 Can I just look? Hi there, everybody. So I'm going to be introducing the speaker for today. So my name is Shrevan Balaji. I'm a freshman here at Cal, and I'm double majoring in the College of Letters and Sciences in molecular and cell bio and computer science. Something that I really like about Cal is it's bustling community. And contrary to popular belief, it's not really that competitive, but everybody collaborates on everything, so it makes it easier to learn things. And that's why I really like Cal. And I'm really grateful to all the opportunities that have had a Cal so far and I'm just a freshman and also thankful for the generations of supporter donors. So on to our speaker. And Brandy T. Summers is the author of Black in Place, the Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City. Her current research includes a book project that examines representations and experiences of space, place, and landscape in her hometown Oakland and the Archive of Urban Futures, a multimodal archival project funded by the Mellon Foundation that focuses on questions of history, value, the right to place, memory, and erasure in Black Oakland. She's a contributing writer for Places Journal and has published articles in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Antipode, and Urban Geography, among others. Please welcome Professor Summers. But you can go take a nap now. He just finished his terrible midterm, so we're very grateful for him being here and I didn't realize you were a freshman, so even more kudos to you. Thank you, I love small groups, so this is perfect. Large groups make me feel anxious, so it's great to see you all here. Are you up parents? Yeah, yeah, okay, okay, wonderful. Well, thank you, hopefully your children will take classes in geography. It's one of those strange areas that the United States doesn't have a ton of geography departments, mostly there in Europe, some China, a number of places, Europe, Asia, a little bit in South America, and so we're one of the few departments in the country, so I'm really happy to be here teaching in it. I have my PhD in sociology, so I didn't get trained in geography, but I've been able to integrate a lot of my work, not only from when I worked at Virginia Commonwealth University, I was working in African American Studies, but then coming over to UC Berkeley in 2019 to be in the geography department has been wonderful as a part of the Letters and Science College, so welcome. I'm gonna be talking a little bit today. My title is Spatial Temporalities, the Future Paths of Black Dispossession, and so before I begin, they've asked for us to show you, or at least maybe you've seen some of these statements, but I'll read it for you before we begin this event, we take a moment to recognize that UC Berkeley sits on the territory of the Huichin, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chicheno-speaking Olone people, the successors of the sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Muwekma Olone tribe and other familial descendants of the Verona Band. We recognize that every year of the Berkeley community every member, excuse me, of the Berkeley community has benefited and continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land since the institution's founding in 1868. Consistent with our values of community, inclusion, and diversity, we have a responsibility to acknowledge and make visible the university's relationship to native peoples. As members of the Berkeley community, it is vitally important that we not only recognize this history of the land on which we stand, but also we recognize that the Muwekma Olone people are alive and flourishing members of the Berkeley and broader Bay Area communities today. I would also encourage you, as an aside, to look into some of the work that indigenous groups are actually doing to take land back in the Bay Area. So we often have these lovely statements, but it's also good to learn about what types of actions are actually taking place, extending beyond on the statements that we make at institutions that have taken over this land. So thank you. All right, so for my introduction, and it is hot in here, so I have lots of light on me, so if I'm glistening, let's just say it's fabulous, but I'm gonna fan myself too, okay. I gave you the title of this presentation before, and the basis of the talk is a collaborative research project that I've been doing with a Brooklyn-based award-winning artist, Olalekon JFS, and it's focused on my hometown Oakland, so that's why I wanted to talk about it today. And so we call this project the Apocryphal Gospel of Oakland. So as it relates to Oakland's ongoing homelessness and housing crisis, the prevailing apocrypha of Oakland is the myth of housing scarcity, despite the fact that there are four vacant units for every unhoused person in the city. City leaders frame policy based on this notion of scarcity to address rampant homelessness, of which Black Oaklanders represent over 70% of the unhoused population and account for a little over 20% of the overall population. The city further promotes the idea that developing additional housing is the only solution to a crisis that derived from ongoing structural inequities. As a result, untenable and even preposterous traditional housing strategies or transitional housing strategies are presented as viable solutions. Ultimately, it's the emphasis and aggrandizement of these strategies as speculative sci-fi interventions that form the basis of this project. We like to have a little fun with what we're doing. So this project in a lot of ways has been influenced by the work of June Jordan, who used to teach here, Octavia Butler, Julie Moray too, and so many others as we're thinking through what it means for Black people to have the same experiences over and over again. The absurdity of how the state conceives of houselessness as well, how the crisis of the unhoused in Oakland is reflective of an ecosystem of inequities. That's what we're focused on. At the same time, I'm also considering Black futures as I think through Black pasts and presence. It's through an act of scavenging, salvaging, repurposing and reclaiming that we make a place for Black life, both materially and discursively. So there's this palimpsestic temporality that shapes my consideration of homelessness, particularly in West Oakland. It's kind of like this collapse, simultaneous parascience fictional time in which complexes of events that seem mappable along the linear past, present, future access are active all at the same time. They emit signals, determining the reality in this unfanciful but often undenied ways. So that includes a history of in migration for World War II-era jobs and the city's inability to house shipyard workers circa 1946. My family migrated to the Bay Area, particularly to San Francisco, and so we have a long history as well here. And the demolition of blighted housing stock during the urban renewal era. The pre-pandemic jump in the housing population between 2017 and 2019, there was a 47% increase. All of these forces continue to stretch their temporal tendrils into encampments around Oakland today if you haven't driven by and seen them. And through those encampments, continue to plot what's likely to happen in two, five, or even 20 years. So none of which is strange, right? Or surprising. And basically I'm saying that history has its effects. Yet the fact that we're living out a future that's been set in motion by identifiable past choices is constantly denied in political discourse, repressed in policy decisions as well. Solutions end up being fetishized but posited as separable from still active legacies. So to put it another way, what could seem like dry facts of urban planning or regional economic history or sci-fi scenarios depend on time travel and seer-like predictions or like satirical takedowns of exaggerated corporate good citizenship. These are also mundane facts of what we see when we drive by the convention center in Oakland at the south end of Lake Merritt or pass under the freeway at Grand Avenue and MLK or San Pablo. Actually the underpass beneath Grand Avenue and the freeway was just recently cleared. These paths persist in the present as traces, ghosts, spurs, half denied or even invisibilized and half accepted as normal conditions of the 21st century East Bay housing economy. So I'm thinking about these questions. One in particular, how do you map no place? There's this intimacy between blackness and placelessness that shows up today as homelessness. Traditional spaces and places as Catherine McKintrick a geographer argues, quote, require black displacement, black placelessness, black labor and a black population that submissively stays in place, end quote. This logic holds sway particularly in urban planning and the policies and politics that have destroyed working and middle-class black neighborhoods across the United States. At the root of these decisions lies a presumption that there's no place for black people in the city. Simultaneously there's this presumption that blackness and therefore any black person belongs only in or to the city. So before I show you the next image, I want you to close your eyes and imagine with me, all right? So try to envision an arc, a degraded cruise ship propped up on blocks and languishing in an empty parking lot in West Oakland, California against the backdrop of the I-880 freeway. In its shadow is a weedy lot populated by a homeless encampment as well as a group of Teslas, tents and campers. Try to imagine charcoal grills, glass encased seating pods and charging stations that are huddled beneath the ship's leaf. There are wires strung with cheerful penance that stretch down from reactors attached to the ship's hull to vehicular generators primed for electric cars that are scattered throughout the camp. If you look above on the sun deck, you can see more generators and another colorful assortment of tarp-covered tents and patio umbrellas and it's framed by strands of tenants, or penance, excuse me, the ship's hull, like the facade of the adjoining decommissioned bow arch train station, so imagine a train station that's decommissioned is adorned with graffiti. One of the more prominent tags proclaims in red the anti-capitalist, Russoian phrase, eat the rich with an accompanying sickle and fork emblem. All right, now open your eyes to see the arc. This is a photo montage by my collaborator, Ola Lekon, who I'm gonna call Lake, as part of our series again, the apocryphal gospel of Oakland which visually constructs this improbable ongoing story of Oakland's housing crisis through these kinds of speculative digital collages. So for many, the scene depicted here in the arc seems improbable or even an allegorical fantasy, but if you recall some of you in December 2019, several months before COVID took hold, Oakland's then city council president, Rebecca Kaplan introduced a plan to dock a decommissioned cruise ship at the port of Oakland adjacent to the West Oakland neighborhood. The idea was to provide emergency housing and shelter for nearly 1,000 unhoused individuals. Oakland's port remains one of the busiest in the nation. It's engineered with a federally regulated infrastructure that's designated explicitly for cargo ships. Even so, Kaplan and her colleagues argued that a floating hotel could temporarily address the 86% spike in homelessness. Again, the Oakland had witnessed. Kaplan noted that cruise ships had been used as emergency housing in the aftermath of natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina. And homelessness, of course, is an unnatural disaster, but Kaplan's plan was just one and a long line of attempts to ameliorate the crisis. Oakland and the Bay Area and other cities in the Bay Area have been experimenting since 2015 with other emergency proposals, including legalizing tent encampments and specific parking lots on certain vacant lots. So while the floating hotel for unhoused Oaklanders never really became a reality, Kaplan's proposition had been prescient. On March 9th, 2020, a ship named the Grand Princess, belonging to the Princess Cruise Line, docked at the port of Oakland with more than 2,400 passengers aboard, 21 of whom had tested positive for the coronavirus. So Oakland's homeless population consistently makes up half of that total in Alameda County. Again, between 2015 and 2019, the number of those unhoused in the city jumped from 2,100 to 4,000, above 4,000. The epidemic of homelessness across the Bay Area tends to be narrowly framed, again, as this result of housing crisis rather than a crisis in affordability. So rather than address income inequality or mass low-income housing gaps, local policymakers often propose to simply just build and build and build, despite the fact that most resulting projects produce luxury and or high-end residences. In other words, city administrators tend to see homelessness as a social problem rather than an issue that is both political and economic. West Oakland, where the Grand Princess was docked, is the oldest neighborhood in the city. It was once home to the largest black community in Northern California. But as the overall black population in the city continues to dwindle, so does West Oakland's concentration of black residents. Across the 20th century and into the 21st, black people throughout the United States have been targeted by spatial exclusions and dispositions that are rooted in racial capitalism, something your students are hopefully learning about in school. Yet racial disparities in Oakland's rates of homelessness remain particularly stark. Black and indigenous populations continue to be the only ones whose numbers are diminishing in Oakland while the total number of black residents who are homeless continues to grow. Most reports produced by the state acknowledge this disproportion, albeit typically only as a data point rather than as a focus for targeted response. So it's not an accident that the arc that we have located the dry dock ship in a parking lot beside a defunct train station, this ad hoc solution to a housing crisis that's fused into a landscape that itself is itself symptomatic of decades-long ascendancy of car culture and the defunding of mass transportation. Thus, rather than the arc being docked at the Port of Oakland for our imagination, it's landed unceremoniously in a massive West Oakland parking lot that in reality and as well in Lake's image, harbors dozens of unsanctioned camp dwellers. Nor was it coincidental that when passengers disembarked from the Grand Princess in West Oakland, their medical status was triaged in an 11-acre containment area in the Port's gigantic parking lot. So the parking lot, which is kind of the topic of this, as a typology is one of the most spatially dominant landscape features of 20th century urbanism. It represents ultimately a planning failure. Parking lots were thought of in the 20th century as a temporary form of land use or a kind of land banking against the future. They weren't thought of as inhabited, but they have taken on new meaning and also an important meaning in the contemporary struggle over the uses and rights to public space in American cities. Cities don't systematically catalog their parking acreage, however, it's estimated that the U.S. has more than 500 million parking spaces in off-street surfaces alone. Perhaps not surprising, parking lots have become central and fights waged by unhoused people against the state as well as central to the state's strategy for addressing the generalized problem. Parking lots have been used since the 1940s as a spatial resource for mitigating homelessness, deployed as again a temporary solution that in practice remains ever present. In this doubling of eras thinking about this past, provisional solutions harden into legacies that extend beyond and across generations, all the while retaining their official status as impermanent, improvised, and based in reaction to emergency. We're living in the second decade of the 20th century with unprecedented levels of income inequality, food insecurity, ostentation, precarity, and austerity. The world is organized by private property and market exchange and fashioned by corporatization, burdened by social repression, environmental destruction, and racial reckonings. The arc shows us this condition laying out a space resembling a kind of zone of social abandonment, a place that's neglected by the state and treated as a repository for the poor, unemployed, disabled, and or homeless. This arc is a dystopian hybrid, a landlocked escape vessel that's poised between an apocalypse in progress and a new post-apocalyptic normal, replete with signs of entropy, innovation, resurrection, and abjection. The scene is exaggerated, yet like the best sci-fi, it is also familiar in that the world that emerges post-disaster draws on memories of the pre-disasterists in order to visualize itself. In other words, dystopian narratives look backward, serving to warn us about impending catastrophe. But when it comes to considering black homelessness and what it tells us about the urban spatialities in which we're currently living, and about those in the making, the speculative timeline folds into a much more complicated knot. Here, we can presume a truth explained by the writer D. Scott Miller in the Afro-surreal Manifesto. He says black, oh, it's called the Afro-surreal Manifesto, black is the new black. For him, the future is already here. Mindful of these histories and yet to come prospects, I'm spending the rest of my time to consider black homelessness in West Oakland as is occurring in this collapsed or simultaneous parascientific Afro-surreal time in which complexes of events that seem mappable, along again a linear past, present, future access are really still happening at once. What's more, the future paths of black dispossession and black homelessness do not take place just anywhere because Oakland has cleared so much land but provided no adequate means of housing people in formal settlements emerge and are often contained within vacant spaces where built structures used to be. Tent camps grow under bridges and overpasses and parks and along deindustrialized margins. More encampments are set up in parking lots in any other kind of open urban space. However, because unlike a public park or the no man's land under an overpass, parking lots are officially sanctioned spaces for temporary, i.e., emergency habitability. So given Oakland's long and destructive history of both clearance and containment of black residents, the parking lot is a particularly useful urban typology of thinking about black homelessness in the city. The parking lot, as the arc shows, is a node where the simultaneity of the past, present and yet to come can be seen and felt with particular clarity. So the questions that I've kind of thought about as it relates to parking lots in particular is how we might think or at least consider the relationship between parking lots as the central and even redundant feature of the built urban environment and the politics of black clearance and containment. And secondly, what does it mean, again, for black people to experience again this same process over and over again decade after decade? So since World War II, the Bay Area was one of the fastest growing centers in the country with more than 50,000 black migrants arriving between 1942 and 1945, mostly from Louisiana where my family is from, Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma. This influx of people coupled with the displacement and dispossession of Japanese Americans and their internment and camps established black people as the city's largest racial minority. Anti-black racism coalesced as the Bay Area's go-to racist practice, proliferating and intensifying for years to come. This restructuring of racism in California from the targeting of Japanese immigrant populations to the assailing of black American migrants aligned with much of what had already occurred in other parts of the U.S., including the South. Since the National Housing Act of 1934, discriminatory housing policies and practices such as redlining and restrictive covenants had cordoned off certain neighborhoods from black residents across the U.S. At the same time, segregation facilitated the emergence of vibrant and growing urban black communities. By 1940, in Oakland, nearly 60% of the black population lived in West Oakland and a robust commercial corridor and a cultural district grew up along 7th Street. West Oakland became known as one of the Harlems of the West. By the end of World War II, Oakland was overpopulated. Black habitants were overrepresented in public housing and West Oakland was full of overcrowded, dilapidated housing stock. With the waning or closing of defense industries like shipbuilding, the unemployment rate jumped as even commercial infrastructure scaled back and the population of homeless black families expanded. A local journalist writing in 1943 described, quote, the tragic spectacle of black families going from door to door, begging for sleeping accommodations in sheds, garages, and any place they could have shelter, end quote. Black Oaklanders were not yet camped in parking lots, but a pattern of black dispossession was calcifying in the city, laying a foundation upon which the present crises of displacement would occur. By 1950, 80% of the black population lived in West Oakland and the city council and planning commission officially considered the whole neighborhood to be blighted. This made way for demolition via urban renewal policies or what James Baldwin famously called Negro removal. Urban renewal and its primary vehicle, slum clearance, accomplished the clearance and containment of black people in two ways, through the widespread demolition and limited reconstruction of buildings and the devastating construction of a transportation infrastructure, including major roadways and a robust public transit system that privileged white movement over black life and left landscapes across the city lying fallow for years on end. The Federal Housing Act of 1949 provided cities with the capital and apparatus for urban redevelopment and public housing, allocating 135,000 public housing units nationwide. In Oakland, public housing was viewed as an issue primarily impacting black and other people of color, since white working class residents by this time were being largely aspired or had largely aspired to flee the city and purchase homes and the nice suburbs. Oakland requested only about 3,000 new public housing units under the 1949 plan, far fewer than were contained in the existing but dilapidated war housing. As the city level dozens of those war housing units, only 500 public housing units were constructed to take their place. Thousands of black Oaklanders were left once again without shelter. During this same period, federal commitments to the construction of affordable housing for all were shifted towards federal and municipal plans for revitalization of downtowns as a way to strengthen the local tax base. Cities began to use federal funds and deployed the powers of eminent domain to redevelop instead of revitalize these blighted neighborhoods, especially those neighborhoods that were inhabited by black people. In 1954, Oakland Mayor John Hulahan formed a redevelopment advisory committee, primarily comprised of real estate banking and commercial retail elites. Executives from places like Bank of America and Kaiser Industries, Sears and Roebuck and the Oakland Real Estate Board, as well as the East Bay Home Builders Association. The resulting Oakland Citizens Committee for Urban Renewal, or OCUR, in turn produced the general neighborhood renewal plan through which they asserted their prerogatives to strengthen the downtown business district. So this plan was unanimously approved and plans for the destruction of a 250 block area of West Oakland, including that seventh street corridor moved ahead. In 1956, that newly formed Oakland Redevelopment Agency, which was an outgrowth of OCUR, announced plans for the Acorn Area Redevelopment Project, designating about 50 blocks in West Oakland for demolition as the first of five major slum clearances in the city. The Acorn plan focused on industrial and middle income residential development and made no provisions for public housing despite the overwhelmingly poor population in the district. The Acorn project was celebrated by city officials and developers as this opportunity to attract white residents in the hope of returning to the area to its former status as a quote, elite residential neighborhood. It was one of the nation's first attempts at reverse integration. Black people in Acorn attempted to stop the bulldozing of their homes by suing the city on the grounds that black homeowners were losing their properties without having anywhere else to go, but ultimately they lacked the political power to fight the destruction and federal courts sided with the Redevelopment Agency. So between April 1962 and May 1965, crews destroyed the majority of 610 structures comprising the neighborhood. The land laid bare and had been home to 4,300 residents. The Oakland Redevelopment Agency designated nearly half of this land for industrial development so the remaining 34 acres were earmarked for housing. The priority was given to the development of industrial sites over the residential units. However, by 1967, no homes had been built in Acorn. Vacant lots ultimately dominated the landscape. So even though the Acorn project never achieved the city's aims to create an integrated place to really make the neighborhood less black, the commissioner of the Redevelopment Agency lamented that West Oakland used to be an area where rich white Americans lived before it became a mostly black area. Acorn was a chance to reintegrate West Oakland, but I'm afraid that hasn't happened, end quote. Acorn was also a template for the city in addressing the lingering housing crisis and as such an experiment in the management of black and low income populations. The project complimented several others that were orchestrated in the 1960s by the Redevelopment Agency which included clearing over 70 more blocks in West Oakland to make room for a humongous US Postal Service distribution center along with surface and underground lines for BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit System. Most notably also the interstate highways. So further renewal projects were put forward and ultimately it disrupted the integrity and also the land in West Oakland. These plans that promoted transit and commercial construction, but ultimately gave way to parking. So the three interconnected freeways that were completed between 1952 and 1985, so that's the Nimitz which is interstate 880, the Cyprus which no longer exists. It was a two tiered portion of the Nimitz freeway that was destroyed during the 1989 earthquake, Loma Prieta, and the Groveshafter freeway, interstate 980, sliced West Oakland into smaller and smaller bits. The Cyprus freeway that was funneled through the Federal Highway Act of 1956 finished in 1958 but literally cut the neighborhood in half, placing a physical obstruction between the western most section of the city and the rest of the city, notably downtown. And here's a photograph of what happened to the Cyprus freeway. For those, is anyone from the Bay Area? And you were alive in 1989? Okay, so you remember what it was like when that, I remember it distinctly and when that freeway collapsed. My aunts had just gotten off the freeway so we were so grateful that they survived but so many people lost their lives in that earthquake and it's horrible, there's a beautiful mural there now if you go by and see it in West Oakland. All right, so intimately connected to freeway infrastructure, the parking lot emerged as a key signifier of mid-century Anomee West Coast style desolate but functional and even futuristic. This surface parking lot became a sign of the modern city, both urban and suburban municipalities began to require that new construction account for widespread dependency on cars, a stipulation that often remains enforced today. As major transformations of the built environment, freeways and interstate highways established in the post-war years tended to generate both fanfare and protest. Surface parking lots in comparison were and are still built much more frequently gaining the best at best minor recognition. Parking lots are just parking lots, right? For the most part, they existed not so much from building something new as being demolishing or the opportunity to demolish something old. Urban studies scholar at Maven, Jane Jacobs called parking lots border vacuums, these bleak spaces that unstitched the urban tapestry. As the 1960s dawn, the parking lot was emerging as the ultimate manifestation of spatial clearance, cleansing and removal. Permanent temporariness in the city. And with these images, one of my wonderful undergraduate students who just graduated added to the 1948 map or 1949 map to show where there was clearance. And so you see with the teal color, those are parking lots in 1968 that had destroyed what existed before, which were homes. People lived in these places prior to that. And then you see the freeways that were built in 1968 as well. By 1993, this is what it looked like. So in the purple are parking lots and then the yellow are the additional highways that were built by 1993. So urban renewal then intensified the precarity of black life in West Oakland. Black labor had been key to Oakland's wartime emergence as an industrial powerhouse, but as state and federal governments poured funds into the advancement of white suburbanization, the urban core was left to decay. A polluted pavement scape littered with vacant parcels, surface parking lots and unfinished projects, really these industrial carcasses and scars laid bare. These dystopias of half a century ago were perpetuated across the intervening decades by the city's continuing neglect of black residents in regard to education, employment, healthcare, day-to-day mobility, and of course, housing. A powerfully destructive trajectory was established for black Oaklanders towards the end of the 20th century. And its results are visible across the city today as the long looming threats of gentrification ultimately became a reality. So when I moved back home to the Bay Area in August of 2019 prior to the onset of the pandemic, I was astonished by the explosive growth and homelessness immediately recognizable in the dozens of encampments that spread across Oakland and parts of neighboring Emeryville and also in Berkeley. Large and elaborate sites swelled along pedestrian pathways in public parks under freeway overpasses of empty commercial lots and in parking lots. Some of the most glaring examples spread around the periphery of the West Oakland BART station in barren asphalt lots where dozens of tents had created makeshift communities of unhoused residents. Peering to my left when I was driving along the southbound overpass of I-880, it was impossible to miss the nearly five acre expanse sprinkled with tents, charred and abandoned cars, stationary RVs and cobbled together plywood and metal structures crammed behind a chain link fence around the lot in a Wood Street encampment. That encampment has also now been cleared by the city and a very controversial removal and I can of course talk about that later. Even so the East Bay's economy has grown but it's not uncommon to see Teslas whizzing by the Wood Street site or other encampments beneath I-80, I-580 and along the edges of West Oakland. The incongruence between these visions reflected for me a frightening sense of our new shared reality under late stage capitalism. People living without housing tend to be pathologized in ways that personalize and medicalize their predicament as if private failings and health problems were responsible for conditions that are in fact driven again by racial capitalism. This is what Peter Marcuse calls neutralizing homelessness. Impoverished neighborhoods and homeless peoples encampments in California have recently been compared to slums in Pakistan, Brazilian favelas and shanty towns in Mexico. Conditions that in an earlier era would have been characterized again as blighted. So through my research generally I found that official responses to such extremity come in three forms but I'm just gonna talk about one today. So one of the fundamental means by which contemporary American cities attempt to manage homelessness is through design. Oakland has initiated a whole bunch of programs and policies to address homelessness, most of which place responsibility on homeless individuals. The city has offered various temporary solutions which operate alongside community-generated products, projects produced by artists, activists, organizers and unsheltered individuals themselves. These include provisions of transitional housing, shelter beds, RV parking sites and the controversial community cabins also known as the Tough Shed program. These last are essentially toolshed communities erected on the surface parking lots and other vacant spaces again such as beneath the I-983 way. To give you a kind of an idea of the support that the program received, Oakland spent nearly $9 million to purchase Tough Sheds which are produced by a Denver-based Tough Shed Inc and establish RV parking lots, parking sites and surfaces all over Oakland as part of its emergency homelessness response. And for those of you who visit Home Depot ever you can find Tough Shed Sheds at Home Depot because they're toolsheds. So Oakland's plan is and they have basically put people inside toolsheds. Such settlements are never located on private property and various legislative measures have prohibited the establishment of encampments within a range of 25 to 150 feet from homeless shelters, private residences or parks, schools and childcare centers. So the unhoused have been pushed to vacant lots and parking lots whether commercial or city-owned. The irony is that some of today's encampments map onto the very parking lots that were produced through urban renewal and the removal of black homes a half a century ago. So again, let's imagine the dystopian future, you don't have to close your eyes. Forshadowing an ever-expanded use of parking lots and the reinvention of housing options in Oakland is Lake's Tough Towers that folds the future back into the present day to depict a utopianism after the end of utopias. In this prophetic scene we're examining an elaborate vertical settlement which strains across the edges of an asphalt covered parking lot on Harrison and downtown Oakland and I literally went to Harrison Street, thank you, and downtown Oakland and took pictures of a parking lot and then Lake rendered all of these images. Tough Towers is a modular provisional encampment for the unhoused, administered as logos inside the image or you can see that there from Home Depot. By the city of Oakland is sponsored by the Home Depot and Tough Shed Inc. And keep in mind, this isn't real, so I've had people wonder. And Tough Towers Lake visually exacerbates Oakland's multi-million dollar expansion of the community cabins program to rip on the likely perpetuity of this temporary housing solution that uses tough sheds as viable residences. Each unit of Tough Towers is a single tough shed. Stacked 10 stories high, these building blocks are intricately configured for structural stability. Their colorful frames are connected by open stairways. Billboards cantilevered off the high units, advertise informal businesses like eyebrow threading or vegan tacos. Tough Towers is equipped with a cell phone tower granting its inhabitants access to next generation wireless and broadband networks. Other kinds of technology are present too. A squad of golden drones hover and screen and surveil residents and their guests. So it's easy to imagine that they're transmitting evolving demographic data to the Oakland police department like the Ring camera does too. Tough Towers is contained within a lot, stretching the borders but not breaching them. The towers are here to serve as temporary housing like most of the emergency housing solution proposed in Oakland over the decades. Yet the image shows a structure that appears permanent if precariously so. The toughness ascribed to Tough Towers evokes the rhetoric of self-determination, resilience and dignity, policy jargon that more often than not functions to circumvent civic accountability and to shift the burden of resolving the city's housing crisis onto individuals and grassroots organizations who receive a little more than performative assistance from above. This logo studded Oakland of the near future looks peppy and inventive, designed forward. It seems to represent a victory for the city which has apparently partnered with a multinational business to offer terrific optics. It looks like a win for everyone except the people who live there. On the one hand Tough Towers operates as a top-down system imposed on its residents who we understand may have no other options. On the other hand, we're saying that these marginalized residents of a dystopian towers continue to live with the urban, adapting opportunistically to the political excesses that surround and manipulate them. All of which means that the unhoused will further adapt the structure of their settlement to discover ways to make the uninhabitable spaces habitable. So Tough Towers like the Ark is a fantasy that renders visible what the present-time platform capitalism actually entails. These images clarify what's going on already right now, exposing that which gets hidden under narratives of personal responsibility and short-term solutionism. This is what we see when we acknowledge the long-duray of our ever-present past. So no explanation's been given for the staggering 86% jump in homelessness in Oakland. But in a 2021 report, the City of Oakland Auditor's Office determined that the city lacked an effective strategy to deal with the crisis that has unfolded over all of these years and had not properly accounted for declining conditions in the encampment. There's no clear understanding of encampment activities. There's no budget sufficient to address the problems that have been falling those who have assembled into these communities. By and large, the City Auditor concluded that Oakland is failing in its attempts to address and ultimately eradicate homelessness within city limits. So if we're thinking about the, and we have to also include the pre-pandemic jump and then also the pandemic afterwards, we think about the encampments in particular, the past, the 40s, the 60s, the 90s, and the 2000s continue to plot what's likely to happen again in the future. So how then are we to really think about a future that's already here since the past has never gone away? Clearance and containment, moving populations into particular locations and continuum here and there are central to urban policymaking. In the economy at large, time may not have moved linearly from the post-war to the present, but urban dynamics keep us as black people in cyclical routine. Clear and contain, this is what happens when two temporalities are way back then and pretty soon, the two spatialities of get going and staying here collide and fuse. So what was once beat up old Victorian homes in West Oakland that were being destroyed to make room for freeways, industrial districts and surface parking lots, now unhoused or being corralled into these same locations where those Victorians once stood. Those who were dispossessed couldn't afford those houses now anyway. If those structures were still here, they would likely be renovated into million-dollar assets. Parking lots themselves are a contentious aspect of this feedback loop. They don't cause or resolve the housing prices, but they were a tool that's constantly deployed as a short-term fix or this constantly presumed dearth of housing. The parking lot is an interim solution that has operated in the past, it's operating in the present, and in the future we'll continue to operate as a battleground where cities oscillate between clearing the unhoused away and containing them within a makeshift but impermeable border of the lot. Perhaps it's time to not only imagine a future divorced from the past, but a layered present in which our awareness and acknowledgement can help make room for a truly radical reimagination of interior and exterior life alike. At the same time, we have to acknowledge the historical accounting of blackness standing in for a reality where certain people have been excluded from specified norms and rights to the city. This exclusion also implies the existence of undocumented worlds of limited visibility, thought to haunt the city's modernity and posit radically different ways of being in the city. In other words, clearance and containment perhaps points to the possibility of something else that may or may not have been at work all along. This is something else as a way to create a different kind of city by creating a different way of thinking about it. And I just wanted to close with a quote from geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore that says, what the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. So thank you so much for coming. It's supposed to add this nice slide. Oh, oh, question. Oh yeah, we have time for questions. I kind of finished on time-ish. All right, good, good, good. I skipped some stuff, so we're good. Any questions? Feel free. Hi. Oh, I can hear them, but I don't know if. The parking, there we go. The parking lots. Yes. I'm presuming those were purchased by the city through eminent domain, is that correct? Yes, or we'll purchase, but yes, yes. And do they still remain owned by the city or have they been sold to private parties? Some of them are owned by the city, some are owned by the state. So it's a combination of parking lots and vacant lots. So they're not necessarily designated for parking, but they are just fellow land that's just laying there. For some companies, they literally just own the land and given the value of land and kind of the financialization of not only housing, but of land these days, it's actually more profitable to just hold empty land that it is to sell it off. So yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Do you have a step? Hello, thanks very much for your talk. I was wondering whether you thought the situation in West Oakland is indicative of what's happening all across the Bay Area and San Francisco or whether it's a kind of unique condition and then a followup on what you were saying about the controversial clearing up of the encampments and where did people go? Yeah. And is that a long-term solution or another quick fix solution? Yeah, thank you. So I think what's happening all over California is indicative of a global issue. So it's not just central to this location. Why significant in places like Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, we have the largest unsheltered homeless population versus Washington DC or New York City where people, the weather impacts whether people can actually stay outside. And so there are requirements for the city, let's say, in New York City to have people go or for them to have enough indoor shelter for people, whereas that same rule isn't necessarily applied in places like Oakland, San Francisco, LA. So as it relates to Oakland, it is a crisis in affordability that has happened for years and years and years. So privatized social services, privatized spaces, and then the ability for large corporations to come and buy up a ton of multifamily units and evict a number of people has contributed to people being on the street. So we also have to keep in mind that so many of the unhoused actually have jobs. They're not unemployed, so they're working and they just can't afford to live in housing that exists currently. And also with the homes that are being built, they're typically at market rate. And so that's very high. And it's at 100% of the area median income. And you can just imagine what the area media income is for a place in the East Bay. It's incredibly high. So even minimum wage isn't gonna get you a place, right? So it's one of those things that I'm trying to highlight that this has happened for many, many years, and we haven't actually addressed a lot of the issues that have existed prior to this moment that we're living in with gentrification and all these other kinds of austere policies that are coming forward. As it relates to Wood Street, it's challenging because it was kind of a strangely fully functioning encampment where people were actually building kitchens. They had yoga class. Like they were actually teaching people how to do a number of things. And it's actually private land. It's Caltrans in part, but it's also privately owned by, I think, one man. And so they have been threatening to get rid of them for so long, but at the same time Caltrans, the state had said that they could stay there for a while. So some of the contention is that they're not actually doing anything with the land currently that they just kicked people off and that they don't have, people are just moving to other areas. There was a large encampment along the water in Berkeley as well near Ashby and there was one further north that was cleared. So people either have to go in different parts of Oakland. You've seen more on the edges of Alameda in near the Home Depot parking lot in this kind of industrial area on the western side of 880. So they just spread out. The issue becomes some of them form communities and they can't necessarily leave together or that in some cases, if they're at work, sometimes their belongings are taken because they can't go and grab them. So they've dispersed all over the city. Thank you for that question. We have time for another question. Hello. Hi. Thanks so much for your presentation. I really enjoyed it and thank you for sort of pulling back the veil of these short, I forgot the term you used, but it was short-sighted solutionism. Yeah, short-term solutions, yeah. Yes. I appreciate that and I'm actually an employee of Bart and I do see these impacts that happen with the fact of these parking lots that are very vacant. A lot of them now post COVID. Is there any hope? Do you have any solutions? Do you have anything that can help guide us to break the cycle that has already sort of perpetuated? I really do appreciate you making that linkage to the history, but how can we break some of that so that we can change the narrative? Sure. I mean, there's all kinds of solutions. You need to give people money, not you personally, but money is often and always the problem. So with Bart in particular, it's unique because if you think about Bart's history, there's no parking lots in San Francisco for Bart, right? Because Bart was viewed as this commuter rail that people from the suburbs, the East Bay suburbs would come park in Oakland and then just go to San Francisco in the financial district. They had no intention of serving the population that was here. It was particularly for people to get to San Francisco. And now San Francisco is having its issues with vacancy and all these other, I mean, a number of issues. So in terms of solutions, I mean, sometimes it seems unnatural or people feel as though it's extreme and fully anti-capitalist, which I kind of am, but part of what really honestly matters, we have to end the cycle of privatization. And so when you're able to provide people with social services, like what used to occur, people actually can afford things. And it's very simple, education, healthcare, like all of these elements, even legal services, housing. And so I'm working actually with an organization called Moms for Housing in Oakland who took over a home in West Oakland that was owned by an investment company. They ended up being able to purchase the home, but after they were evicted by the county with tanks, I mean, they were with their babies, you know, when they moved into this empty house. And so part of it is they wanna make housing a human right. They wanna say that anyone should be able to live in a home, just point blank. And if we start with that reality, if we don't have that terrible burden of housing being so overburdened some and worrisome for so many people, we'd have better health outcomes. We would have, children would do better in school because they wouldn't be worried about whether they get to sleep at night and whether they're safe, that crime would be impacted by this. So so much has to do with us actually providing social services, giving people housing and paying them a living wage. And it's that simple. So what that ends up meaning in a lot of cases, and again, it's like I can talk to my students like this, so I think about it with parents, like please don't pull your kids out of school. But thinking about, there's no necessity for a ton of billionaires to be running around the world. Like to have that much wealth means that there are so many people who aren't receiving it. And so if we, I'm not talking full-scale wealth distribution, but I am thinking about how accumulation is it necessary when you're gonna take from other people. So that's really what it is. If we start thinking so much about profit-profit accumulation, accumulation, you have to think about who's on the other end. We start judging people's work. We start determining who's skilled and who's unskilled despite the fact that they actually provide incredible service for us. So those areas, housing, social services, living wage, I think could make a huge, huge difference in how we live. Thank you, Randy. Oh, one last question. I'm part of a family foundation, and I was wondering if you could recommend a good non-profit that I could donate that would help with the house, helping people find housing. Do you know of any? So I would encourage you to look at Moms for Housing because they have an active transitional housing, especially for women and children who don't have homes, but also ACE, A-C-C-E, I'll be, A-C-E-C-E, I can't remember what the acronym stands for, but they also look into housing and think about environmental justice a bit to help people. So that's one thing I didn't get to talk about today also is pollution and the ways that the construction of freeways and the further transportation infrastructure has hampered the health, specifically in West Oakland of young black kids who have asthma at alarming rates higher than anywhere else in the city. And it's because of all the trucks and it's because of all the construction. And so those elements also contribute to decline. So having healthcare that's good and feasible and inexpensive is necessary. But yeah, try ACE, A-C-C-E, Moms for Housing, Moms with the number four in housing. Thank you. Are we at the time? I think we're at time. Although if you're gonna be around, if people have questions and they wanna come up and chat. Yeah, thank you again for coming out. Thank you so much. Thank you.