May 24, 2021
I don’t live in LA anymore. Twenty six years ago that made me feel lost, rootless, far from home. Today 26 years later I call East Oakland home and so it is. Like the LA neighborhoods I like, College Court in East Oakland was subdivided in the 20s for small working class homes built for the growing population of Oakland.
Before development it was farmland and orchards. The Fruitvale train station is two miles west of here and Mills College a quarter mile north. The houses sold with restrictive convenants, no people of color, no immigrants and Catholics probably discouraged. In the 1960s real estate predators were block busting in East Oakland. They would move a black family, hope to start white flight, buy the houses cheap and sell at inflated prices to the new Black families moving in. Not everyone fled and this neighborhood like some Mid City neighborhoods in LA was stayed diverse with a good mix of Black and White families. Now it’s a neighborhood that’s beginning to gentrify but still has a strong African American base. In the gentrification cycle we’re not quite trendy yet and we’re not urban pioneers.
We’ve been here six years and it’s home. Like all of Oakland it is probably the most diverse place I have ever lived. Not as latino as I am used to from LA, but a mix of White, African American, Asian and some Latinos. Mostly Americans, not immigrants though immigrant neighborhoods are nearby. South of here, a more urban neighborhood is Latino, Mam, Arab, and Asian and the barrio starts less than a mile from here and Little Vietnam is less than 3 miles west.
My 11 year old Black Latinx Irish daughter is right at home here. When we moved here friends from school or church came to visit the first time they were cautious, East Oakland, even Deep East Oakland, but were surprised at our neighborhood. It’s genteel, a quality I think it’s retained for the last 100 years, no matter the color.
It took a while for me to feel at home in the Bay Area. When I first moved up in 1995 I lived in Mill Valley, a beautiful place, but a place I never feel at home in. When my then wife Susan got a job in Los Angeles, we got an apartment in Glendale where she lived and I joined her for a week every month and I got an apartment near Lake Merritt. Lake Merritt, Lakeshore, Grand Avenue and Park Avenue, neighborhoods next to each other, is one of my favorite places in the world. A library, a bookstore, bicycle shops, cafes, restaurants, a kosher bakery, a vacumn repair shop, the Grand Lake Theater and plenty more, wonderfully dense and urban. With the lake it should be a tourist attraction, Japanese and Midwesterners enjoying California at its best, but it’s not.
I lived there a year. At first working at Juvenile Hall in San Francisco and then a cadet at the State Parks Ranger Academy at Pacific Grove. I’d come home most weekends. I moved out of my apartment when I got a Park house at Mt. Diablo. After Mount Diablo I lived in a Park house on Angel Island.
Six months before I retired we moved off the island and I found us a place next to Lake Merritt. The apartment was OK, the neighborhood was wonderful. After a year there Suzette’s 17 year old son moved in with us after living with his father in Florida. The apartment was too small for us. Suzette made the move from Los Angeles to the Bay Area when she went to Cal and lived in University Village in Albany. For her home is that part of the East Bay, Albany/El Cerrito and Berkeley.
She found us a house in El Cerrito. The landlord was selling the house in a year or so but planned to rent it in the menatime. That was OK we were planning to go to Spain for a year. And then my father-in-law convinced his daughter that was too risky and a year and a half later when our landlord wanted to sell the house we went looking for another one nearby. Suzette found us a house in a development called Hilltop Green in El Sobrante, technically Richmond but with an El Sobrante zip code.
Hilltop Green was developed in the 1970s on land owned by Chevron Oil. It is a bowl like glen below a bluff with Highway 80 above it and out of earshot. It is spacious single family homes with apartment buildings on the eastern edge of the bowl. It has one road leading in and out. It is like a gated community without a gate. There is a Park and community center with a swimming pool for residents. It was one of the first integrated tract developments in the United States. Forty years later it is still wonderfully integrated with a strong African American middle class respectability. It was one of the nicest neighborhoods I’ve ever lived in, neat suburban streets, a park, a community center, and everything we needed a short drive away.
We would have stayed there comfortably but our landlord raised the rent nearly 10% after one year. There were houses in the development that we could afford and we began to think we should buy instead of rent. Hilltop Green has one big disadvantage we became aware of after we moved in, there is a constant cascade of invisible pollution from the freeway into the bowl where we lived.
So we started looking, El Sobrante, kind of far away, Richmond, there are good neighborhoods in Richmond in spite of its reputation, El Cerrito and Berkeley. We had a wonderful real estate agent Anita Jaffey, recommended to us by Karimah. We made a bid on house in Richmond, acceptable on a nice block in a hard neighborhood. We didn’t get it. We looked and looked. Berkeley was just too expensive. The one house in our range was across the street from a liquor store where the neighborhood leisure class loitered.
Like everyone else we weren’t thinking East Oakland. My bicycle explorations had taken me to neighborhoods like the Dimond and I knew there were neighborhoods in East Oakland that didn’t fit it’s reputation. We began to think of it as a real possiblity when we saw a home near the Laurel, another one of those Oakland neighborhoods, a cafe, a biycle shop, restaurants, a hardware store, laundromats and a bank. The library was nearby, no book stores, but a neighborhood nonetheless.
Affordability was the key point and we began looking more seriously near the Laurel. We made a bid on a house and almost got it. The last time I had bought a house it was a buyer’s market or at least the owner asked a price and the buyer bid below until the owner and buyer reached an agreement. In Oakland in 2015 the owners offered the house at a price that everyone knew was too low and the buyers compete in bidding it up. It’s all done in a matter of days. As buyers we had to bid high enough to get the house, so to overbid but not too much. We had already lost two bids before we bid on this house.
It reminds me of the diamond dealers in some Central Asian trading market who talk trash to each other with their right hands touching under a scarf and they finger bid.
And in August of 2015 we got it. I used retirement savings to make the down payment and costs. And we moved in. We’ve been here six years. College Court, we call it home.
