As earlier in the century, Oakland’s demographic shifts in the era of deindustrialization were not simply black and white, but multihued. Changing immigration policies in 1965 allowed a greater influx of Latinos into Oakland, primarily into the already heavily Mexican Fruitvale district. Many of the new arrivals worked in low-end service jobs in the industrial suburbs to the south . By the late 70s and early 80s, the impoverished flatlands became a major center of refugee resettlement for Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Khmer, Lao, Hmong, Khmu, Mien, and Vietnamese fleeing the Cold War’s bloody battlegrounds in Central America and Southeast Asia. Resettlement programs in poor areas of East Oakland kept the majority of these immigrants poor, adding to an already large and devalued pool of cheap labor for the postindustrial economy . Social networks provided entry into formal market niches and a vibrant, yet self-exploiting, informal economy, much of it centered in Chinatown, San Antonio, and Fruitvale . As the former industrial garden dried up, some new capital did flow into the economically parched urban landscape, yet the promised jobs and opportunities never emerged. To the contrary, urban redevelopment ultimately displaced thousands of residents from their homes. Several of the most “blighted” areas were razed under the aegis of urban renewal . Thousands were displaced and forced to relocate. Single family homes and duplexes were subdivided to accommodate those displaced, adding an additional strain on the dilapidated housing stock.
Redlining prevented or dissuaded any new investment for housing repair. Housing in the East Oakland flatlands eventually became dilapidated, as well, flower display buckets due in part to a large number of absentee landlords who were homeowners who had followed the industrial garden to the suburbs, or speculators who bought their devalued property at fire sale prices. By 1978 more than two-thirds of East Oakland’s single-family homes and apartments with more than five units were owned by absentee landlords . Rents grew for increasingly decrepit housing, driving up vacancy rates to the point where the City of Oakland declared a “state of emergency” in April 1974 in response to the high number of vacant and abandoned housing units in East Oakland. These 1,200 empty units were seen as a result of the “blighting influence” of E. 14th Street, the major artery running the length of East Oakland. More than half of the structures assessed in the 1972 Elmhurst Redevelopment Project were categorized as containing “building deficiencies.” By the late 1980s, almost a third of vacant houses in the flatlands were considered in “poor” condition by the City of Oakland’s Office of Community Development . As this chapter demonstrates, the devaluation of capital in Oakland was contained in the flatlands via racist policy and practice. The construction of major transportation corridors through the flatlands also helped to materially reinforce these existing spatial and socioeconomic divisions in Oakland, as in other post-industrial American cities, physically demarcating the boundaries between investment and abandon, rich and poor, whites and people of color. Plans for the Nimitz, MacArthur, and Grove-Shafter Freeways were approved in 1958 by the all-white Oakland city council . The Grove Shafter , which was placed immediately adjacent to the old Grove Street redline, effectively severed West Oakland from downtown. The MacArthur divided the flatlands from the hills. The Nimitz , which parallels the MacArthur, was sited through the city’s industrial corridor along the city’s southwestern edge, roughly separating the majority of factories and warehouses and access to the estuary from the flatlands residential areas.
Other construction projects were sited in devalued flatlands neighborhoods where land values were low and the political power of the community marginal. The Cypress Freeway was constructed right through the middle of West Oakland, razing hundreds of homes and displacing thousands of residents. The Bay Area Rapid Transit system, which began in 1964, had a similar impact on the flatlands. In most of the flatlands, the BART tracks were placed above ground to reduce costs. Construction of the BART line between downtown and the trans-Bay tunnel destroyed 7th Street in West Oakland, the cultural and economic center of Oakland’s African American community and displaced several hundred families, many of whom moved to East Oakland where they were faced with rents two to three times as high as what they paid in West Oakland . The port and its rail lines, the freeways, the Bay Bridge, and the BART were constructed to link Oakland to the region and to position it as a major transportation hub for the economically vibrant Bay Area. But as Self argues, capital and people flowed above West Oakland on freeway overpasses and BART tracks, channeled to San Francisco’s enduring commercial center and Oakland’s growing industrial suburbs. These conduits of capital served as physical boundaries of devaluation of existing fixed capital in the flatlands, material structures demarcating what zoning and redlining succeeded in doing invisibly on paper. Not only did the benefits of the freeway and BART system—the hallmarks of urban modernity—bypass the flatlands, their construction was marked by dispossession and displacement of Oakland’s flatland residents. As capital devaluation become more and more contained in the flatlands, the city’s retail landscape changed dramatically. A depressed flatlands economy made it difficult to retain major retail, including supermarkets. For example, when the new Eastmont Mall, built on the site of the former East Oakland GM factory, held its grand opening in November 1970, it beckoned customers with the promise of unlimited parking and two major department stores, a four-plex movie theater, and food court. By the ‘80s, however, falling purchasing power and an increase in drug dealing and related violent crime around the mall led to a major decline in retail sales. During the 1990s both department stores closed, as did the mall’s Safeway supermarket. With the mall’s anchor stores gone, business occupancy dropped to only 30 percent . By 1987 only four department stores continued to operate within the city limits . This pattern of capital flight and devaluation transformed food access during the era of deindustrialization in the Oakland flatlands and in U.S. “inner cities” on the whole. Across the country, food retail had been gradually changing first since the arrival of chain grocers stores prior to World War I and then by chain supermarkets in the 1930s. After the Second World War, supermarkets dominated the lion’s share of food retail. Driven by the entry of women into the workforce, flower bucket a growing demand for one-stop shopping, automobile culture, and a massive influx of new processed foods derived from subsidized commodities, supermarkets became more and more popular. Shopping centers, a new model of retail often “anchored” by a supermarket, sprouted up in the new white suburbs across America. By 1960 more than two-thirds of groceries were purchased at supermarkets. Unable to compete with the economies of scale enjoyed by supermarkets, many small grocers went out of business. The power of corporate supermarket chains increased during this period as well. Chain supermarkets slowly drove the independent chains out of business, waging “price wars” to secure turf. By 1975 corporate food retailers controlled about two-thirds of the food retail market, draining capital from the local economy and funneling it off to corporate headquarters . As food retail became concentrated in the aisles of major supermarkets, food access became increasingly dictated by supermarket location. By the 1970s nationwide economic “stagflation” caused supermarket retail to founder.
Mergers and leveraged buy-outs of competing chains hit less competitive, inner-city markets hard; between 1978 and 1984, Safeway alone closed more than 600 stores in these neighborhoods . The boarded-up hulls of failed supermarkets littered the shoals of America’s post-industrial cities; many remained shuttered, others converted to churches, and only some rigged anew as thrift or dollar stores for consumers with declining purchasing power. While the number of supermarkets in urban areas declined, however, the overall number of supermarkets increased. By the mid-‘90s, in urban areas the poorest urban neighborhoods had roughly half the retail supermarket space than did the richest urban neighborhoods . During the ‘80s and ‘90s superstores took over the helm of food retail, spatially concentrating food access in locations often only accessible by car. For working class people, falling wages and retail capital’s retreat from post-industrial urban centers meant that cheap food availability was limited to big box stores and fast food joints . A “junk food jungle” took root in the barren stretches of the fresh food desert throughout poor neighborhoods in post-industrial America, capitalizing on the niche left by the retreat of groceries and supermarkets and a demand for food that was easily accessible, convenient, and cheap, sending the incidence of diabetes and obesity skyrocketing . Liquor stores followed a similar successional logic. With the ebb of food retail capital, liquor stores began to serve as the primary source of food provisioning in America’s inner cities, yet prices for their goods were often higher than those found at a supermarket, and fresh fruits and vegetables were unavailable.58 Food retail in the Oakland flatlands paralleled these national trends. Between 1935 and 1987, the total number of grocery stores in Oakland dropped five-fold, from over 1,000 to about 200 while the average number of employees per store increased nearly seven-fold. These shifts signal not only the arrival of supermarkets and consequent concentration of the food retail sector, but also the steep decline in service to the city’s growing population, an overall decrease from 36 to 5 stores per 10,000 residents . The decline hit the flatlands even harder. In West Oakland, the number of grocery stores declined from 137 in 1960 to 22 in 1980, due largely to supermarket penetration , a drop from nearly 25 percent of all of the city’s stores to just above 10 percent. By the 1990s, many of these same supermarkets that had pushed out the small grocers in the flatlands had also closed their doors in response to falling profits. The Safeway at Eastmont Mall, one of the mall’s anchor stores, closed at this time. In a particularly ironic twist, two of the country’s four leading supermarkets, Safeway and Lucky Stores, were headquartered in Oakland, yet access to quality food in the once bountiful industrial garden of Oakland’s flatlands had evaporated as capital reinvested outside of the city lines. One can conclude from the data in Table 2.3 that the rapid growth of the suburbs precipitated the decline of Oakland’s share of food stores, but Oakland’s sales nevertheless began to lag disproportionately due to the declining purchasing power of the city’s population. By the late 1980s, a third of Alameda County’s food stores were located in Oakland, but these accounted for only a quarter of the county’s total food sales. With the retreat of the supermarkets and closure of small-scale groceries, food retail in the flatlands has been largely left to liquor stores. Statistics help to describe a landscape of food access not unlike that of many other food deserts. In 1935 there were more than eight grocery stores for every liquor store in Oakland; by 1977, there were less than two.59 In the flatlands the number of liquor stores per person was two to four times the city average in 2007. There are four times as many fast food restaurants and convenience stores as grocery stores and produce vendors in the East Bay . No supermarkets serve residents in West Oakland and recent plans for British supermarket giant Tesco to open a West Oakland store have fallen through. A recent survey by a food justice initiative found that in six flatlands neighborhoods, residents reported having to leave their neighborhoods to find affordable, healthy food . West Oaklanders have to cross into the redeveloped box store land of neighboring Emeryville to shop at Pak N Save. Similarly, in East Oakland’s Council District 6, no national grocery chain exists.60 Most East Oaklanders find the best deals across the city border; one focus group participant noted, “Oakland dollars are going to San Leandro” . Another noted, “I wish we could have more fresh foods rather than junk food, candy, and soda that we’re all used to eating because that is the only thing around” . Participants said that they want more stores that sell healthier foods and better quality produce. Another study highlights residents’ acute awareness of the difference not only in availability, but also of quality: “Yes, there’s a difference in the stores in our area compared to the stores in Montclair or somewhere else [in the Oakland hills].