?

If not more. More.

[00:51:19] Audience: One bedroom.

[00:51:20] Corrina Gould: Four... Okay, thank you.

[00:51:22] Audience: I think one of the things that I know that you've been a big champion of in your programs include is wraparound services.

[00:51:27] Corrina Gould: Mm-hmm.

[00:51:28] Audience: So I was wondering if you could share with the audience a little bit more about why the wraparound services and what are the services that your team provides- Mm-hmm

and then how does that enable people to get out of what you de- described?

[00:51:39] Corrina Gould: So the education program that we work with, we're an Indian education center, one of 21 in the state of California. Um, we get state funding. We also get OFCY funding to do that, and then I get Title VII funding for my job through the federal government by counting Indian kids, basically.

And what happens is that we are able to provide services for these kids at our center, um, which is in a great location across from the lake, outside of all the gang areas. Um, we pick them up from eight different schools. We take them to our location four days a week. We feed them. We give them an hour of tutoring services, an hour of cultural arts so that they're engaged in themselves.

They feel good. They're resilient. They remember who they are as human beings, and then they have outside activities as well. But onsite, we also have case managers. We also have people that'll provide therapy for them. We have folks that will go to... Because we were, uh, started out as a foster care agency, uh, many of our students have been in and out of different kinds of foster care or crisis places, so we're able to provide those kind of services as well.

We're able to take our students on field trips to higher education places from the time they're in sixth grade on up to try to get them engaged in those kind of things. So I think that those kind of services are good. We're also teaching financial literacy. We have a program where they get internships to do traditional cooking and h- and learn how to prepare those kinds of things, so it's a life skill about how do you take care of yourself when you leave home.

And so those are the kind of things that I think that's really important for young people to know. We also engage them in cultural things, like not just arts and crafts-like things, but actually talking about what does it mean to live in an urban area and be American Indian, right? And how does that look?

Because most of our students don't look like me. They look like all of you. Our children are third generation in Oakland because they had been moved from the '50s and '60s, and so families have been mixed with every other nationality. And so many of our children are mixed with African American or Mexican or we even have kids that are Yemen and American Indian.

And so how does that look to, to also talk about Black Lives Matters- Mm ... with those kids? Mm-hmm. How does that look like to talk about Alex Nieto? How does that look like to talk about all of these injustices that they see and have a safe place to do that? Yeah. So those are some of the kind of things that we're able to do at the center and hopefully bring our children up in those kinds of ways.

[00:54:02] Audience: I'm gonna turn back to Julius for a moment because I wanna go back to obviously we've identified housing as one of those big issues, and Julius, can you kind of walk the audience through your land trust model, but some of the policies you've been working on on trying to stabilize-

[00:54:14] Junious Williams: Yeah. So to... Let me say j- just, uh, contextually, there is an emerging school of thought with respect to something called community wealth ownership that we've been dabbling in, and it's represented in a number of different ways.

Worker-owned cooperative businesses are one manifestation of that land trust, and other shared equity ownership, uh, models. On sort of the right end of it are even things like community benefit corporations that for the past couple of years have been authorized to operate. We started at the height of the foreclosure crisis, a land trust.

The basic model for a land trust is that the land trust retains ownership of the underlying real estate. So we buy a parcel with a house on it. We sell the house or the improvements technically to the family, and we retain ownership of the underlying real estate, and we give the family or the owner a revolving 99-year lease so that they've got it.

And for example, our, in our houses in Oakland, we've got about 18 houses now in Oakland, our lease fees are about 50 to $75 a month for the underlying real estate. It's simply enough for us to be able to take care of our management functions. As you can imagine, just thinking about housing costs, about 25 to 35% of the cost when you buy a house is underlying real estate in a market, a strong market like Oakland.

So we're able to sell our houses well, and then there's also public subsidy So if you think about East Oakland right now, houses are running 4 to $500,000 in East Oakland. We're selling our houses to families for 125 to $165,000. We've taken all of the public subsidy that the city and the government typically invest, and we put it in those houses.

The difference between the typical model that the city does is it's permanently affordable. So our families agree. We sell to families who earn 50 to 80% of area median income, and they agree as a stipulation for buying a house from us that if they want to sell that house, they will sell that to another family making 50 to 80% of AMI so that nobody ever walks away with the public subsidy.

Once there's a public subsidy, it's going to be there. And secondly, our houses remain affordable in perpetuity. We have a community governance structure, the typical land trust model. The board of directors is one-third homeowners or tenants in the land trust. About a third of the folks are other technical expertise, and about a third of the folks are people who live in the neighborhoods where we own houses.

We had a city grant initially through the... Geez, it's been so long I can't even remember it. Neighborhood Stabilization Program that permitted us to purchase the original set of houses. We are moving from the single-family housing model to a scattered site, small multifamily strategy, and this is really important.

What's happening in the affordable housing world here is the big players like Unity Council, like East Bay and Local Development Corporation, it's not economically feasible for them to play in the small unit market. So there's a gap right now that people are being pushed out of duplexes to 20-unit houses.

That's where most of the mischief is going on right now ar- around displacement. So what we're trying to do is to move into that market and purchase those by organizing the tenants when they become aware that somebody's getting ready to sell, to go in and purchase it, and the way that we keep it affordable is resident management And so what we are going to do is we'll purchase the property, we'll cross-subsidize the property.

We'll be able to go down to about 30% of AMI, but we'll balance that by bringing in some tenants who are gonna pay 80% of AMI so that the building subsidizes itself. And we keep costs down by forming a nonprofit corporation among the tenants, and they are gonna take responsibility for keeping costs low by some of the building maintenance and management that they will do.

So that's basically the land trust model we're part of. There's also Northern California Land Trust in Berkeley that owns here, San Francisco Land Trust, Sonoma. There are about five of us in the Bay Area all using this model, and it's very important because it changes the structure of ownership. Our families are coming in and have home ownership as an option, when otherwise in this market in East Oakland, they can't afford a $400,000 home.

Very quickly, the other thing that I think is really, uh, important in this new wave of ownership mechanisms are the worker-owned cooperatives, and I think either Allison or Hilary from Project Equity- Yep. Very important for a couple of reasons, very quickly. Worker-owned cooperatives, if people aren't gonna be...

The largest way in which you can build wealth in America is home ownership. Mm-hmm. If we cut people off from that, there ain't another mechanism. Except, though, that worker-owned cooperatives may provide a way for people to build wealth, not through their housing, but through their ownership of the places in which they work.

So it's a really big thing, but two other things. If you are undocumented, while you can't work for me legally, you can own a business legally. So for undocumented folks, and I shouldn't say it so much because the right will figure it out and close the loophole, but it's a loophole. So if you organize workers, what- The folks that just changed their name.

They're now Prospera. Prospera.

[01:00:23] Jose Corona: It used to be Wages.

[01:00:24] Junious Williams: It used to be Wages. That's right. And is now Prospera, is a worker-owned cooperative business.

[01:00:29] Jose Corona: As an individual- Yeah ... you can work with a tax ID number.

[01:00:32] Junious Williams: Right.

[01:00:32] Jose Corona: And you can own a business as a tax ID, so-

[01:00:35] Junious Williams: Right, because

[01:00:36] Jose Corona: you're paying yourself ... if you're collective, because you're all owners of that build- of that business.

[01:00:38] Junious Williams: The other place is for people who are formerly incarcerated and have a felony conviction and nobody'll hire them, well, if you have your own business, like the cooperatives in Cleveland- Mm-hmm ... where they're in the neighborhood, the washer, and 90% of the people there are formerly incarcerated or former substance abusers.

If you own the business, you make the decision about what the standards for hiring are. So I would encourage people to... Project Equity is a leader nationally in thinking ar- around this and how we scale it up. Arizmendi Bakery, y'all know Arizmendi? Yeah. Is another model of that. So it's really important.

And one final note quickly. Somebody said voting with your feet. Capitalism runs amok because even when we have options to behave differently, we don't, because we spend unconsciously. Part of what we need to do is re-acculturate ourselves to where our monies go. And if we're in the Bay Area and we've got options like Arizmendi and others, we damn sure should go there and spend our money there.

We're making them more vulnerable than they need to because we just go to a bakery to get a damn donut. Well, it's a political action to go to Arizmendi or to go to one of the cooperative businesses so that they don't struggle, and that's how we have another option for building wealth in this country besides just owning homes.

So I'm gonna stop. Thank you, Jay.

[01:02:02] Audience: Jose. Yeah. We've got about 10 minutes left, and I'd like to open up to Q&A. And I'd also like to get back to, again, the theme of our conference and one of the questions is, like, you know, funding wise. 'Cause what you've heard a lot today is one of the things we're lacking is funding.

Funding for housing, funding for education, funding for wraparound services. So questions. For Oakland, um, looking at just straight up the asking, new large businesses coming in, you know, Uber, does the city of Oakland feel like it's in a position where it could just straight up redistribute the wealth in that way?

[01:02:35] Jose Corona: Yeah. Short answer is no. Um, it's hard to tax, you know, private business. I mean, there, there's things that are already in place when there's a real estate transfer. There's called an impact fee for real estate. So in the transfer from the sale of the Uber building, the Ceres building, there's a formula there that actually is like one...

It ended up being 1.8 million impact fee that goes directly into an affordable housing and jobs fund for the city of Oakland, that then goes to organizations like New Balcy or Unity Council to build affordable housing. So

[01:03:07] Audience: we're taxing on the end result- Right ... that Uber- Okay ... earning

[01:03:14] Jose Corona: From the city side?

[01:03:15] Audience: Yeah. I mean, since, you know, the federal government, state government seems unwilling to act.

[01:03:21] Jose Corona: Yeah. Gi- give an example where that's happening, and I'll go research it and find it and implement it here. But I haven't seen one that works that way.

[01:03:28] Audience: There, there is in San Francisco, for example, San Francisco's one of the few cities that actually, um, has a 1% tax on employees' gross income from cashing out of their stock.

So what they've done, though- Yeah, it's like an- ... how they, how they, uh, created, uh, Twitter as an anchor in the mid-market section of San Francisco was create a tax, uh, incentive district where you would set up your company, i.e. Twitter, inside of the old, uh, Furniture Mart, and then employees would not have to pay that 1%.

But in exchange for that, each of those corporations had to sign a community benefits package to roll money back into mid-market and, uh, the Tenderloin and South of Market. So in the form of funds, uh, like what Jose was describing, but for basically community reinvestment. So could be for social enterprises, for housing, daycare, et cetera.

Again, it gets back to Julius' point where, you know, we all have an opportunity to rally to create something on the ballot, for example, to do that if you get enough signatures. Or think of other creative ways that you could work with corporations to incentivize them in a way to put money into community benefit packages or support social enterprises or to put money behind some of the issues we've talked about today: housing, education, daycare, healthcare, et cetera.

I, I love the thinking of the system I live and work in working exactly the way it's supposed to. And the system itself needs to be

taken down in any possible way. So as I try to put myself in his place and I want to find solutions to this, I keep coming back to how realistic is it to think that we could figure out- The transparency behind all of these things into who's making the decision. Who is actually signing something? At some point, someone is making a decision to have rent control or not, to enforce it or not.

With all of these things here, there is a decision-maker. Mm-hmm. How would we even go about figuring that out? Is it realistic to actually say we could figure out where all this is coming from-

[01:05:32] Jose Corona: Hmm ...

[01:05:32] Audience: so that brings in transparency to the process?

[01:05:35] Jose Corona: I don't know. I will tell you that I think we could be more targeted.

I mean, I think one of the things that Junie has pointed out was, another stat that I'll throw out there is that when you hear about the displacement happen in Oakland, where it's happening the most, the, the oak- the buildings that are getting flipped the most are four to five unit buildings. And one of the things that we found out is that in those buildings, 80% of those tenants are African American.

So can we be more targeted in look, looking at different policy levers that we can pull, from enforcement to actually looking at helping a community land trust acquire those four to five unit buildings throughout the city so that they can actually keep the people that are living down there? It's information that drives a lot.

So the more information that we have, I like to have, it informs us how to make decisions. And if we know that, I think we can pull our policy levers, force into, into those and be more targeted. Again, with the equity, if we know that 80% of people living in four to five unit buildings in Oakland are African American, and those are the very people that are getting displaced- How can we actually be more targeted in our strategies?

Not only public sector, but then private sector, to have private sector invest in these land trusts. But I think overall the system, I, I don't know. I'm right there with you.

[01:06:46] Audience: We have about two minutes left, so I'm gonna have Nana come-

[01:06:47] Jose Corona: Run for office ...

[01:06:48] Audience: and then go back.

[01:06:49] Corrina Gould: I, I just wanna say just how do we keep people accountable, basically.

And I think that it's been really difficult for me working around, not the education piece of it, but about developments that happen in cities. I've gone to tons of EIR meetings, environ- environmental impact reports, but unless you know that it's happening, and unless you're invested in that, you don't know that it's going on, right?

And so how do you get that information? For me, it's like people tell me these things are happening. I ended up at a zoning meeting last night m- and because of this big development that the, somebody wants to put it down on 4th Street, and it's one of our sacred places. And the interesting thing was that we're actually able to do some movement in maybe not having this development happen, maybe trying to figure out a different way of doing it, not just because it was a sacred site, but because Union Pacific has a buy-in to it that this is a crazy place to do it.

There's traffic jam stuff. There's all of these kinds of things. So not just going to city council, but there's all these other committees that we don't talk about. Just like somebody was saying that those sexy jobs, those not sexy jobs, like in HR and stuff like that, those are where de- decisions are being made- Mm

a lot. Mm-hmm. And that we don't know. We know that we can go to City Hall, and we can be like, "Ah," like that. But there are these little pockets of people that are making- Mm-hmm ... decisions outside of that particular meeting. And I think that we need to be aware and informed about- Mm ... who those people are and how do they make those decisions, and let them see us.

And that's the problem, is that it's always on us to make sure that we're there. It's not about them coming out to us. So it's difficult about trying to figure out. It is about changing how the system works. It's a different way of getting communication out from the city to regular folks, so that we know what's happening in our communities, not all of a sudden reacting to it, but being a part of it.

Definitely.

[01:08:31] Deborah McKoy: Just one quick thing. I wanna invite everybody on April 25th and 26th, there are Y Plan final presentations, both in Oakland and in Richmond, which is engaging young people in Oakland. Two high schools are looking at the redevelop- the future new plan for downtown, which has been an economic...

Typically are economic powerhouses, right, within cities, but there's a real intentional effort to try to get a new vision of equitable downtown planning. But you have to be involved, so two high school... I love changing the system, right? So the schools in their third and fourth period, Met West and Schuyler are involved in the plan and serving as consultants to the planning department.

So if you're interested, you can sign up here. I'll send you invite. And then Richmond, the same thing. They're looking at plan downtown with three high schools of Richmond, which are really important about informing the future 20 years of w- how their cities are gonna develop. Gen- you know, this issue of change essential for that.

[01:09:20] Jose Corona: Thank you the most. Just... That's great.

[01:09:25] Eric E: That wraps up this archive highlight episode of Voices of the Community. We want to extend a massive thank you to our incredible panel, Jose Corona, Corrina Gold, Junious Williams, and Deborah McKoy, for sharing their deep expertise and their passion for the people of Oakland and the Bay Area. Today's conversation made it clear that while the forces of gentrification and displacement are deeply entrenched, the solutions are already growing from the ground up.

Whether it's through community land trusts, workers-owned cooperatives, demanding equitable education, or holding the private sector accountable, the power to build and retain community wealth belongs in our hands. We produce this archive highlight series to give you context, to show that crises we face today aren't new, and neither are the solutions.

If you wanna go deeper, visit voicesofthecommunity.com and click on the archive series, where you'll find full bios for every guest, links to every original episode, and resources from organizations doing this work on the ground. If today's conversation resonated with you and you're looking to dive a bit deeper, we'd love to share a few related episodes from our COVID-19 series.

For those interested in land trusts and cooperative ownership, we highly recommend our conversations with the Northern California Land Trust and East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative. If you wanna learn more about the housing burden and displacement, check out our spotlight episodes featuring the Coalition on Homelessness, Compass Family Services, and our Making the Invisible Visible series.

We also explore access to capital and economic equity through our work with the Mission Asset Fund and the Resources for Community Development. And finally, if you're looking for stories about youth empowerment and education, you can hear how organizations like Tech Exchange and Youth Spirit Artworks are preparing the next generation.

And if this show gave you something, put a value on it. Your donation directly funds the next series. Go to voicesofthecommunity.com and click on the donate button to support our work. Now back to George Koster to wrap up our episode

[01:11:35] George Koster: These shows are only possible because of our dedicated team, associate producer Eric Estrada for his co-hosting and technical wizardry, and designer Casey Nance of Citron Studios for making the show look exceptional.

A special thanks to Dr. Cecil Hale for supporting Voices of the Community at KCSF, and to broadcast partners KSFP, LPFM 102.5 FM in San Francisco, and KPCA LPFM 103.3 FM in Petaluma, and of course, to KCSF that you can stream on TuneIn for amplifying these voices. I'm George Koster in San Francisco, and join us for our next episode as we continue lifting the voices that shape and strengthen our communities.

Thank you for listening, supporting, and sharing. Until then, remember, your voice matters.

Thanks to our CoProduction Partner

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