An Oakland Diaspora: What Drives Longtime Residents to Leave?

Vanessa Ladson has a pool, a hot tub and a laundry room. And on this particular day, a rainbow arcs over her five-bedroom home in Antioch.

On a Sunday in December, she’s wearing a red top, hoop earrings and lipstick: Ladson is ready for church. It’s about 40 minutes away in East Oakland, where she used to live. But she doesn’t think too much about the distance between her home and Lily of the Valley Christian Center.

“It’s my family,” she says.

It’s not just Sundays that Ladson gets into her blue Ford Focus, which she calls “Fiona,” and heads to Oakland. During the week, she wakes up at 4 a.m. to beat rush-hour traffic to downtown Oakland, where she works for the East Bay Municipal Utility District. If she’s running late and catches the worst of it, the commute could be two hours, she says.

“It is awful getting up that early, but that is the price to pay,” she says.

Ladson loves Oakland. But after leaving in 2006 and bouncing around cities in the East Bay for a few years, she finally landed her own home in Antioch, a deal too good to pass up, says Ladson. Plus, she didn’t want her then-teenage son, Tyler Thompson, to be brought up in such a dangerous city, she says.

Thompson appreciates the house in Antioch. It almost makes it worth it, he says.

“But you always have that thought in the back of your head, like, man, if I could, I would be down where everyone knows me,” says Thompson.

Even though its been nearly a decade since he lived in Oakland, he still thinks of the city as home.

Currently, many Oakland residents are being forced to think about quality of life and how far their money can go as “The Town” sheds its reputation as an affordable alternative to San Francisco. Oakland has become one of the fastest-growing renters’ markets, and as prices rise there will continue to be displacement that leaves a bad impression on those who are choosing or are forced to leave.

“It’s almost like when you’re with somebody, and they’re not quite where they need to be. They have all this potential and they’re just bummin’,” says Denise Kees, a real estate agent from East Oakland. “Then they go off and they become successful and then they dump you.”

Kees says Oakland has dumped plenty of longtime residents.

In the last decade, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates the city has lost nearly 10 percent of its African-American population, down from 113,833 in 2005 to 102,933 in 2014.

This hits home with Kees, whose best friend moved to Antioch.

“When I want to go see my best friend, I have to get on three or four freeways and drive for an hour,” she says.

As in many major cities, most residents in Oakland are renters — more than 60 percent, according to the Census Bureau. But the majority of both renters and homeowners wouldn’t be able to afford a median-priced home in their communities, according to an analysis by the Urban Strategies Council in 2014 that looked at selected Oakland neighborhoods.

Howard Kees, Denise’s father, has been a real estate agent in Oakland for about 25 years. Before that, he coached youth basketball. Now some of his former players are settling down. They have good credit and stable jobs that provide steady income — just not enough.

“Those same kids that I coached are coming back to me and saying, ‘Coach, I’m ready to buy a house. If coach could do it, so could I,'” he says. “And I hold my head down and say, ‘You don’t qualify.'”

Howard Kees grew up in West Oakland at 20th and Wood streets and attended McClymonds High School. Now, “yuppies, buppies and hipsters” have moved into the neighborhood, he says. The last house he sold in West Oakland went for $600,000 and was “tore from the floor up” — a fixer-upper. There are two more homes he’s currently trying to broker in the neighborhood for more than $800,000 apiece, he says.

Part of the problem is that there are very few incentives for developers to build houses for residents with average incomes. State and federal tax incentives often support low-income housing developments, while private developers are able to make up costs of building more expensive housing by charging prices that more and more people are willing to pay to live in Oakland.

Developers built no housing specifically for people making a “moderate” income between 2007 and 2014, according to city data.

“It is a surprise. I didn’t think it was zero,” says Michele Byrd, Oakland’s housing director.

A state Assembly bill introduced last year would have tried to extend certain housing subsidies statewide for middle-income residences. It failed.

This year, Assemblyman Tony Thurmond, a Democrat from Richmond, is working on legislation that also targets more moderate income earners.

Oakland is currently considering new housing policies, including a discussion about impact fees that would either require developers to build a certain percentage of affordable housing as part of their projects or charge developers a fee that would help pay for more affordable housing elsewhere.

Antioch has a different story. Between 2007 and 2014, the city surpassed its housing goals, set by the Association of Bay Area Governments. The bedroom community in eastern Contra Costa County has space to build and land is cheaper than in Oakland, says Forrest Ebbs, Antioch’s community development director.

“You can actually build moderately priced housing here and make a good profit on it,” Ebbs says.

Over the last decade, Vanessa Ladson moved from Oakland to Hercules, then to Pittsburg and finally to Antioch in 2010 — jumping on a five-bedroom house that sold for $300,000. To her, leaving Oakland means she’s able to live in comfort.

But she misses her former home.

It hurts her to think about the house on 105th Avenue in East Oakland where she grew up, she says. The home had roses along the walkway and carport. Plus, there’s the fish market she remembers, along with the local corner store and her favorite taco truck.

“I will not eat a taco or burrito if I don’t go to that truck,” she says.

For some people, the idea of losing a local network isn’t just about losing a sense of community, says Richard Walker, an author and retired UC Berkeley professor. There is “enormous economic cost,” especially for more vulnerable populations like the elderly, he says.

“They can’t get to their old doctor. They don’t know where to go. They’ve gotten lost and some of them literally die,” he says.

But in order for people to have a chance at staying in Oakland, there need to be stronger city policies and leadership to implement laws that will at least try to keep them here, Walker says.

East Oakland Is Simmering

When asked whether homes are available in East Oakland to the middle class, Howard and Denise Kees simultaneously say, “Yes!”

The historically working-class East Oakland neighborhood where Howard Kees lives near MacArthur Boulevard and 100th Avenue has below-average incomes, but most people own their homes, he says. The supply hasn’t changed, but prices have been elastic. In recent years, he’s seen homes in the neighborhood sell for less than $100,000 and for as high as $600,000, he says. The average price is around $300,000, about $100,000 less than the citywide average, says Kees.

And more is changing in the neighborhood than property prices.

The number of black residents in Kees’ census tract dropped nearly 25 percent from 2009 to 2014, according to just-released census estimates. The white population has increased, and household income numbers are rising, too.

While Denise Kees still calls her community “the ’hood” with affection, she is concerned that the demographic upheaval in Oakland neighborhoods will ultimately drain the city of its diversity — and force friends to move.

And when people make that choice to leave, she says, “You can’t come back.”