Oakland’s Army Base Redevelopment Was a Win for Locals. Can the Coliseum Be the Same?

For three years before Sadakao Whittington’s release from Solano State Prison, the phone book-sized pamphlet taped under his bunk represented hope for his life on the outside.

Every day, he said, he would study the pages of the Sprinkler Fitters’ union handout for information on fire sprinklers, explore the apprenticeship courses he could take through the union, and calculate how much money he could make with a full-time job in the industry.

“I would look at it every day for the next three years and dream how my life would be different,” he said.

When Whittington was released on parole in 2014, he went to the West Oakland Job Resource Center to apply to the Sprinkler Fitters, only to find that they weren’t hiring. But the center, which helped contractors who were redeveloping the waterfront Oakland Army Base to meet mandatory local hire minimums, connected him with a job at the Oakland Laborers’ Union.

Whittington remembers working three-week stints at the Army base, cobbling together just enough money to pay rent for the bare apartment where he spent his nights in a sleeping bag, and then heading up to the Laborers’ training facility in San Ramon for a week at a time to take skills and certification classes like welding or heat fusion.

At the time, Oakland was just a few years into an employment deal with the developers redesigning the city’s share of the former Army base that required hiring local workers, including historically marginalized or formerly incarcerated people. A few years later, a similar deal was struck between a coalition of public health, environmental justice and racial equity advocates, and the developers of the Port of Oakland’s share of the 400-plus acre property.

Now, a new report from the UC Berkeley Labor Center shows that 25 years after the Army base’s decommissioning, those deals have been largely successful — potentially offering a model for how the planned redevelopment of the Oakland Coliseum can be a boon for the community.

The construction phase of the Army base redevelopment generated tens of millions of dollars in wages for Oakland workers, union jobs offered career advancement opportunities for city dwellers, and new hiring and investment practices “have begun to address the racial injustice and economic loss experienced by West Oakland residents,” according to the report.

Whittington, the man who was incarcerated in Solano State Prison, is now over a decade out from his release. He is a service foreman in the Oakland Sprinkler Fitters and teaches those apprenticeship classes he had once hoped to take.

“I had no experience, I didn’t even really know how to use a measuring tape,” he remembers. “Being able to go to the job resource center, me being able to get into the Laborers’ Local, they actually gave me the foundation to which I built everything else.”

An opportunity in East Oakland

The successes and lessons of the Army base redevelopment deals offer insight into how a long-anticipated community benefit agreement tied to the Coliseum sale could yield similar results, said Kate O’Hara, the executive director of the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE).

“One of the biggest opportunities we have in Oakland and Alameda County to expand on what we’ve done at the Army base is the Coliseum project,” she said.

Both the city of Oakland and the Oakland A’s, the Coliseum’s joint owners, reached deals last year to sell to the African American Sports and Entertainment Group, a local and Black-owned development group that hopes to revitalize the hole left in East Oakland by the departures of all three of the city’s major sports teams — the Warriors, Raiders and now the A’s — since 2019.

The pro sports exodus has cut local jobs and hurt business at nearby commercial stores, compounding decades of disinvestment in the neighborhood.

Included in AASEG’s sale agreement with Oakland is a provision that it create a community benefit agreement with local stakeholders, many of whom helped secure the Army base deals, including EBASE and other community groups. AASEG leaders have repeatedly said that community input and investment are their top priorities.

”We are looking for the developers and the city and the county to work closely with community organizations to really formulate a community benefits agreement that delivers on good jobs, just like in this project, but also affordable housing, environmental protections and real long-term community oversight and partnership,” O’Hara told KQED.

AASEG has already vowed to create affordable housing on the site and expressed its desire to realize the city’s 2015 Coliseum Area Specific Plan, which it called “the guiding framework for reinventing the City of Oakland’s Coliseum area as a major center for sports, entertainment, residential mixed use, and economic growth.”

Other specifics of the community benefit agreement will be hammered out once the group’s deals with the city of Oakland and the A’s are finalized — timelines that have been stalled thanks to ongoing negotiations with Alameda County, which has to sign off on the A’s sale.

When it comes to successes that the Coliseum deal could aim to replicate, one of the biggest wins of the Army base was job creation, according to O’Hara.

The agreement called for half of the construction and long-term operations work to be done by local employees, and a quarter of the operations workers and apprentices to qualify as disadvantaged. For the formerly city-owned property, that meant workers who lived in low-income parts of Oakland, and for the port-owned half, it included single parents, long-term unemployed people, recently incarcerated or emancipated people, and those on welfare.

The report found that on the city’s side of construction, Oakland residents accounted for 45% of infrastructure construction work done, including nearly 20% by apprentices.

The port’s side was even more dominated by local workers: Nearly 66% of work hours were performed by Oaklanders, and more than 23% by apprentices.

Both jurisdictions exceeded their targets for hiring local apprentices from marginalized communities, and in total, individual contractors who didn’t meet the local hiring targets paid more than a quarter-million dollars in damages.

“The best benefit is that it provided a lot of really good jobs for the community of Oakland,” said Andrew Jaeger, the UC Berkeley Labor Center study’s author. “It brought in hundreds of new local apprentices who probably would not have become apprentices under other conditions, if it wasn’t for this agreement.”

Those job openings are what led Whittington to complete his parole in Oakland rather than San Francisco or Contra Costa County, where he grew up. He said other jurisdictions also didn’t have resources like those he could access at the West Oakland Job Resource Center, which was created by the Army base deal. That included skill-building classes and growth opportunities in addition to stable work.

“All of these things gave me a step to get to where I am today,” Whittington said.

Bringing the community to the table

The uses for the Coliseum land are more flexible, O’Hara said, and negotiations could secure benefits beyond jobs — like community spaces and neighborhood services that East Oaklanders need.

AASEG managing partner Ray Bobbitt and fellow member Shonda Scott told KQED in September that the entertainment group had over the last few years sought input from over 50 community organizations as well as relatives, residents and young people.

“Oftentimes those young people’s voices aren’t part of the discussion,” Scott said at the time. “And that’s really what this project is for. It’s not for us to sit under the shade of the tree. This is for us to put these trees up and then have shade for the next generation. This is a legacy project.”

AASEG has said that 25% of any housing it builds will be affordable. It is also eyeing commercial attractions that have slowly faded from East Oakland — a resounding desire of Castlemont High School’s urban design students, who have completed proposals for the space’s use as part of their class during the last few school years.

“Like movie theaters, [an] arcade, things that are fun, because East Oakland does not have a lot of that,” Lilly Jacobson, the school’s 11th-grade urban design teacher, told KQED last fall about what her students wrote in their proposals. “There’s been so much disinvestment that all of the fun stuff has left. Students have to go to San Leandro or Hayward to go to the movies or the mall.”

Despite the construction-related employment successes of the Oakland Army Base deal, Jaeger said permanent jobs haven’t materialized on the scale that the community coalition had hoped for.

“One of the reasons why [that is is] completely out of the hands of the coalition,” Jaeger told KQED. “The port has not been doing as much business as was projected, and so there’s actually just not as much permanent employment happening there.”

Such a consideration could be especially important for the community groups bargaining in the Coliseum deal, as the city tries to rebound from long-term disinvestment.

“Perhaps there should be institutions put into place that allow for … say, a warehouse, if it’s idle for years on end, maybe it could be used for something else for the community benefit,” Jaeger said.

Ultimately, he said, the biggest key to success for development that benefits the community is their presence at the bargaining table — something Bobbitt has told KQED will be key to the AASEG development deal, if and when the sale is complete.

“Everyone knows that businesses work individually, or through lobbying firms, to help write laws and policies. Then from their perspective, [the policies] work quite well for them,” Jaeger said. “Community groups and workers, they can do this too, and they should, and I think this is a case where they did it quite successfully.”