Читать книгу Living on the Edge - Celine-Marie Pascale - Страница 19

Oakland, California is a racially diverse city with demographics that are roughly 29% white; 26.5% Latinx; 22.5% African American; 15.2% Asian.³² Wealthy neighborhoods, like those in the Oakland hills, are home to families of color as well as white families. The city’s poor communities, however, are overwhelming Black and Latinx. Home to 429,082 people, Oakland has a population density of 7,676 people per square mile. (By contrast, Athens County has 130.7 people per square mile and Standing Rock has about nine people per square mile.)

The Oakland commercial district is an eclectic mix of old and new storefronts that give this part of the city a working-class bohemian reputation. Lakeshore Avenue is home to multiple cafés, bakeries, and small restaurants. Peet’s Coffee operates a large café just a few hundred feet away from a Starbucks. The upscale Peet’s is designed to invite people to linger – for the price of a cup of coffee, patrons settle into books or conversations that can last hours. The neighborhood is home to an old-fashioned donut shop, an artisanal bakery, a small greengrocer and a trendy gift store. Yoga studios and high-end hair salons (for women and men) take up significant real estate. Just one block over from Lakeshore Avenue on Grand Avenue, the picture is a little different. The high-end chains have not invested in Grand Avenue as they have on Lakeshore Avenue. The storefronts show signs of wear and age, and closed stores are prevalent. For an outsider, this makes it hard to tell if the community is gentrifying or collapsing.

The Lakeshore district is ringed by hills to the east. A maze of narrow streets winds past bungalows as it climbs up the hillside to increasingly expensive homes. Slightly to the west of Lakeshore and Grand Avenue is Lake Merritt – an amazing tidal lagoon and wildlife refuge. People without disposable income generally lose access to public space. (Libraries in urban areas remain one of the last bastions of community space but a very circumscribed one.) Lake Merritt is an urban jewel surrounded by parkland. The lake is a regular destination for school field trips to analyze water samples or visit wildlife recovering from injuries at the Nature Center.

The parkland includes a playground for small children surrounded by picnic tables, a bonsai garden, a children’s fairyland, and a boating center. Not all of it works well, not all of it works all of the time, but it is a tremendous community resource. Indeed, in a country radically segregated by class and race, one of the most striking things about Lake Merritt is the willingness of people in the community to share it. Schoolchildren, families, lovers, sunbathers, students, fitness buffs, picnickers, and temporary housing encampments all coexist around the 3.5-mile shoreline. In a city where a two-bedroom apartment might rent for $5,000, it’s not surprising to see a small tent encampment beside the lake. When the city authorities moved port-o-johns into the park for people living in the tent encampment, it became obvious that things were not going to change any time soon. This is not to say that everyone is happy about it, but the park continues to serve a wide and diverse community.

Oakland, once called the Harlem of the West, has been experiencing an influx of young, white, wealthy tech workers and an explosion in housing prices. The changing demographics are also affecting the park use. As white families move into Oakland in increasing numbers, complaints to police about people “living while Black” have also increased. For example, in 2018 Oakland made the news when a leisurely picnic turned into a nightmare. A white woman, Jennifer Schulte, called the police on a Black family using a charcoal grill at their Lake Merritt picnic. As she summoned the police, Schulte reportedly told Kenzie Smith and Onsayo Abram, who were barbecuing, that they would be going to jail. Smith told the Guardian he couldn’t get her voice out of his head. “I honestly thought that I was going to die.”³³ Jennifer Schulte became a potent symbol for the ways in which white people target Black people engaged in ordinary behavior. She was quickly dubbed “BBQ Becky” in memes that went viral. Later in the month, hundreds of Black residents showed up at Lake Merritt for a “BBQ’n while Black” cookout/protest.

There is much more to Oakland than Lake Merritt. A short drive from downtown Oakland, several communities are laboring under the weight of deep poverty, including Acorn, Ghost Town, and the Deep East. Today, these communities can only be described as the homelands of American apartheid. Their reputation for violence makes it easy to forget – perhaps encourages people to forget – that people live here, raise children here, and call these communities home. The media refers to them as “areas.” No one lives in an “area.” Even the poorest of us live in communities and neighborhoods – even when those communities carry a more dangerous feeling at night.

Once envisioned as part of a redevelopment plan, the Acorn neighborhood, at the edge of West Oakland, stands as a weary testimony to the old housing projects of the 1960s. Today, the community is not just bordered by Interstate 980 – Interstate 880 runs right through it. Small yards in front of homes have been paved with concrete and delineated from each other and the sidewalk by chain link fencing. Every home I saw was protected by bars on the windows and security gates on doors. As I wander through these streets on foot, the overwhelming presence of concrete and home security is harsh and unrelenting.

Just a short distance away in West Oakland, another development project created the neighborhood of Ghost Town. Hundreds of families, nearly all Black, lost their homes to eminent domain claims that cleared the way for three freeways, a massive freeway interchange dubbed “the MacArthur Maze,” and the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system, all of which cut through the low-income community. The MacArthur Maze marks the south border of Ghost Town, that stretches roughly from 27th Street to 35th Street. Under the knot of freeways that form the Maze, the sidewalks are filled with encampments of people – an informal community of its own, with cardboard architecture, a few shopping carts, and mounds of belongings wrapped in trash bags.

In the midst of the sidewalk encampments and broken-down buildings are schools and children. In this neighborhood half of all families live below the federal poverty line. Despite the number of boarded up buildings, however, it is a neighborhood with a strong identity.

The community is home to a small garden known as Ghost Town Farms, as well as the local Ghost Town Brewery, and it once attracted artist collectives that sprung up in converted warehouses. A tragic fire in the artist’s collective known as the the Ghost Ship in 2016 took thirty-six lives and led the city to condemn many of these properties.

Viewed from Ghost Town, Oakland’s high-rise office buildings form a horizon that looks like the Emerald City of Oz. So perhaps it is telling that the history of Ghost Town has been replaced with local lore. One story claims that there were so many killings in the neighborhood it became known as a Ghost Town, another that the name derives from the fact that two casket makers were once located side by side in the neighborhood, while a third attributes the name to a drug kingpin who referred to the area as a Ghost Town because he had eliminated all his rivals. The scariest story of all is the real history. It has nothing to do with gangs – it’s a story of how collusion between government and business betrayed entire communities; first through redlining practices, and then through eminent domain claims.

Across town, the Deep East is a neighborhood roughly defined as running southeast of 73rd Avenue to the San Leandro Border. I stop for gas on 106th Avenue – deep in “the Deep East.” I am immediately and obviously out of place as an older, white woman, in a community that seems to be younger and without white faces. As in Mobridge, I don’t understand immediately how the gas station works. Familiar things can be so different. Here, the pumps do not take credit cards. I ask a young man sitting in a car on the opposite side of the island for help. He slowly, and wordlessly, points to a small bullet-proof booth with an attendant. I join the small but steady flow of people to the booth. A young woman arrives ahead of me and with a hand gesture offers me the opportunity to go ahead of her. No eye contact, no smile, not a word. Her face is closed to me and I don’t know how to read the interaction. I decline her offer and get a silent shrug. She leaves without speaking or making eye contact.

On the road beside the gas station an old van is parallel parked. The hood is open and the engine exposed. Enough engine parts are scattered around the vehicle that it looks like a long-term repair project in process, yet no one is in sight. Not far from the van, on the chain link fence that surrounds the gas station, a man growls and snarls – I’ve never heard a person make sounds like this. He is splayed spread-eagle across the fence, his body twisting and turning. Although he is writhing, he remains so attached to the fence that I have to look closely to be sure he is not actually tied to it. He is not, but his grip is powerful. A line of men and one woman sit on a curb inside the parking area of the station. No one engages the growling man, no one stares, or even seems to notice.

I follow their lead, pump my gas and return to collect my credit card. This time, a young man offers for me to go ahead of him. I decline but he insists with such firmness that I can only say thank you and accept. While waiting for the clerk to process my card, I turn around and start a casual conversation with this man. I talk about the weather; yesterday was unbearably hot and today is a breezy spring day that feels perfect. He agrees. I make a comment about the unpredictability of the weather that gets a laugh. He has a beautiful smile and for a moment I make eye contact. And then his face closes and I know to return to my business. I realize much too late that, in some communities, survival can depend on learning to see nothing and say nothing. That in some places in the country, eye contact might get you killed. Is this where I am? If so, it is all the more amazing that ordinary acts of kindness seep through in daily interactions. I collect my card receipt and leave.

Signs of an informal economy are everywhere – in the particular presence of young men on street corners, in the sparkle of polished rims on new cars, and in the very serious young men scanning the environment as they drive slowly past. I wonder if the gas station, or the area around it, is some sort of drop point. As I type up my notes, I wonder if I should have used cash. Could my card have been skimmed while I pumped? The corrosive power of doubt seeps in as I reflect. My card was not skimmed, and it is worth noting that when it has been in the past it was always in wealthier, whiter places that I had not learned to see as dangerous. This is not to minimize or deny that violence that has come to characterize the communities around 106th Avenue, but to acknowledge the humanity of people living there and the prejudice that outsiders bring to it – intentionally or not.

Vanessa Torres is one of the more than 15,000 people who live in the Deep East. Vanessa grew up with her parents and four siblings in a two-bedroom apartment they rented for about $1,700 a month. As the oldest of the five children, she has had a lot of responsibility in the family. She began translating for her parents at age eight, and now at twenty-four describes herself as something of a parent to her parents, who rely on her to help navigate technologies as well as bureaucracies. “Something that is sometimes frustrating is that they think we know how to do everything.” It’s a common generational issue for immigrant families.

Vanessa, like many others, feels the impact of gentrification in Oakland. In 2019, the mid-point for monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the Deep East was $2,300.³⁴ I hear the stress in Vanessa’s voice as she leans forward: “This is the ‘hood.’ If Latino, low-income communities can’t afford it anymore, well, shit, where do we go? We obviously can’t afford to live in nicer, affluent communities. If we can no longer afford to live in low-income communities that are considered dangerous, that are considered poor, then where do we see ourselves?” Vanessa answers her own question. She’s been watching Black and Brown families move from the Deep East to Tracy and Stockton, “cities where there’s essentially nothing,” sighs Vanessa.

“My mom sells tamales once a week, and my dad’s a laborer. I’m the one who has the job, a good social.³⁵ So I think that’s kind of pressure on me too to make sure that I stay well off so I can support myself and support my family. I am already at a big advantage: I speak English, I was raised in this country, and I have a four-year degree.” Vanessa works for an educational nonprofit that serves Latinx high school students. It’s a professional position that comes with health insurance and a salary that she ballparks between $45,000 and $59,999 a year. This puts Vanessa in the ballpark for the Economic Policy Institute calculations for self-sufficiency for a single person. By these numbers alone, she seems solidly middle class. But life is always more complicated than numbers. On paper, Vanessa is single. In reality she is responsible for her parents and younger siblings. Vanessa tells me: “If I wasn’t supporting my family, then I wouldn’t be considered low income, but a chunk of money and resources goes toward my family and it’s definitely more challenging.” There’s more to be said about this later. For now, it’s also worth noting that she remains tethered to the struggling class in other ways. For example, although she has health insurance, the Deep East is isolated from health-care providers. To get health care, she needs to take public transit, which can mean taking multiple buses to a different part of Oakland. For Vanessa and her family, there is no such thing as an easy, or a short, trip to the doctor.

Again, keep in mind that Fair Market Rent (FMR) – the standard calculation used here – is quite different from actual housing prices. Sixty percent of local housing is more expensive than this. The reality of the rental market in 2019 meant that studios in Oakland went for $1,761 a month ($21,132 per year). We saw in Chapter 1 that HUD’s definition of affordable housing, includes utilities and costs no more than one-third of your pre-tax income. While most rentals do not include utilities, let’s bracket that issue and look just at the monthly rent. Using HUD’s parameters for assessing affordable housing, a renter would need to earn at least $5,283 a month or $63,396 a year to be able to consider a studio in Oakland affordable. Vanessa’s salary is not enough to enable her to afford this studio without becoming what HUD calls “cost burdened.” That is to say, she would have to pay more than 30% of her income for housing. The lack of affordable housing is the source of a lot of misery. A person living at the federal poverty line ($12,140 per year for a single person) could put 100% of their income toward rent and still not cover the cost of an average studio apartment. The federal recognition of poverty comes long after the point when housing in Oakland becomes unaffordable.

The self-sufficiency budget of $57,383 for a single person is in the neighborhood of what Vanessa earns – but it’s hard to say precisely, since we only have a ballpark figure for her income. To fully support herself and four others (two parents and her two youngest siblings), Vanessa would need to earn $156,717 a year. It isn’t clear to me just how fully she supports her family, but it becomes easy to see how quickly circumstances move Vanessa from middle class to low-income. This is exactly why income alone never tells the full story.

Even so, when I notice that Vanessa has $20,000 in savings, I am ready to cancel the rest of the interview. And then she explains that she and her family cut corners to save money as if their lives depend upon it – because they do. “I feel like me and my family have tried really hard to save money,” explains Vanessa, “because I’m undocumented. My parents are undocumented. My brother’s undocumented, so I know that there’s no safety net for us. For example, my parents are not working right now [because of the pandemic], and they can’t get unemployment. I want to make sure that I try to save up every penny as possible, because we don’t know if there’s going to be a situation within our family.” Vanessa’s income is critical to her family, which includes a younger American-born sibling who would be left alone if the family was deported. According to the Marshall Project, there are about 10.7 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, and, nationwide, “about 908,891 households with at least one American child would fall below federal poverty levels if their undocumented breadwinners were removed.”³⁶

In 2000, Vanessa was just four years old when her mother and father brought her and her one-year-old brother to the United States from Mexico in hopes of finding employment and educational opportunities. “It’s frustrating to hear the backlash from people [who say] ‘well, if you’d wanted to come to this country, then you should do it the legal way.’ Sometimes our families don’t have time to wait for the legal way. It’s a do or die type of thing. But people love to throw around, ‘if you want to come to this country, come here the legal way. Apply for a visa, blah blah blah.’ My family is still in the process of – ” Vanessa pauses with exasperation and draws a breath. “We applied to get citizenship through an uncle for the four of us in ‘99. It’s 2020, and we still have not heard anything back, and we look at the visa bulletin board – it’s a really slow progress. It’s very slow progress.” A legal immigration policy that takes more than two decades to process an application is actively encouraging illegal immigration.

Vanessa and her brother are among nearly 700,000 youth who have received Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). DACA is an immigration policy that protects children brought to the US without documentation from immediate deportation. It enables them to obtain a social security number and is contingent upon regular renewals. However, DACA does not provide a pathway to citizenship, which leaves recipients vulnerable to changing administrations. “It’s challenging, but I think, at the end of the day, you kind of have to live day-by-day, navigate day-by-day. When people ask questions like, where do you see yourself in five years, I’m like, I don’t necessarily like that question. Who can guarantee me that I will be here? I’m talking about will I be in this country in five years? So, it’s kind of hard to think about the future when I’m trying to live day-by-day, month-by-month here.”

While the temporary protection of DACA has enabled Vanessa to obtain a professional job, both of her parents, like many in her community, are part of an informal economy of undocumented workers. Vanessa continues: “especially for the working folks, they are not compensated enough for their labor, like farm workers, construction workers. They are putting their bodies, their health on the line and at risk, and a lot of these are Latinos who are working on the fields, who are working construction. If you’re working construction and you mess up your back, you’re screwed. How are you going to continue working this job that you have? Now you have to look at other forms of working when you’ve been so used to working construction and making this much money? If you get hurt on the job and you have to take another job, that could be a pay cut essentially. Then that could be a cut within your life. You have to make ends meet and narrow things down, [which] essentially means moving out to somewhere cheaper. They would have to move out to places where there’s more poverty.”

The Pew Research Center estimates that more than 40 million people living in the United States are immigrants – 35.2 million of them (roughly 77%) are here legally and about 10.5 million (around 23%) are here without authorization.³⁷ About 25% of all immigrants to the United States come from Mexico and, like Vanessa’s parents, they come for work. According to Pew, industries that depend on the labor of unauthorized immigrants include agriculture, food production (slaughterhouses and canneries), construction, manufacturing, and hospitality (as maids and custodial workers).³⁸ Families like Vanessa’s live in fear of getting caught up in raids and deported without notice. The Pew Research Center reports that from 2001 to 2017, a majority (60%) of immigrants deported from the United States had not been convicted of a crime.³⁹ Despite Oakland being a sanctuary city, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are using the city airport as a staging ground for thousands of flights. Between 2010 and 2018, the ICE air operation flew nearly 43,000 people in and out of Oakland.⁴⁰ Of these, almost 27,000 were being deported; the other 16,000 were being transferred as part of a detention and relocation system that seems designed to cut people off from legal and community support that could help them stay in the country.⁴¹

While the Trump administration refocused national conversations about immigration in very hostile ways, the truth is that as a nation we have never been willing to address the fact that unauthorized workers have long been central to US business. Immigrants and their families have been caught between the pull from businesses that rely on unauthorized immigrant labor and the push of immigration policies that result in deportation. Immigrants and their families pay a steep price.

In 2019, President Trump ordered ICE agents to conduct mass roundups of immigrant families across the country. His administration also sought to rescind Obama-era protections for immigrants, including the DACA program. “I think there’s not a single time,” says Vanessa, “when I am not afraid of something happening to my father or my mom or me that we’re no longer with each other. We’re afraid of deportations or removal proceedings, so just being with my family, spending time with them, absolutely brings me joy, because we could be here and in the split of a second … then we’re not.” And of course, this means saving every penny in case the day comes when her family is torn apart by a raid. In early summer 2020, the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s effort to end DACA, but the government was able to change the reporting requirement for recipients from once every two years to once a year. For Vanessa and the DACA recipients like her, the battle continues.

Vanessa isn’t the only person in Oakland with a professional job and financial struggles, although the struggles all look a little different. Puppy Love (PL) is the name chosen by an African American man living in Oakland to serve as his pseudonym. He is in his fifties and has one child, who is now an adult. PL might be more of a homebody than people expect and spends a fair amount of time at home doing chores. For relaxation he works out and tries to go fishing at least twice a week. PL has steady, full-time employment as a manager in a nonprofit providing adult education to people with developmental disabilities. He cautiously refuses to talk about his salary, but volunteers that he has no savings, retirement plan, or assets. PL is one of only two men in the entire organization, about which he says diplomatically: “It’s definitely a challenge on some days; things aren’t thought about from a man’s perspective as easily as they are in this organization from a woman’s perspective.”

As a supervisor, he spends his days troubleshooting problems and likes the variation that problem-solving brings. “I don’t control what happens to my consumers when they’re not in my care, but when they are in my care, I need to provide the best welfare, safety, and security possible. That’s important to me. I don’t think that’s important to everybody else in society when it comes to this population. They’re very neat folks. They’re loving. They’re caring. They’re intelligent.”

PL has worked incredibly hard for the success he has had. He has held the same full-time job for more than five years; it’s work that he finds rewarding and which provides basic health care and vacation time. While he appreciates that he is fortunate to have a job that provides vacation time, PL can’t afford to take a vacation: like millions of others, he lives paycheck to paycheck. Despite having steady, full-time work that he loves, PL is a long way from economic security. “You know, my worries are that, you know, am I going to have a place to lay my head at the end of each night? I’m always worried about, you know, is my truck going to make it home? The cost of living in California goes up every day. The cost of health care goes up every day. Living in the Bay Area is quite expensive. Rent is raised dramatically from year to year. I work in a nonprofit organization, so I don’t get a raise every year.” In the last three years, PL’s monthly rent has increased by $250, yet his salary has remained static. He explained: “that $250 that I’m now paying extra on rent was going toward the grocery bills, the gas bills. Now I’m having to scrounge that money up. You know, it’s got to come from other places … It is definitely a hard place for me to live due to the rent.”

Oakland has been described as the new ground zero in the affordable housing crisis. The city’s weak rent control laws have failed to effectively stabilize rents in the city. It feels wrong to even call it rent control if a landowner can increase rents by 10% or more just by providing tenants with a written notice sixty days in advance. Locals are well aware that the city has long protected landowners over tenants. But the current housing crisis now feels like a betrayal to many who say the city has not only pandered to tech companies with tax breaks, but is also encouraging the rapid gentrification that pushes long-time residents out of the city.

Clearly, PL is not alone in his worries about rising rents; in 2018, 4,000 people competed for just twenty-eight spots in a new affordable housing development in Oakland.⁴² For people in the struggling class, rent is never one-third of their monthly expenses – everyone is “cost burdened” and the going rents are well beyond what many can manage. Between 2017 and 2019, Oakland experienced a 47% increase in residents unable to afford housing.⁴³ A national renter survey in 2017 showed that one in five households had been unable to pay their rent in full within the past three months, and that roughly 3.7 million people had experienced an eviction as a result of non-payment of rent.⁴⁴ The high cost of housing is forcing many older people into homelessness. According to HUD, people over the age of fifty make up 31% of those living without housing.⁴⁵ Affordable housing is critical to keeping individuals and families out of poverty.

PL tells me that retirement is out of the question – he couldn’t afford to live in Oakland without a job. Although the East Bay is home, PL will need to leave if he is going to retire. However, like many people living with economic uncertainty, he can’t even imagine a place to move to. He has family in South Carolina and although it is less expensive to live there, he doesn’t think he could go back. “I couldn’t live in South Carolina, because the racial overtones are so prevalent there that it doesn’t work for a young man that’s grown up in California.” Yet California is changing in ways that make it harder for him to get by.

PL still experiences a lot of racism in the East Bay: derogatory comments, people crossing the street when they see a Black man coming toward them. “Sometimes you walk into service stations or you walk into an organization and you don’t get service as quick as other people, or you’re ignored, so that happens a lot in the Bay Area.” Even while PL experiences racism, he considers it as related to class as well. “If you’re in the upper, top middle class of Americans, I think a lot of these things are not issues for you, because you have the money, the financial backing to do what you want. But when you don’t, you know, you live in a certain neighborhood, you have to drive a certain car, you have to wear certain clothes, and those things are identifiers for certain people in America of difference, and difference is a scary thing in this country right now.”