This Month's C-W City: Oakland, CA

The city of Oakland, California (population 400,000) is one of the nation’s most multi-cultural cities, with a population that is roughly 35 percent African-American, 25 percent white, 20 percent Latino, and 15 percent Asian, with the remainder mixed race or other. Located across the Bay from San Francisco, Oakland is often seen as San Francisco’s poorer cousin. But in recent years it has rebounded, due in part to its embrace of community wealth-building approaches. The city has backed some of these efforts, including an individual development account program and an affordable housing trust fund in 2002. Below we describe a select few of the many examples of Oakland’s community wealth-building network: an ESOP pizza restaurant (in the process of conversion to an ESOP since 2003), a number of cooperatives, two of the nation’s leading community development corporations, a community development credit union, and many other community wealth-building enterprises.

Community Development Corporations

East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation
www.ebaldc.org
Founded in 1975, Oakland-based EBALDC serves a multi-ethnic constituency that is currently 41 percent African American, 36 percent Asian and Pacific Islander, and 11 percent Latino with the remainder being Caucasian, Native American and other ethnicities. Services have moved beyond affordable housing to home ownership programs for low-income families, neighborhood economic development programs, advocacy, and an Individual Development Account savings program. EBALDC also has developed 700 units of rental housing and 200,000 square feet of commercial space, including the award-winning, mixed-use redevelopment of historic (originally built in 1917) “Swan’s Marketplace, completed in 2001.

The Unity Council
www.unitycouncil.org
The Unity Council (formally called The Spanish Speaking Unity Council) has worked with the largely Latino community in the Fruitvale District of Oakland for the past four decades. It provides affordable housing development, job training, childcare, and senior care. It also owns a subsidiary business (Peralta Service Corporation) that employs area residents on work crews for beautification projects. But it is best known for its participation in the Fruitvale Transit Village development, a mixed used (commercial-residential) project that aim to maximize transit use (a principle known as “transit-oriented development”) by improving pedestrian flow and access to the nearby Fruitvale BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station.

Employee Stock Ownership Plan Companies

Zachary’s Pizza
www.zacharys.org
Zach Zachowski and Barbara Gabel, owners of the award-winning Zachary’s Chicago Pizza restaurant, with branches in Berkeley and the Rockridge District of Oakland, began in May 2003 a phased-in sale of the company to their employees through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), making the 115 employees majority owners of the company. Zachowski in a fall 2004 interview with the Berkeley-based Daily Californian newspaper, explained the rationale for creating the ESOP: “If we sold the business to a corporation, the culture will change and so will the food and the staff. This is the only way for us to keep it like it is without us being there.”

Cooperatives

Design Action Collective
www.designaction.org
The Design Action Collective is a spin-off of Berkeley-based Inkworks Press collective. Throughout the 1990s, Inkworks Press offered graphic design services to non-profit, grassroots and activist organizations under the same roof as its offset print shop. In 2003, Inkworks decided that both its print and design services would benefit from the creation of a new collective. Like Inkwood, Design Action Collective is an independent, collectively run, union shop.

Women’s Action to Gain Economic Security
www.wagescooperatives.org
Founded in 1995, WAGES is a non-profit organization that raises start-up capital and provides technical assistance to promote economic and social wellbeing of low-income women through cooperative business ownership. WAGES’ efforts have led to the development of three women-owned, environmentally sound, housecleaning cooperatives in the Bay Area — in Redwood City, Morgan Hill, and Oakland. The Redwood City and Morgan Hill co-ops have now been spun off from WAGES and operate as fully independent businesses. The Oakland co-op, Natural Home Cleaning Professionals, opened with 8 members in September 2003 and has grown rapidly.

Social Enterprise

Youth Sounds
www.youthsounds.org
Youth Sounds is a media and arts organization dedicated to providing youth with opportunities to share their stories through programs in video, audio and music production. Founded in the fall of 2001, Youth Sounds began as an after-school drop-in program at McClymonds High School in Oakland, California. Since then, the group has worked with thousands of youth in Bay Area high schools and public housing sites nationally. Youth Sounds employs its young clientele by training them to provide professional video and music workshops and services for non-profit and youth serving organizations.

University Partnerships

Institute for Urban and Regional Development
www-iurd.ced.berkeley.edu
Over the past 14 years, the University of California-based IURD has developed close relationships with city and community organizations, as well as nonprofit institutions working in Oakland and West Oakland. IURD has raised more than four million dollars since 2000 for collaborative projects with community based organizations (including with EBALDC and the Unity Council) and public agencies in the city of Oakland. Faculty and students involved in these projects have been drawn from the College of Environmental Design, the College of Natural Resources, Civil Engineering, the School of Education and the School of Public Health.

State and Local Policy Innovation

East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy
www.workingeastbay.org
EBASE brings together labor, community, and faith-based organizations with work to end low-wage poverty and create economic equity. In 2002, in part due to its advocacy efforts, 78 percent of City of Oakland voters voted to approve a “living wage” ordinance that raised the wages of 413 low-wage airport workers in the first year after the initiative’s passage.

Municipal Enterprise

East Bay Municipal Utility District
www.ebmud.org
The publicly owned EBMUD provides water services to over a million customers in the East Bay. EBMUD has converted a full 90 percent of its service cars were hybrid vehicles as part of the agency’s efforts to engage in environmentally responsible business practices.

State and Local Pension Investments

Pacific Community Ventures
www.pacificcommunityventures.org
PCV is a community development venture capital firm whose largest investor is CalPERS, the state employee pension fund. CalPERS’ investment has helped bring capital to low-income communities. For instance, PCV invested $400,000 in Niman Ranch, an Oakland-based natural meat product distributor that employs 110 workers in a low-income neighborhood, with wages averaging $14 an hour and annual sales in excess of $50 million.