As San Francisco real estate prices continue to soar, a surge of gentrification is overtaking Oakland. And these new residents, who are majority white, are not making it easy for those who already live in the area:
According to reports by East Bay Express, Whites are calling the police on innocent Blacks in Oakland at an alarming rate. Taking data from the website Nextdoor.com, Whites have called the police on Blacks for walking down the street, knocking on a door, and not picking up dog poop. The White residents have also called the police on Black salesmen and postal workers who were delivering items. … Police currently get over 700 calls per month on suspicious vehicles and people every month. The response by White residents proves how racist attitudes are an essential part of the gentrification of Black neighborhoods. Along with the racial profiling, the gentrification has allowed some property owners to increase rent by as much as 120 percent due to a rise in value.
Team Blackness also discussed Jordan Davis’s mother speaking out on new Stand Your Ground laws, Mike Huckabee’s ridiculous comments, and the #BoycottStarWarsVII outcry over the movie’s black character.
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Mnemosyne (iPhone)
I wish I could find it, but someone here once posted a rant by a (white) cop asking white people to stop calling him every time they saw a black person on their street, because they were wasting everyone’s time and costing the town money every time he got a call like that and discovered 999 times out of 1000 that the black person lived there, too.
And, you know, I’m white, and I grew up in a lily-white suburb, but I’ve lived in Los Angeles for 20-*cough* years. I can handle the sight of black people walking down the street, or even — gasp! — living in the same building as me. It’s not that big a deal, so get over it, assholes.
srv
Hey, white people get called on that all the time in SF. Except Haight, where it’s usually not from an animal.
Not That Guy
Maybe John Roberts should move to Oakland and experience a post-racial paradise for himself.
sparrow
While I have no doubt at all that there are plenty of stupid white people out there, this is awful close to nutpicking. I have an account on Nextdoor in a racially mixed but majority-white area and have never had anyone put out an alarm for someone just being black. There were a few crime/suspicion posts but all of them had pretty good evidence (kids throwing rocks at vehicles, break-ins in action, people trying car doors to see if they were unlocked), outright muggings. And the vast majority of posts are about more neighborly things: garage sales, borrowing requests, ads for cultural events, etc. I just see this jumping on Nextdoor as the latest cycle of “OMG silicon valley website/idea/thingie is BAD! Civilization dooooomed!”
PurpleGirl
I think there’s a web site like that in NYC but I’ve never tried to find it or read it. Maybe I should just to see what people post there.
srv
@sparrow: The only thing Nextdoor has taught me is that many of my neighbors are crazier than the people I encounter in the internets.
Full story:
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/racial-profiling-via-nextdoorcom/Content?oid=4526919&showFullText=true
ruemara
@sparrow: This is not nutpicking, this is a growing problem. Please don’t downplay something just because you don’t have to deal with it.
Cacti
But remember, Hipsters don’t see race or color.
sparrow
@ruemara: But seriously, I’m asking: you think that racists posting on nextdoor are somehow a different and additional problem to those same racist people calling the cops? They’re calling the cops whether social networking exists or not, and that is the actual problem and it’s been going on forever. It sucks but I don’t see any evidence here that it is increasing. As to the racists, I actually think it’s good if they post on Nextdoor, because I’m betting a good number of their neighbors call them out on their stupidity. I certainly would if someone posted on my neighborhoods site saying “hey watch out for a random guy, he looks suspicious” and nothing more to it, and I’m definitely not the only one.
I don’t know, maybe I somehow live in the only civilized Nextdoor community, but I just paged through several weeks worth of posts and only two were on crime — one about a missing package, and the other about a suspect being arrested in a recent mini-mart robbery.
SatanicPanic
I read the original East Bay Express article and the article that Elon is linking to is getting it wrong. The East Bay Express article talked about areas that AREN’T gentrifying because they were already wealthier areas with single family homes. The gentrifying areas in Oakland are mostly West Oakland and Downtown, or maybe Fruitvale, which the article, ironically says it’s NOT talking about.
Oakland already had racist white people (this has been true for at least a century) living in the hills, Nextdoor just made it more obvious that they are shitty people. Whether or not hipsters or techies from San Francisco are good or bad on race is an open question, but the East Bay Express article doesn’t really touch on that.
I hate to be the person to do this, but it’s sloppy and probably not helpful. And Elon lives in Berkeley, so he should have at least some idea of the places this article is talking about.
Betty Cracker
@sparrow: FWIW, my local Nextdoor seems to be bias-free as far as I can tell. Mostly it’s people trying to unload unwanted patio furniture and stuff like that. The few crime reports that exists are along the lines of, “Did anyone see who stole my red lawnmower last Tuesday?” Maybe the assholes on this corner of the continent (and there are many) aren’t tech-savvy enough to spread bias via an app…yet.
celticdragonchick
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
This.
rikyrah
Yes, because we all know Existing While Black is a crime.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
Also, too, this might be the right thread for a weird and disturbing sexual assault story in the NY Times magazine. A professor in New York was sentenced to prison for having sex with a severely disabled man who she claims communicates with her via facilitated communication but, as with many of the FC stories, no one can seem to replicate her claimed success in communicating with him. It has multiple intersections, including race and disability rights, and is just a really sad story all around:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/the-strange-case-of-anna-stubblefield.html?action=click&contentCollection=Movies&module=MostPopularFB&version=Full®ion=Marginalia&src=me&pgtype=article
I think the article is pretty fair, because I don’t realistically see how this guy could have freely consented even if he was genuinely communicating with her, but of course this is also the worst nightmare some advocates for the disabled can imagine: either she took advantage of a severely intellectually disabled man with cerebral palsy, or he’s an intelligent person who has now been deprived of his means to communicate. And there’s just enough ambiguity that I don’t think anyone will ever know for sure if he can communicate or not.
Rising Above
Example seventy bajillion of White Privilege.
rikyrah
Gentrification gone high-tech
The Moar You Know
I moved to SF in 1990. At the time, it was what it had been for a long time; a run-down workingman’s city, with a finance-oriented downtown and lame tourist attractions.
By 1998 the writing was on the wall; you could leave voluntarily or you could leave involuntarily, but if you weren’t rich you were leaving, rent control be damned. The landlords wanted the poor people out and the city wasn’t helping tenants, they were helping landlords evict them. And that wasn’t just for SF – it was for the extended Bay Area, from Santa Cruz in the south, all the way to San Rafael in the north, and Antioch to the east. Even Modesto’s poors didn’t escape the economic wrecking ball.
So I left in 2001 and returned to the land of my birth, Southern California, and gave up playing music full time, and got a job making more money than I ever dreamed of. And here’s the thing: I’m now doing really well financially, and I STILL couldn’t afford to move back to the Bay Area if I wanted to.
And I don’t. Most of it, in all honesty, is an utter crime-ridden shithole. SF, Berkeley and Oakland all. My only wonder is that the police aren’t called far more often than they are. 700 calls in a month? Fuck, in areas like the Haight and Telegraph Avenue it ought to be 700 a day.
Also, Satanic Panic above has some really good points. Deliberately conflating the already well-entrenched racism of the wealthy areas of the East Bay with the areas that are gentrifying leads you to conclusions that the data just don’t support.
Gentrification isn’t “causing” racism. It was already there. The SF Bay Area was and is the most racist and segregated place I’ve ever lived in my entire life.
gwangung
@sparrow:
With increasing number of white people, there are increasing number of stupid white people.
This isn’t happening just in Oakland, but in supposedly liberal Seattle and other areas (both the Central District and West Seattle has had this sort of thing). Some of this is people just not knowing the neighborhood and who lives there; some of it is from people acting from their unconscious biases.
I think you might want to slow down and listen carefully to folks and not just dismiss it.
ruemara
@sparrow: re-read what you wrote. In essence, your Nextdoor community wasn’t racist, so this was really close to nutpicking. What did I say? “Please don’t downplay something because you personally aren’t experiencing it”.
If you can explain where you got that I thought that the racism on Nextdoor was new, special and different from profiling or other less technical versions of racism, I’d be grateful.
Cacti
@gwangung:
The Seattle PD is currently operating under a consent decree with the DOJ for a pattern of civil rights violations.
Myiq2xu
Maybe we should pass laws to keep white people from moving into black neighborhoods.
SatanicPanic
@gwangung: The article Elon links to is specifically referencing neighborhoods that have long been majority white while making it sound like it’s white people moving into black neighborhoods. I’d like to hear from neighborhoods that are actually gentrifying, I think that would be more useful.
EDIT- to be more clear, it’s referencing a story about Nextdoor that was about majority white neighborhoods, not black neighborhoods . The story that Elon links to misrepresents what the Nextdoor story was about.
PhoenixRising
I lived in 2 mixed-race (edge) neighborhoods and 1 SE Asian area in Oakland in my 10 years there, starting in 1986. And the cops never came for a damn thing anyone called them about. Didn’t matter if it was a parent beating a child with an extension cord, rape of a 13 year old by her brother’s dealer and his friends, or someone pulling out a gun in a parking dispute.
It is not a coincidence that the victims of the crimes described above, each of which I witnessed, were…black. And the city of Oakland’s actual policy was ‘who gives a f?’ If gentrification leads to actual policing of the community, that’s a good thing compared to the city I left with my little girl who was not going to grow up in that hellhole.
So if Oakland is dispatching for dog shit violations, let’s look at that. But if all we learned here is ‘white supremacy is scared AND apathetic toward the 45% of Oakland residents who happen to be black’, I contend that we haven’t learned too much that wasn’t already evident from this social media expose.
ruemara
@SatanicPanic: There’s another article that cannot link to via mobile, unfortunately, that did talk about this occurring in gentrifying neighborhoods. I thought it was the East Bay one but no. Wish I could remember where it is.
Cacti
@Myiq2xu:
I’m not sure if you’re trying to be ironic, clever, or what.
But historically black neighborhoods are historically black because that’s the part of a metropolitan area they were historically redlined into. White people didn’t live in the black neighborhood because they chose not to.
Black people didn’t live in the white neighborhood because the law or restrictive housing covenants prevented it.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@sparrow:
Okay, look. It is a fact that that vast majority of the racism that black people deal with in this country is undocumentable, because it’s what people say verbally. Because of that fact, a lot of people don’t believe the amount of shit that black people have to deal with every day, because said black people don’t have written or some other kind of objective proof (like a recording) that it happened.
That’s why these Nextdoor stories are blowing up — black people now have written proof that their neighbors are being racist assholes to them. And yet you seem to want *still more* proof that this is really happening.
This is why people are getting frustrated with you. It’s not clear that there’s any level of proof that would make you say, Yep, some racists are being assholes on Nextdoor short of, IDK, actual Klan meeting times being posted.
This happens. It exists. Accept that so we can move forward.
goblue72
I live in Chinatown in Oakland. My wife grew up in the flats, originally in the Murder Dubs before her family moved to Eastlake. So we both are witness to the gentrification here. I’m also on Nextdoor and read the East Bay Express regularly.
I’d say the following is the general gist of things:
1. The East Bay Express has a certain left-wing take on reporting that also tends to spin its stories in the most controversy enhancing way possible. Clickbait for eyeballs – gotta sell those medical marijuana ad spaces! In addition, the quality of their fact-checking and reporting has a tendency to be spotty. Its a free weekly “progressive” broadsheet of the type familiar to anyone living in a major city. So, the takings are always with Kosher sized grains of salt.
2. Nextdoor, at least in Oakland, is indeed rife with examples of white folks in both the already gentrified areas (like Glenview, Dimond, Adams Point, etc) AS WELL AS in the gentrifying flats in West Oakland, Fruitvale, Uptown, etc. displaying a fair bit of at best racial insensitivity and at worst outright racial profiling. Just this week, someone put up a flyer in Adams Point essentially warning neighbors about about a black man with a dog who said hello.
3. I would agree in part that this was always present and that digital media is just bringing it out there. A number of the neighborhood email listservs in Oakland are rife with this kind of racial profiling garbage.
4. Where I disagree is that it shouldn’t be news – it should be. If its getting attention now because of digital media, great. Sunshine is the best disinfectant.
5. As for police presence, its still as bad as its always been. But there has been a definite increase in the amount of calls to the police for complaints that amount to “being in public while Black”. Which due to the paler, more affluent constituency making the complaints, City Hall winds up responding to. Most recent kerfuffles involve complaints about gospel music choirs practicing too late at night in West Oakland and some white dude attempting a citizen’s arrest of some sort of a drum circle at Lake Merritt (the drummers being mostly people of color). There’s also a lot of tension lately over a perceived crackdown of black folks barbecuing around the recently renovated Lake Merritt – which many folks suspect was driven by complaints from the white condo owners around the Lake.
6. So yes, the racial tensions in places like Oakland are nothing new. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do something about it.
7. And finally, Oakland is one of the hottest rental markets in the country and has seen double digit year-over-year rent increase for the last several years. 3 guesses as to the racial profile and socioeconomic status of those moving in, and of those being pushed out. So understandably, the long time residents of the Bay Area’s premier Chocolate City are feeling a bit under threat. I would too.
sparrow
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Good lord, I never said these things weren’t happening. I’m saying villifying NextDoor for it is off the mark.
Myiq2xu
@Cacti: So what is your point? Are we supposed to preserve “historically black neighborhoods”?
The term for that is “segregation”.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@sparrow:
Nobody is vilifying NextDoor. That’s like saying that someone is vilifying Twitter if they report on some jerk’s racist tweets.
Cacti
@Myiq2xu:
My point is, if you think housing mobility is remotely equal for white and black Americans, even in the 21st century, you’re living in a blinkered fantasy land, Justice Roberts.
gwangung
@SatanicPanic: Well, actually, I am referring to wider events. This particular article may not be evidence for the wider events, but those wider events are actually occurring.
@Cacti: I’m going to also refer to a longer term trend in Seattle’s Capitol Hill area (long a gay friendly neighborhood) where there’s a increase in gay-bashing, which people are linking to the gentrification of the area.
Myiq2xu
@Cacti: That isn’t what I think, but thanks for playing.
So what is your solution?
goblue72
@sparrow: I think where the criticism of Nextdoor comes in – even if not noted in the article – is the Nextdoor is consciously promoting itself as a social media version of a neighborhood watch.
Quite literally. A section of Nextdoor’s help section is devoted to “How to use Nextdoor for crime prevention”
https://help.nextdoor.com/customer/portal/articles/1019177-how-to-use-nextdoor-for-crime-prevention
Nextdoor actually partners with city governments to host online neighborhood watches. So it really is a core part of their business plan.
At the same time, Nextdoor has taken a typical tech business laissez-faire attitude towards the racial profiling occurring on its neighborhood forums, while at the same time wanting quasi-official sanction as THE social media Neighborhood Watch. Much like Uber wants to claims its a “car-sharing” service and not running a taxicab company. Or AirBnB is a “house-sharing service” and isn’t running a hotel business.
srv
@The Moar You Know: You’re a real debbie downer today.
Crime isn’t that bad here. Once you give up your car, you don’t have to worry about it being broken into or stolen anymore. Only had one robbery in 10 years and we recovered the bike he stole ourselves with a little SFPD backup – the guy who ran slowest was a SoCal lowlife with a $100K warrant for an auto crime.
@sparrow: This thread is so Nextdoory.
Woodrow/asim
@sparrow:
And I think, having heard TWiB discuss racial bias through NextDoor use last week, no one’s saying “NextDoor is evil!”
I usually listen to TWiB in a batch, so I confess to not having heard this one. And I suspect you’ll find they talk about NextDoor not as inherently evil, but as an enabler of bad decision making that’s the hallmark of racist bias.
I don’t see anyone making NextDoor our to be a villain, just a tool that villains use.
SatanicPanic
@gwangung: absolutely, I just want people to be more careful about throwing out gentrification at everything that goes wrong. The issue is more complicated than that- I don’t think, for instance, that it’s always a bad thing that a neighborhood gets more investment or that a more integrated neighborhood is destined to fail.
goblue72
@gwangung: I saw that while living and working in Seattle. (I lived in Capitol Hill.) As the neighborhood gentrified and became the “it” part spot for mostly straight outsiders, and uptick in gay bashing-type assaults was perceived to be on the rise. I can’t recall precisely, but I think an SPD analysis did show an increase in assaults overall – which I’d assume was a function of a lot more drunk party people descending on the neighborhood.
Cacti
@Myiq2xu:
Right.
You’re just deeply concerned about the possible discriminatory effects of white people being unfairly shut out of historically minority neighborhoods…that were created as racial and ethnic ghettos for non-white people in the first place.
White people aren’t being shut out of any neighborhood, and housing discrimination against white people is an imaginary problem. Minorities getting pushed of neighborhoods that white people previously found undesirable is what’s upsetting the people who’ve lived there for generations.
The population that has always been crapped on is the one with the real problem. But you’re upset about the potential impact of a hypothetical problem as it could possibly relate to the socially dominant population. The story of America for the last 5 centuries.
goblue72
@Cacti: Was gonna say that same thing. Thanks.
Its like, I can’t help but feel there’s an example of this historical population in the U.S. that was pushed aside by white Europeans, and told to go “live over there”, then when the white Europeans decided they liked “over there”, they told the historical population to go “live over, over there”. And then the Europeans found gold (now IPOs) “over over there”, so it was time for the historical population to move again.
If only there was some example of that I could remember.
Myiq2xu
@Cacti: You didn’t answer my question:
So what is your solution?
Myiq2xu
@goblue72: So basically you are saying that poor inner-city neighborhoods collectively belong to black people? You don’t want white people to move into those neighborhoods?
That’s racism.
srv
@Cacti:
All the service and blue collar folks in SF have been mostly white for a long time and they started moving to Oakland as the techies displaced them. Now the techies are moving to Oakland.
The gentrifiers who gentrified them are now being gentrified – but by foreigners. Try buying a house today and coming up against multiple cash offers 20% over listing.
SF is just a second or third home beach community now, and techies are the new middle class. The service staff are all bridge and tunnelers.
goblue72
@srv: If you are making some argument that white techies moving to Oakland because SF rents are going up as some counter-factual to the existing systemic displacement of people of color from city neighborhoods that is a function in part of a racist society – and that its all just the same thing… then you are more retarded than I thought.
goblue72
@Myiq2xu: You really are out to lunch. The relative power dynamics that in part a function of a systemically racist society does indeed make things different. Sorry if your little brain can’t get around that concept.
Myiq2xu
@goblue72: What a load of racist crap!
srv
@goblue72: This is why you’ll never win. You’ll always see race before class.
The rich were smart to divide you.
SatanicPanic
@srv: Why do people of color always have to bear the burden of ignoring racism? Why don’t racist people just stop being racist? And what make you think that rich people aren’t just as racist as everyone else?
It’s true that the wealthy did wall off the suburbs to people of color and poorer white people, but that’s no excuse for white people to move into more diverse parts of town and not behave themselves.
Toschek
I have lived in the area for well over 20 years now and I’ve seen a lot of changes just where I live now. My partner and I live on the west end of Alameda, which is a small town on an island in the bay. The west end of the island has traditionally been the working class side and the east end is where the rich folks live. It used to be home to a naval air station and I get the impression that when the navy base was active (it shut down during the base closures under Clinton) the demographics were roughly the same – enlisted and petty officers lived on the west end (closer to the base) and officers lived on the east side. When we first moved here we had a lot of African-American and Latino neighbors (full disclosure, I’m a pasty-ass honkey) but it wasn’t predominantly minorities or whites, just diverse and full of regular lower middle class folks and the rents were reasonable (for the Bay Area anyway) with a modest two bedroom apartment going for around $900. In the past five years or so though we’ve seen an increase in development of single family planned housing and condos plus an influx of tech-bros who are either priced out of the city or staring families and need more room for their brood which has driven the rents up to insane levels. I certainly haven’t seen any Black or Latino families moving here in the past 5 years, just more and more white people every day.
FWIW, I pay $1,500/mo for a two bedroom cottage with a private yard and garage which is pretty insanely low for the Bay Area, but our newest neighbors who moved into the identical cottage next door are paying 2.5x that amount ($3,750) for exactly the same thing. The 1br he vacated in SF went on the market for $5500 (Western Additon) so he feels like he is getting a steal.
I don’t know what the point of all of this is, but it’s sad to see this shit happening here. The Bay Area used to have so much going for it in terms of a real diverse population, interesting people and things to see and do, but in the past 15 years or so, more and mor a playground for the obscenely wealthy. I don’t know what happens when the people who keep the city running can’t afford to live there any more but I guess we’re in the process of finding out.
All I know is that I can’t afford to move elsewhere in the Bay Area and I sure as hell don’t want to move to Tracy or Vallejo so I am stuck here unless I can find a job in a completely new city/state which makes me really sad because even though I’m not from here originally I consider it home.