Current Issues in Cities and Suburbs
Land Acknowledgement
Northeastern University - Oakland occupies unceded Muwekma Ohlone land.
We recognize that every member of the Oakland community has, and continues to benefit from, the use and occupation of this land. We have a responsibility to acknowledge and make visible the university’s relationship to Native peoples. As members of the Oakland community, it is essential that we recognize the history of the land on which we stand and that the Muwekma Ohlone people are alive and flourishing members of Oakland and broader Bay Area communities today.
You can support the rematriation of this land by visiting Sogorea Te' Land Trust.
If you are accessing this page from somewhere other than the Northeastern University - Oakland campus, you can look up your location on Native Land Digital to find out more about the people whose traditional homelands you're on.
Planning
- City of Oakland 2045 General PlanThe General Plan Update for Oakland's 2045 General Plan is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for all Oaklanders to work together to create a visionary blueprint for the future of the City. Once approved in 2025, the Oakland 2045 General Plan will guide the development of the City for the following two decades. The Oakland 2045 General Plan will craft a new direction for the future of Oakland, one focused on creating an equitable and just city.
- 2023-2031 Housing Element Public Hearing DraftThe Housing Element is part of Oakland’s General Plan that serves as a blueprint for housing the City’s residents, at all economic levels including low income and households with special needs.
- 2022-23 City of Oakland Budget Priorities SurveyThe Budget Survey is conducted at the direction of the City’s Consolidated Fiscal Policy (CFP). The CFP directs the City to conduct a statistically valid survey to
assessing the public’s concerns, needs and priorities prior to the development of the biennial budget. - History of Industrial Activities and Industrial Zoning in OaklandAn overview of Oakland’s industrial history, a timeline of key periods in the development of Oakland’s industrial sector, and highlights political, social, and economic
conditions and policies that have shifted Oakland’s industrial landscape.
Demographics
- 2022 Point In Time CountEvery 2 years, communities conduct comprehensive counts of people experiencing homelessness in order to measure the prevalence of homelessness in each local community. The 2022 Alameda County EveryOne Counts! Point-inTime Count was a community-wide effort conducted on February 23, 2022
Maps
Historical Organizations
- Alameda County Historical SocietyThe Alameda County Historical Society was founded in 1965 "to foster and encourage interest in the history of Alameda County.
- Oakland Heritage AllianceOakland Heritage Alliance is a non-profit membership organization which advocates the protection, preservation, and revitalization of Oakland's architectural, historic, cultural and natural resources through publications, education, and direct action.
- Oakland History Center (Oakland Public Library)The Oakland History Center's mission is to collect, maintain and provide materials that tell the story of Oakland and the East Bay. An Oakland Public Library card will be needed to access online materials.
- African American Museum and Library at OaklandThe African American Museum and Library at Oakland is dedicated to the discovery, preservation, interpretation, and sharing of historical and cultural experiences of African Americans in California and the West for present and future generations.
Other Resources
- Oakland Then & NowCompare images of Oakland landmarks from the 19th and 20th centuries to today.
- Four Plans that Shaped Downtown OaklandAn overview of the planning history of downtown Oakland.
- Virtual Oakland Blues and JazzRemembering 7th Street is a project of UC Berkeley’s Journalism School and Architecture Department to re-create West Oakland in the 1940s and ’50s when it was a thriving community teeming with blues and jazz clubs.
- San Francisco Public Library Digital CollectionAlthough there is not a collection that is Oakland specific, the Historical Photograph Collection has images of Oakland community members and infrastructure.
Using Subject Terms to Search
Subject terms are standardized words and phrases that create a shared vocabulary among libraries and help users discover more sources by grouping books, articles, and and other information into subjects.
Below are some subject terms that will assist you with searching for information on Oakland. Try combining the Subject Terms below with other keywords and phrases that might match your topic. You can also look at the SUBJECT field of your results to modify or create new searches.
Here are some examples:
- City planning AND "Oakland"
- "Oakland history" AND political aspects
- "Oakland (Calif.)" AND social conditions
Here is an example of what subject terms look like when searching the library's catalog and can be located under "details":
- Oakland History Center (Oakland Public Library)The Oakland History Center's mission is to collect, maintain and provide materials that tell the story of Oakland and the East Bay. An Oakland Public Library card will be needed to access online materials.
- African American Museum and Library at OaklandThe African American Museum and Library at Oakland is dedicated to the discovery, preservation, interpretation, and sharing of historical and cultural experiences of African Americans in California and the West for present and future generations.
- CalisphereCalisphere provides free access to unique and historically important artifacts for research, teaching, and curious exploration. Discover over two million photographs, documents, letters, artwork, diaries, oral histories, films, advertisements, musical recordings, and more.
- Bay Area Television ArchiveEstablished in 1981, the TV Archive preserves 6000 hours of newsfilm, documentaries and other TV media produced in the Bay Area and Northern California between 1950-2000. Searching for “Oakland” brings up primary source news footage about the Black Panthers, the Oakland Museum, Merritt College, Oak Center redevelopment, and much more.
Other Resources
- Mapping Queer OaklandMapping oral histories from LGBTQ+ Oakland elders stamps their stories into the geography of Oakland. Collectively, these individual narratives tell a larger story of queer Oakland history.
- Oakland Tribune ArchiveThe Newspapers.com database gives you access to most issues of the Oakland Tribune, from 1874 to 1972. You can type in your keyword search and then pull down the “add more info” tab to enter “Oakland, California” as the location and a date or range of dates you’d like to search.
- The Black Panther NewspaperThe Black Panther was the official newspaper of the Black Panther Party. It was the main publication of the party and was soon sold in several large cities across the United States, as well as having an international readership. The newspaper distributed information about the party's activities, and expressed through articles the ideology of the Black Panther Party.
Black Youth Rising by
Black Youth Rising is a book that restores hope and possibility to the lives of urban black youth. In this pathbreaking account, author Shawn Ginwright details the powerful positive impact that community-based organizations can have in rebuilding the lives of urban black youth, through a process he calls radical healing. Readers can see how caring adults in a community setting are able to create safe spaces for youth to turn away from neighborhood violence and their own traumatic pasts. Together, young people build a refuge within their own community that allows them to avoid the common dangers of street life and build healthy identities and a productive future for themselves and others. Combining a theoretically grounded framework with practical strategies, Black Youth Rising offers a new model for understanding what African American youth need in order to succeed in school and in life. This book is essential reading for educators, social workers, community organizers, after-school coordinators, and all who work with inner-city adolescents.
Call Number: 305.235 G4937b 2010ISBN: 9780807750223
The Color of Law by
In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation?that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation?the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments?that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day. Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north. As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know. Now, Rothstein expands our understanding of this history, showing how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. While urban areas rapidly deteriorated, the great American suburbanization of the post?World War II years was spurred on by federal subsidies for builders on the condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. Finally, Rothstein shows how police and prosecutors brutally upheld these standards by supporting violent resistance to black families in white neighborhoods. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination but did nothing to reverse residential patterns that had become deeply embedded. Yet recent outbursts of violence in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Minneapolis show us precisely how the legacy of these earlier eras contributes to persistent racial unrest. ?The American landscape will never look the same to readers of this important book? (Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), as Rothstein's invaluable examination shows that only by relearning this history can we finally pave the way for the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past.
Call Number: 305.80097 R847 2017ISBN: 9781631492853
Flame and Fortune in the American West by
Flame and Fortune in the American West creatively and meticulously investigates the ongoing politics, folly, and avarice shaping the production of increasingly widespread yet dangerous suburban and exurban landscapes. The 1991 Oakland Hills Tunnel Fire is used as a starting point to better understand these complex social-environmental processes. The Tunnel Fire is the most destructive fire--in terms of structures lost--in California history. More than 3,000 residential structures burned and 25 lives were lost. Although this fire occurred in Oakland and Berkeley, others like it sear through landscapes in California and the American West that have experienced urban growth and development within areas historically prone to fire. Simon skillfully blends techniques from environmental history, political ecology, and science studies to closely examine the Tunnel Fire within a broader historical and spatial context of regional economic development and natural-resource management, such as the widespread planting of eucalyptus trees as an exotic lure for homeowners and the creation of hillside neighborhoods for tax revenue--decisions that produced communities with increased vulnerability to fire. Simon demonstrates how in Oakland a drive for affluence led to a state of vulnerability for rich and poor alike that has only been exacerbated by the rebuilding of neighborhoods after the fire. Despite these troubling trends, Flame and Fortune in the American West illustrates how many popular and scientific debates on fire limit the scope and efficacy of policy responses. These risky yet profitable developments (what the author refers to as the Incendiary), as well as proposed strategies for challenging them, are discussed in the context of urbanizing areas around the American West and hold global applicability within hazard-prone areas.
Call Number: 307.1216 S5948 2017ISBN: 9780520292802
The Revolution Has Come by
In The Revolution Has Come Robyn C. Spencer traces the Black Panther Party's organizational evolution in Oakland, California, where hundreds of young people came to political awareness and journeyed to adulthood as members. Challenging the belief that the Panthers were a projection of the leadership, Spencer draws on interviews with rank-and-file members, FBI files, and archival materials to examine the impact the organization's internal politics and COINTELPRO's political repression had on its evolution and dissolution. She shows how the Panthers' members interpreted, implemented, and influenced party ideology and programs; initiated dialogues about gender politics; highlighted ambiguities in the Panthers' armed stance; and criticized organizational priorities. Spencer also centers gender politics and the experiences of women and their contributions to the Panthers and the Black Power movement as a whole. Providing a panoramic view of the party's organization over its sixteen-year history, The Revolution Has Come shows how the Black Panthers embodied Black Power through the party's international activism, interracial alliances, commitment to address state violence, and desire to foster self-determination in Oakland's black communities.
Call Number: 322.42097 S7459 2016ISBN: 9780822362753
Living for the City by
In this nuanced and groundbreaking history, Donna Murch argues that the Black Panther Party (BPP) started with a study group. Drawing on oral history and untapped archival sources, she explains how a relatively small city with a recent history of African American settlement produced such compelling and influential forms of Black Power politics. During an era of expansion and political struggle in California's system of public higher education, black southern migrants formed the BPP. In the early 1960s, attending Merritt College and other public universities radicalized Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and many of the young people who joined the Panthers' rank and file. In the face of social crisis and police violence, the most disfranchised sectors of the East Bay's African American community--young, poor, and migrant--challenged the legitimacy of state authorities and of an older generation of black leadership. By excavating this hidden history, Living for the City broadens the scholarship of the Black Power movement by documenting the contributions of black students and youth who created new forms of organization, grassroots mobilization, and political literacy.
Call Number: 322.420973 M973L 2010ISBN: 9780807833766
Oakland, the Story of a City by
Oakland, The Story of a City by Beth Bagwell has been the standard for Oakland local history since it was originally published in 1982 and has been called one of the most influential popular titles on the history of Oakland. Anyone with a passion for Oakland's heritage and history owes a depth of gratitude to Beth Bagwell for chronicling many of the "lost" stories of Oakland's early days.
Call Number: 979.466 B149oa 1982ISBN: 0964008718
The Second Gold Rush by
More than any event in the twentieth century, World War II marked the coming of age of America's West Coast cities. Almost overnight, new war industries prompted the mass urban migration and development that would trigger lasting social, cultural, and political changes. For the San Francisco Bay Area, argues Marilynn Johnson, the changes brought by World War II were as dramatic as those brought by the gold rush a century earlier. Focusing on Oakland, Richmond, and other East Bay shipyard boomtowns, Johnson chronicles the defense buildup, labor migration from the South and Midwest, housing issues, and social and racial conflicts that pitted newcomers against longtime Bay Area residents. She follows this story into the postwar era, when struggles over employment, housing, and civil rights shaped the urban political landscape for the 1950s and beyond. She also traces the cultural legacy of war migration and shows how Southern religion and music became an integral part of Bay Area culture. Johnson's sources are wide-ranging and include shipyard records, labor histories, police reports, and interviews. Her findings place the war's human drama at center stage and effectively recreate the texture of daily life in workplace, home, and community. Enriched by the photographs of Dorothea Lange and others, The Second Gold Rush makes an important contribution to twentieth-century urban studies as well as to California history.
Call Number: 979.466 J68s 1993ISBN: 9780520207011
Hella Town by
Hella Town reveals the profound impact of transportation improvements, systemic racism, and regional competition on Oakland's built environment. Often overshadowed by San Francisco, its larger and more glamorous twin, Oakland has a fascinating history of its own. From serving as a major transportation hub to forging a dynamic manufacturing sector, by the mid-twentieth century Oakland had become the urban center of the East Bay. Hella Town focuses on how political deals, economic schemes, and technological innovations fueled this emergence but also seeded the city's postwar struggles. Toward the turn of the millennium, as immigration from Latin America and East Asia increased, Oakland became one of the most diverse cities in the country. The city still grapples with the consequences of uneven class- and race-based development-amid-disruption. How do past decisions about where to locate highways or public transit, urban renewal districts or civic venues, parks or shopping centers, influence how Oaklanders live today? A history of Oakland's buildings and landscapes, its booms and its busts, provides insight into its current conditions: an influx of new residents and businesses, skyrocketing housing costs, and a lingering chasm between the haves and have-nots.
Call Number: 979.466 S4118 2021ISBN: 9780520381124
A City for Children by
American cities are constantly being built and rebuilt, resulting in ever-changing skylines and neighborhoods. While the dynamic urban landscapes of New York, Boston, and Chicago have been widely studied, there is much to be gleaned from west coast cities, especially in California, where the migration boom at the end of the nineteenth century permanently changed the urban fabric of these newly diverse, plural metropolises. In A City for Children, Marta Gutman focuses on the use and adaptive reuse of everyday buildings in Oakland, California, to make the city a better place for children. She introduces us to the women who were determined to mitigate the burdens placed on working-class families by an indifferent industrial capitalist economy. Often without the financial means to build from scratch, women did not tend to conceive of urban land as a blank slate to be wiped clean for development. Instead, Gutman shows how, over and over, women turned private houses in Oakland into orphanages, kindergartens, settlement houses, and day care centers, and in the process built the charitable landscape--a network of places that was critical for the betterment of children, families, and public life. The industrial landscape of Oakland, riddled with the effects of social inequalities and racial prejudices, is not a neutral backdrop in Gutman's story but an active player. Spanning one hundred years of history, A City for Children provides a compelling model for building urban institutions and demonstrates that children, women, charity, and incremental construction, renovations, alterations, additions, and repurposed structures are central to the understanding of modern cities.
ISBN: 9780226156156
American Babylon by
A gripping portrait of black power politics and the struggle for civil rights in postwar Oakland As the birthplace of the Black Panthers and a nationwide tax revolt, California embodied a crucial motif of the postwar United States: the rise of suburbs and the decline of cities, a process in which black and white histories inextricably joined. American Babylon tells this story through Oakland and its nearby suburbs, tracing both the history of civil rights and black power politics as well as the history of suburbanization and home-owner politics. Robert Self shows that racial inequities in both New Deal and Great Society liberalism precipitated local struggles over land, jobs, taxes, and race within postwar metropolitan development. Black power and the tax revolt evolved together, in tension. American Babylon demonstrates that the history of civil rights and black liberation politics in California did not follow a southern model, but represented a long-term struggle for economic rights that began during the World War II years and continued through the rise of the Black Panthers in the late 1960s. This struggle yielded a wide-ranging and profound critique of postwar metropolitan development and its foundation of class and racial segregation. Self traces the roots of the 1978 tax revolt to the 1940s, when home owners, real estate brokers, and the federal government used racial segregation and industrial property taxes to forge a middle-class lifestyle centered on property ownership. Using the East Bay as a starting point, Robert Self gives us a richly detailed, engaging narrative that uniquely integrates the most important racial liberation struggles and class politics of postwar America.
ISBN: 9781400844173
Buddha Is Hiding by
Fleeing the murderous Pol Pot regime, Cambodian refugees arrive in America as at once the victims and the heroes of America's misadventures in Southeast Asia; and their encounters with American citizenship are contradictory as well. Service providers, bureaucrats, and employers exhort them to be self-reliant, individualistic, and free, even as the system and the culture constrain them within terms of ethnicity, race, and class. Buddha Is Hiding tells the story of Cambodian Americans experiencing American citizenship from the bottom-up. Based on extensive fieldwork in Oakland and San Francisco, the study puts a human face on how American institutions--of health, welfare, law, police, church, and industry--affect minority citizens as they negotiate American culture and re-interpret the American dream. In her earlier book, Flexible Citizenship, anthropologist Aihwa Ong wrote of elite Asians shuttling across the Pacific. This parallel study tells the very different story of "the other Asians" whose route takes them from refugee camps to California's inner-city and high-tech enclaves. In Buddha Is Hiding we see these refugees becoming new citizen-subjects through a dual process of being-made and self-making, balancing religious salvation and entrepreneurial values as they endure and undermine, absorb and deflect conflicting lessons about welfare, work, medicine, gender, parenting, and mass culture. Trying to hold on to the values of family and home culture, Cambodian Americans nonetheless often feel that "Buddha is hiding." Tracing the entangled paths of poor and rich Asians in the American nation, Ong raises new questions about the form and meaning of citizenship in an era of globalization.
ISBN: 9780520937161
No There There by
Challenged by Ku Klux Klan action in the '20s, labor protests culminating in a general strike in the '40s, and the rise of the civil rights and black power struggles of the '60s, Oakland, California, seems to encapsulate in one city the broad and varied sweep of urban social movements in twentieth-century America. Taking Oakland as a case study of urban politics and society in the United States, Chris Rhomberg examines the city's successive episodes of popular insurgency for what they can tell us about critical discontinuities in the American experience of urban political community.
ISBN: 9780520940888
The Riders Come Out at Night by
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE From the Polk Award-winning investigative duo comes a critical look at the systematic corruption and brutality within the Oakland Police Department, and the more than two-decades-long saga of attempted reforms and explosive scandals. No municipality has been under court oversight to reform its police department as long as the city of Oakland. It is, quite simply, the edge case in American law enforcement. The Riders Come Out at Night is the culmination of over twenty-one years of fearless reporting. Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham shine a light on the jackbooted police culture, lack of political will, and misguided leadership that have conspired to stymie meaningful reform. The authors trace the history of Oakland since its inception through the lens of the city's police department, through the Palmer Raids, McCarthyism, and the Civil Rights struggle, the Black Panthers and crack eras, to Oakland's present-day revival. Readers will be introduced to a group of sadistic cops known as "The Riders," whose disregard for the oath they took to protect and serve is on full, tragic, infuriating display. They will also meet Keith Batt, a wide-eyed rookie cop turned whistleblower, who was unwittingly partnered with the leader of the Riders. Other compelling characters include Jim Chanin and John Burris, two civil rights attorneys determined to see reform through, in spite of all obstacles. And Oakland's deep history of law enforcement corruption, reactionary politics, and social movement organizing is retold through historical figures like Black Panther Huey Newton, drug kingpin Felix Mitchell, district attorney and future Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, and Mayor Jerry Brown. The Riders Come Out at Night is the story of one city and its police department, but it's also the story of American policing--and where it's headed.
ISBN: 9781982168612
