A 1910 promotional booklet published by the Oakland Chamber of Commerce features a world map with all shipping lines leading to “Oakland Opposite the Golden Gate, The Logical Port and Industrial Center of the Pacific Coast” . 47 Worker housing emerged primarily in West Oakland, between the downtown business district and the rail and shipping terminus. The displacement of San Francisco residents following the 1906 earthquake was a boon for Oakland, bringing in a new workforce and new demands for housing. With population and industry growing at a rapid pace and aided by the extension of horsedrawn and electric streetcar lines, Oakland expanded to the north and east, annexing previously autonomous communities such as Temescal, Claremont, Brooklyn, Fruitvale, Melrose, and Elmhurst by 1909 . World War I saw a massive influx of military capital into Oakland. Automotive manufacturers such as the Durant Motor Company, Hall-Scott Motor Company, Chevrolet, and General Motors expanded considerably during these years, bucket flower earning Oakland the moniker “Detroit of the West.” Shipbuilding dominated the port, and employed upwards of 40,000 in 1920.
Drawn by the promise of jobs, new workers, many of them African Americans and immigrants, flooded in by the thousands. Wartime industrialization and the boom that continued through the ‘20s saw the expansion Oakland’s residential development alongside the construction of new factories eastwards into the orchards and pastures of the annexed townships . Integrating the pragmatism of locating industry where land was available with the reformist planning vision of Ebenezer Howard and Lewis Mumford, planners and developers in Oakland embraced the paradigm of the “industrial garden”: the dispersal of industry away from the mixed-use downtown core but closely tied to nearby, semiautonomous residential neighborhoods. In these industrial garden suburbs, factory workers would return home by bus or rail to a neighborhood of small, single-family homes, each with a yard or garden. Proponents pushed “garden living” in these quiet and tranquil respites far—but not too far—from the factory grind as a cure to the social and health risks already well documented in the mixed-use urban slums of the Northeast, Chicago, and to a lesser extent in the older downtown cores of San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles . Urban and rural modes of survival came together here, as workers clocked out and headed home to tend vegetables, chickens, and goats in their yards .
As Mike Davis writes, the industrial garden was “a new kind of industrial society where Ford and Darwin, engineering and nature, were combined in a eugenic formula that eliminated the root causes of class conflict and inefficient production” ; in essence, by keeping the worker happy, productivity could increase while nipping a restive labor movement at the bud. During the New Deal the vast expanse of small homes that had cropped up as part of the industrial garden expanded rapidly. Beginning in 1934, a flood of highly subsidized, low-interest mortgage loans from the newly created Federal Housing Administration fed the growing suburbs; East Oakland soon filled in with suburban developments of small Mediterranean-style single-family homes. As in other California industrial centers, developers consolidated land purchase, subdivision, construction, and sales in order to maximize efficiency and minimize costs. Vast tracts of small houses, mostly prefabricated or built from kits with nearly identical floor plans, created an economy of scale that dovetailed nicely with the contemporary planning vision of neighborhood cohesion, mixed use, and garden cities to create quintessential industrial gardens. In order to expand homeownership, housing production had to be reorganized into a quasi-Fordist system of on-site assembly of prefab components to perfect the “minimum house”: a small, single-family home constructed as cheaply as possible but comfortable and unique enough to satisfy the dream of home ownership . The newly subdivided suburban landscape was rapidly filled in with these small, single-family homes erected virtually overnight. However, market forces alone were not responsible for the shifting landscape. While the social idealism of Ebenezer Howard’s garden cities and Lewis Mumford’s inclusive “eco-topian” regions undergirded the vision of many suburban planners, the pragmatism of industrial location, the whims of individual developers, and the rising power of racist homeowners’ organizations soon elided their utopian vision.
Indeed, the flows of capital defining Oakland’s urban landscape were clearly racialized. The federally-subsidized dream of homeownership in the industrial garden was not available to everyone; people of color rarely qualified for FHA loans because these were to be applied only to newly constructed homes and, contrary to Howard’s vision of universalist garden cities that welcomed and nourished all workers, new home developments in the suburban industrial gardens were racially exclusive. Until 1948 racial covenants established by developers and homeowners’ associations prevented people of color from moving in and disturbing social divisions seen as “natural” . Even after the Supreme Court made racial covenants illegal via Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948, such obstacles remained in practice. Contractors were rarely able to secure loans for construction for non-whites in a “Caucasians only” neighborhood and realtors feared “the wrath of white homeowners” . The racialized demarcation of urban space taking place between the wars was not new in California. For decades the labor movement in California had already laid the groundwork for the formation of a virulent form of white class-consciousness via their aggressive exclusion of Asian, Latino, and African American workers . Easy access to low-cost, single-family homes in close proximity to East Oakland’s factories simply fueled racist and exclusionary sentiments by creating a sense of bootstrap entitlement. Homeownership thus helped heterogeneous European and Euro-American populations of workers consolidate as a spatially and racially homogenized labor force of “whites,” geographically distinct from the radicalism of recent European immigrants and African Americans in West and North Oakland and along the estuary.48 Suburbanization of industry and housing was thus a way to escape from the working class and “to attract a better brand of labor, removed from the ‘bad moral atmosphere’ of the inner city, and promising the stability of homeownership for the ‘better class’ of workers” .If industrial relocation and FHA-funded residential development were the source of capital flows that irrigated East Oakland’s industrial garden from the 1920s to the ‘40s, homeowners associations, zoning, and redlining were the dikes that initially prevented this capital from flowing back towards West Oakland, and then effectively quarantined its devaluation to the few areas where people of color were allowed to live. New capital continued to flow in. Between January 1945 and December 1947 roughly $300 million was spent on the expansion of new industrial plants in the Bay Area . Within the city itself, however, devalued fixed capital—a landscape of aging housing stock and obsolete factories— left little room for new industry to take root. A highly coordinated growth machine of industry, developers, boosters, cut flower bucket and white laborers driven by the promise of homeownership and jobs diverted this latest flow of capital to the green fields of the newly incorporated industrial suburbs—San Leandro, Hayward, Fremont, San Lorenzo, Newark, Union City, Milpitas—that flanked the East Bay between Oakland and San Jose. Vast tracts of agricultural land were incorporated into these pro-business municipalities, zoned as industrial, and sold for prices below industrial land prices in Oakland. National companies such as General Motors and Caterpillar built branch plants on these fertile green fields, and defense contracts showered the new industrial suburbs with federal capital, ensuring rapid growth. As the data in Table 2.1 illustrate, manufacturing nearly doubled in Alameda County between 1948 and 1967. Here at the urban edge of the new suburbs, industry was given a tabula rasa. In essence, these new suburban municipalities provided a more favorable business climate, spatially removed from the pressure cooker of the urban center’s working class and the grip of recalcitrant city politicians . In the words of the Bay Area Council, which helped drive industrial suburbanization, suburban employees were “more loyal, more cooperative, more productive workers than those in big cities” . The implicit message to future investors was that this suburban workforce was largely white.Just as in East Oakland during the interwar years, industry and housing in the new suburbs went hand in hand, part of a concerted planning effort to disperse industry and the suburban residential developments that followed in its stead. These industrial shifts and the prosperity of the post-war era further fertilized the American dream of homeownership.
Large scale housing developments in the urban periphery and the expansion of automobile ownership cultivated suburban development and white flight, draining urban areas of their tax base. Just as the industrial garden of East Oakland was watered with a strong mix of industrial and residential capital during the World War I and 1920s boom years, and with capital available through FHA loans in the ‘30s and ‘40s, the new industrial garden suburbs grew rapidly in the post World War II era as a result of this same combination of industrial capital and federal housing subsidies. As Oakland de-industrialized and new factories sprouted in the suburbs, working class white Oaklanders followed, lured by homeownership and proximity to jobs, just as they had done in the previous wave of inter-war and wartime suburbanization. Between 1949 and 1951 only 600 units among the 75,000 constructed in the Bay Area were open to blacks . Upwardly mobile whites left the East Oakland flats to join the downtown ruling elite in their Oakland foothills and hillside neighborhoods, taking their cash with them. In Elmhurst, for example, white residents made up 82 percent of the neighborhood’s population in 1960 and median income was $6,154, only about 2 percent lower than the citywide median income; a decade later whites made up only slightly more than a third, while on the other side of the city boundary in San Leandro, people of color were excluded. As capital was channeled into the industrial suburbs, it began to dry up inside the city’s boundaries, leaving the once-verdant urban economy parched of tax revenue. By the mid 1960s, the number of manufacturers within Oakland had begun its steady decline. Between this downward trajectory and the steady growth of manufacturing in the new industrial suburbs, Oakland’s share of Alameda County’s industrial productivity dropped from more than half to less than a third in the four decades following World War II .55 More than 130 factories shut their doors and nearly 10,000 manufacturing jobs were lost by 1977 . Unemployment skyrocketed as a result. The unemployment rate in 1964 was 11 percent but for blacks was almost twice that high. Business ownership was absentee for the most part; by 1978, only 25 percent of businesses in East Oakland were locally-owned . This trend continued in the ‘80s as jobs shifted from the traditional manufacturing and warehousing sectors to a service-based industry. The Bay Area on the whole benefited from a boom during this period, with a 15 percent growth in jobs between 1981 and 1986. Oakland, however, reaped little in the way of this regional bounty; employment grew only by 1.5 percent during these same years. The flatlands bore the brunt of job loss during this period. West Oakland and Fruitvale lost eight to ten percent of jobs. In the Elmhurst and San Antonio districts, employment decreased by roughly a third . As East Oakland’s industrial garden withered and whites fled to the suburbs and hills, housing there became available to upwardly mobile people of color for the first time. The Oakland border with San Leandro truly became a color line. Just as East Oakland’s industrial garden communities had excluded people of color via racial covenants, new housing developments in places like San Leandro and San Lorenzo excluded people of color using racial covenants and informal “gentlemen’s agreements” between realtors and homeowners’ associations. Creating a class alliance with developers, increasingly conservative white homeowners in the new suburbs helped to exert political pressure to further confine devaluation to the Oakland flatlands. Proposition 14, a 1964 ballot initiative sponsored by the California Real Estate Association and supported by 65 percent of voters statewide, essentially overturned the federal Fair Housing Act, passed the year before. In 1978 this same alliance was able to pass the infamous Proposition 13, which severely limited cities’ ability to raise property taxes. The resulting decrease in property taxes took a toll on Oakland’s already impoverished flatlands, as inflow of revenue was squeezed by more than $14 million, leading to facilities closures and cuts to public services .