The Holy Grail of community economic development is “development without displacement”: reinvestment in decayed neighborhoods which can provide long-time residents with new opportunities, without forcing them from their homes. It’s hard to achieve in a market-driven society, especially one where home ownership rates and household wealth are as wildly disparate as they are here in America. But it’s not impossible; six cities in the study qualify.
The Black Panther Party got its start on Oakland’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Way (then named Grove Street). It was partly fear of the Panthers which led the city to make Grove/MLK the boundary where the elevated BART tracks and the 980/24 freeway would be routed. Anyone living there today can tell you that the neighborhood is one of the most rapidly gentrifying areas of Oakland, which is why it shows up in the group of cities where MLK Way is undergoing displacement: a decrease in Black population and an increase in White population coupled with an increase in median income and other markers of socioeconomic change. This is the most common case in the data set, with 15 cities meeting the criteria.
Here are some maps I’m working on, trying to combine OPD police stop data for bikes and pedestrians with demographic info. It’s not good. In every police beat in Oakland, the majority of pedestrian police stops are of non-whites; in most beats, it’s above 80%. Bike stops are not much better.
I was invited to speak at LuckyDuck Bike Cafe’s “BikeStory: Advocacy” event this past week. There were a total of six speakers. mostly from the traditional bike advocacy world, and a sizable and pretty appreciative crowd. In my preparations for the talk I made some progress on boiling down the concepts of the Bike Lab’s work.
I led another bike ride for Walk Oakland Bike Oakland (WOBO), the lead sponsor of the Paint the Town program, which gives groups the opportunity to collaborate on painting an intersection or street. The city waives permit fees and provides a small bit of funding, and the neighbors work together to come up with a design and do the project. It’s a pretty cool program, inspired by City Repair in Portland. I’d done a ride to visit a number of Portland’s projects, and doing a similar ride in Oakland seemed like a fine idea.
My feed today lit up with friends sharing the news that Oakland has been granted Gold status in the League of American Bicyclists’ “Bicycle Friendly Community” program, which has been a goal of the advocacy movement here for some time. As you might expect, I have an opinion about it.
Everyone who’s involved in cycling advocacy, especially in places like the Bay Area where advocacy has become powerful, must take the time to read and understand Adonia Lugo’s Unsolicited Advice for Vision Zero, which challenges advocates to think about how their behaviors contribute to the identification of bike infrastructure with whiteness. Conflict amongst advocates over the Telegraph Avenue design in Temescal demonstrates the point.
This weekend I joined up with some folks from OakDOT at the Scraper Bike Team’s “Pothole City” ride. I always want to take opportunities to learn about cycling cultures, and to visit parts of the city I don’t know as well. And fortuitously, earlier in the week OakDOT had just approved a radical road diet project on 90th Avenue, based on the Scraper’s preferred design. It involves a protected two-way bike lane running down the center of the road, painted orange, and potentially incorporating street murals.
I was glad to hear this week that the charges against Naj K. Smith for playing loud music from his bike were dismissed, thanks to the outcry from the community and the pro-bono work of Walter Riley. So the rally planned for today to protest his court date instead turned into a rally to discuss racial policing. Speakers included Naj himself, as well as Oakland Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan (who also wrote a letter in support of Naj), and several folks from Red, Bike and Green, the organization Naj was leading the ride for when he got arrested. The general theme was that even though this particular case has been resolved, the structural problem of racially-biased policing remains.
I think that the Oakland DOT is doing a good job of trying to address social justice issues in its community engagement process for the bike plan update, but some of the other bike planning efforts going on in Oakland highlight how difficult it is to keep focused on those issues. One example was a workshop in Fruitvale about a proposal to redesign and pedestrianize East 12th Street near the Fruitvale BART station, and another was a community open house about updates to Telegraph Avenue in Temescal. Both were focused on infrastructure and lacked opportunities for meaningful input from the community.
Two of my recent bike-related experiences came together this weekend, when Naj K. Smith of Rich City Rides (who I met leading a ride last week) got arrested in Oakland for leading a ride on First Fridays with his sound system trailer. The bike and sound system were confiscated, and he was handcuffed and spent the night in jail. He made bail but the bike is still impounded.
Oakland is working on updating its Bicycle Master Plan. Since the last update in 2007, a lot has changed in Oakland, but I think the two most important changes affecting this plan aren’t related to cyclists or even cycling infrastructure. What’s really different is that Oakland has consolidated various different agencies into a new Department of Transportation, and also created a new Department of Race and Equity. The structural changes have led to a very different (and better) community engagement process for the new bike plan.
In 2016, Oakland created a new Department of Race and Equity, charged with creating “a city where our diversity is maintained, racial disparities have been eliminated and racial equity has been achieved.” In Oakland, that’s a big ask. But the creation of the office is, I think, an honest attempt to look for ways to improve the situation. The department has just released its first Equity Indicators Report, and as you might expect, Oakland fails on a number of important indicators related to equity.
Heading out for a fun ride yesterday, I ran into the Oakland Rideout at Oakland Technical High. Sponsored by Marshawn Lynch, this was a super-social ride from his Beast Mode store downtown, up to my neighborhood. The event included a beautiful demonstration of the transformation of public space, as a sideshow of BMX and motocross bikes, and Lime scooters took over Broadway.
One of the topics at the Oakland BPAC was an update on bike share progress. As part of the 2017 East Bay roll-out, Motivate created a “Bike Share 4 All” program which allows low-income individuals to obtain an annual bike share membership for $5 (instead of the regular cost of $150). But Motivate has refused to place bike share stations in Deep East, despite using the Scraper Bike Team’s style as marketing for their service. The exclusive rights we granted Motivate are a give-away of public space to private interest.
Roger Rudick of Streetsblog SF was among about 25 people who joined me on the Oakland Flatlands bike tour this weekend, and he wrote up a good summary.
The short version is, we had a good group, lots of good discussion, got finished before the rain started, and I think everyone got to learn some new stuff.
I’m going to be leading a bike tour of Oakland’s flatland neighborhoods this weekend, and in preparation I did some work on redlining maps. One of the themes of the ride is that the current racial divisions between neighborhoods is largely a function of housing policies and practices in the post-Depression era.
