Who gets to call a neighborhood home has never been simply a matter of personal choice. Across the United States, racial covenants, discriminatory lending, and public policy have often been the determining factor deciding where people could live, and whether they could build wealth through homeownership. Rockridge’s housing history is part of that broader American story, from explicit racial exclusion to today’s barriers of price and access.
The Foundations of Inequality
Racism is in the DNA of the founding of the United States. The Constitution of the United States was written for the benefit of White, landowning men, and the ideals of equality expressed therein excluded most U.S. residents, as they did not apply to women or non-White people.
Countless laws dating from the Spanish, French, and English colonial periods were passed to make the status of Indigenous peoples and people of African descent inferior under the law, restricting their rights and relegating them to second-class status. Women’s status was defined as being the property of their husbands or fathers. In fact, the United States has yet to adopt the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to give women full equality under the Constitution.
Congress approved the ERA in 1972. Virginia finally ratified it in 2020, becoming the last state needed to ratify the constitutional amendment. Now, Congress must eliminate the original deadline, and multiple joint resolutions have been introduced in Congress to do just that.
Most legal remedies to raced-based housing have stalled.
“In fact, a good argument can be made that no one who has grown up in America has escaped the shadow of the systemic racism that has been directed at both non-White and non-Christian minorities, often for centuries. It is not an exaggeration to state that almost all existing housing in the United States was functionally or formally racially exclusionary when built.”
Housing Discrimination in Oakland and the Bay Area
Whether privately funded, government-subsidized, or built using federal mortgage guarantees, housing in America—all of America—has often been racially biased in fact or in practical effect, and most certainly in its historical context. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to state that almost all existing housing in the United States was functionally or formally racially exclusionary when built.
There is a history of racial exclusion throughout Oakland, facilitated by deed restrictions, racially exclusionary zoning, societal conventions, politics, and federal and local lending policies. It is a historical fact that the Rock Ridge Park development in Upper Rockridge, which eventually gave the neighborhood its name, was sold with racially exclusionary covenants in its deeds. In 1909, an advertisement in the San Francisco Call newspaper stated that “No negroes, no Chinese, no Japanese can build or lease in Rock Ridge Park.”
In the wider Bay Area, San Francisco began formal racially exclusionary zoning as early as the 1870s, largely aimed at the Chinese. In 1916, Berkeley established racially exclusionary zoning excluding Black and Asian people in the adjacent neighborhood of Upper Claremont, intending to expand it into Elmwood.
Race-based zoning was outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1917, but was quickly replaced by racial covenants on individual deeds. Although many racial covenants had sunset clauses, some as short as five years, the enforcement of covenants was not outlawed until 1948.
On the plus side, it is also true that many homes were built without racial covenants, and minority ownership of single-family homes in the Vernon Tract of the lower Rockridge flatlands can be documented as early as the 1920s. Examples of non-White ownership include Chinese, African-American, and Sikh families.
It has been argued that zoning itself is racist by definition. That argument loses credence when it is easily observable that zoning evolved to separate land uses, with special zones for single-family and multifamily housing at various densities, as well as commercial uses, light and heavy industry, and farmland in most developed nations, including racially homogeneous countries.
The Federal Contribution
Federal policies have had the largest impact on the inability of Black Americans to gain homeownership and, with it, the ability to build equity in an appreciating asset, thus creating generational wealth.
In the 20th century, the single most toxic federal policy was created by the Federal Housing Administration, established in 1934, which furthered segregation efforts by refusing to insure mortgages in and near African-American neighborhoods—a policy known as “redlining.” The Fair Housing Act of 1968 was passed to fight the practice.
Even the GI Bill, a piece of sweeping legislation aimed at helping World War II veterans with benefits including college tuition, low-cost home loans, and unemployment insurance, functionally excluded Black veterans from using those benefits, especially home loans. The wide disparity in the bill’s implementation ended up helping to drive growing gaps in wealth, education, and civil rights between White and Black Americans.
Much housing in America was not only specifically denied to Black Americans through racist laws and policies involving both property purchases and mortgage lending, but, as the ability to build wealth was denied them, more and more housing became financially out of reach.
Rockridge Now
Rockridge’s current status as one of the whitest neighborhoods in Oakland is a direct result of gentrification by waves of San Francisco commuters moving east, beginning with the arrival of Highway 24 and the opening of the Rockridge BART station in May 1973.
Once the neighborhood had bootstrapped itself to economic and social recovery, it did not take many years for an influx of educated White people to gradually price out Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC). In the late 1950s and 1960s, the Rockridge flatlands, on the east side of College Avenue were far more diverse than they are now. Anyone who grew up there will tell you the same, regardless of where in the flatlands they grew up.
A Working-Class and Diverse Past
The original segregation of Rockridge was by class and income—Rockridge neighbors east of College Avenue were white-collar professionals, and west of College Avenue, residents were blue-collar skilled workers, including many migrants and immigrants: Black families from the South and families of European, Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino heritage.
Those of us who grew up in the Rockridge flats in the 1950s and ’60s experienced a diversity that does not exist here today. I grew up on 63rd Street between Colby and Hillegass, and my classmates at Peralta Elementary School included children of Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino heritage, as well as children of the great World War II migration of Black people from the South to California for jobs related to the war effort. While Oakland’s Hispanic population was quite small at the time, we also had Hispanic classmates.
Affordability and Demographic Change
Rockridge has lost a majority of its previous diversity over the past 40 years, and has also lost most of its working-class families. These days, it is primarily highly educated and predominantly White tech workers earning six-figure incomes who can afford to rent or buy here.
These same newcomers have already altered the diversity and character of much of San Francisco, and are now rapidly gentrifying Oakland. According to the most recent census data, Oakland is younger and whiter, and the area median income. (AMI) used to determine income eligibility and affordability limits for affordable housing in new developments—has risen by over $20,000 in the past five years, coinciding with the market-rate building boom.
A History Shaped by Race and Wealth
Rockridge’s housing history reflects the enduring connection between race and wealth in America. Explicit racial restrictions initially gave way to a market in which the ability to rent or buy became shaped by generations of unequal opportunity. Understanding that history should guide the debate about Rockridge’s future going forward—and how to make room for people across a wider range of incomes and backgrounds.
