Goodbye, Oakland — and Every Other City Losing Its Battle With Greed

This is for the ones who’ve been here and don’t plan on leaving, no matter what the tech-boom money says

I’m not an Oakland native.

Although I’m born and raised in the Bay Area with Mexican immigrant parents, a UC Berkeley alum, and a husband married to a Latina with proud family roots in East Oakland, I’ll never really be from here the way that many are really from here. But with the city always being a freeway’s drive from where I grew up and the place where I’ve spent some years of my adulthood living and teaching, I admire those who are rooted here. I honor those people. Their stories, vibrations, voices, struggles, and triumphs — the various textures of generational fabrics that thread together into everything special this place is, has been, and will continue to be.

Yet, take a 15-minute drive around Oakland, and you’ll sense how the local presence is diminishing at an alarming rate. Unaffordable high-rise apartments, glittery coffee shops, and exclusive restaurants have popped up in the least expected places, while White-collar, free-spirited techies and hipstery-looking transplants from all over the world have clogged the arteries of these neighborhoods.