"I've got a lot of thoughts about that, but let me just keep it to a
bare minimum," Sensabaugh responded. "It's not even the fact that they
are coming in, it's the fact that the people coming into the
neighborhoods are not embracing the culture that is already there."
At Betti Ono, conversations about art and politics are always
entangled. Physically, the gallery itself offers a metaphor for that
deliberate intersection. Tucked into the Broadway-facing edge of Frank
Ogawa Plaza, the space occupies the same plot as City Hall, with its
door mere yards from the city council chambers. There, it's uniquely
poised to bring the concerns of artists and culture makers to a place
where they can't be ignored by those in power — to amplify unheard
voices on a stage at the center of the city.
But Betti Ono's own voice is in danger of being silenced. Recently,
the gallery's founder and director, Anyka Barber, received notice from
her landlord — the City of Oakland — that her rent was going up by 60
percent. That works out to $22,000 more a year, and the gallery can't
afford it. According to Barber, when she moved into the space five years
ago, representatives from the city's real estate department told her
she would eventually be able to secure a long-term lease, and that the
city would provide support for improvements on the space to accommodate
her programming. But instead, the city has hiked the gallery's rent
every year.
Although Barber has been requesting a long-term lease from the start,
the city has only offered her one-year leases, she said. And since the
gallery's last lease ended in December, she has been operating on a
month-to-month basis — a situation that has greatly inhibited her
ability to plan for future programming and apply for outside funding or
loans, she said. The space is currently in limbo, she added, because
representatives of the city's real estate department have asked her to
hang on until they decide whether they can offer her a lower rate.
Meanwhile, she's had to turn down artists and cultural organizations
interested in collaborating. Soon, she'll be launching an online
fundraising campaign in hopes of keeping the gallery open.
"We don't have a lease, which means we don't have a home," Barber said
in a recent interview. "That's a really, really hard thing to say about
a space that has been intentional about creating space for people of
color in Oakland, especially Black people, to feel like they belong and
that they have just as much access to downtown and can celebrate
themselves in public and be seen and be accepted and be protected just
like any other group in the city should be able to do."
The challenges facing Betti Ono Gallery are not unique. Although
Oakland's art and culture scene has blossomed during the past decade and
gained widespread recognition for its vibrancy, a growing number of
arts and cultural spaces are currently at risk of displacement. In fact,
many have already shuttered, and artists and gallery owners are
increasingly worried that Oakland may eventually lose its artistic soul.
For the past eight months, Barber has been working to stem the tide of
displacement of Oakland's artists and cultural spaces as one of the
core leaders of Oakland Creative Neighborhoods Coalition (OCNC). Barber
co-founded the group in June with Katherin Canton, a network coordinator
with Emerging Arts Professionals San Francisco Bay Area, in hopes of
organizing around rising concerns over Oakland's arts community being
priced out of the city. (Canton has since stepped away from her
leadership role in the coalition due to time restraints, but well-known
Oakland arts advocate Eric Arnold, a former
Express staffer, has taken on a prominent role, among others.)
OCNC, which now has hundreds of members, initially came together in an
attempt to draw city officials' attention to the need for Oakland to
hire more staffers in its cultural arts department before the 2015-2017
city budget was finalized in June of last year. The city has been
without an arts commission since it disbanded in 2011.
The city's cultural affairs department used to be robust: From 2001
until 2003, it had thirteen employees working specifically on
arts-related matters. But since then, the department's staffing has
gotten consistently smaller. It also took a major cut during the
recession. Today, it only has three full-time employees and one
part-timer, with only two of those positions dealing directly with art
and artists.
Pamela Mays McDonald, an OCNC member and External Affairs chair for
Oakland Art Murmur, a nonprofit organization that supports and
represents Oakland galleries, addressed the issue in a recent email:
"The fact that the Cultural Arts Department has been kneecapped by
having no commission of responsible citizens for advocacy and oversight,
combined with being grossly underfunded and understaffed, leaves
culture workers here defenseless against the onslaught of
gentrification," she wrote. "There is no institutional understanding
that the arts are an economic engine for the area; they are not just a
cynical lure to make a neighborhood pretty to attract outside
investors."
Nonetheless, during last year's budget talks, the city council
declined to increase the size of the department or reestablish the arts
commission. Since then, OCNC has been working to narrow down a list of
the arts community's top priorities and concerns. So far, those have
mostly focused on the need for more affordable housing, rent security
for studios and creative spaces, and legislation that would immunize
pre-existing cultural communities from noise complaints by new
residents.
Another core concern for the coalition has been rallying artists to
provide input for the Downtown Oakland Specific Plan. The city's
extensive planning process has been engaging with community members to
produce a detailed vision for what downtown is going to look like if
developers continue to invest in Oakland — how tall buildings will be,
what kinds of occupants they will have, and how much affordable housing
will be built. OCNC aims to ensure that the arts community is
prominently positioned in that vision, so that the scene thrives in
Oakland over many more decades.
Those involved with OCNC, and many groups of artists organizing
alongside it, agree that now is a critical moment for Oakland's creative
contingent to make demands of the city, and for the city to be
responsive to those demands — before Oakland loses its cultural
identity.
"To be a world class city, to have all this cultural vibrancy and
'diversity' and all this specialness that everybody talks about, there
needs to be a clear strategy to protect that and to grow that," said
Barber. "I think our city leadership could really set the stage for some
really powerful new policies that could inform cities across the
country and across the world."
In the early Aughts, following the first dot-com crash, Oakland's
Uptown district was riddled with storefront vacancies, and rents were
extremely cheap. So artists began to move in: DIY spaces Mama Buzz and
Rock Paper Scissors Collective (RPSC) were some of the first to open up.
Others soon followed, and during the next decade, the neighborhood
transformed from a rarely walked, crime-ridden district to one with the
densest aggregation of galleries in Oakland.
During the mid- to late Aughts, the migration of artists from San
Francisco to Oakland started to hasten, as more artists were attracted
by the East Bay's affordable rents, its high prevalence of studio
spaces, and DIY art culture. And in recent years, during the latest tech
boom, San Franciscans have been moving across the bay in hordes,
thereby driving up rents even further and making Oakland's economic
climate less accommodating to the low incomes of artists.
As rent prices have soared, even landlords who had been sympathetic to
cultural spaces in the past are finding they can't afford not to rent
at market rate. And the depletion of affordable housing and workspaces
is creating a strong sense of insecurity for artists and cultural
professionals.
Last year, San Francisco's arts commission conducted a survey of
artists that work in the city and found that 72 percent of nearly six
hundred respondents said they had either been displaced or were facing
imminent displacement from their workspace, home, or both.
Last November, a taskforce appointed by Mayor Libby Schaaf to research
artist housing and workspaces conducted a similar survey in Oakland and
received more than nine hundred responses. The complete survey results
have yet to be published, but a memorandum that the task force submitted
to the mayor in late December outlined the main takeaways: While 70
percent of respondents said that they do not fear imminent displacement
in their workspaces or homes, the majority felt that workspace and
housing costs are the biggest challenge to being an artist in Oakland.
In addition, half of the respondents said they are paying month-to-month
for housing and workspace, rendering them particularly vulnerable,
especially for those in commercial spaces because they have no rent
control or rent protections.
Students and other activists marched last week to protest the destruction of the Alice Street Mural.
Kelley Kahn, who works on special projects for the mayor's office and
manages the task force, said in a recent interview that the results show
that we're currently in the midst of a critical window of time during
which the city has an opportunity to prevent the same kind of creative
exodus that San Francisco experienced. "The time is now to start
intervening," said Kahn. "And our interventions may actually have an
impact because the artists have not left yet."
But even before the survey was conducted, it was clear that Oakland's
artists were starting to face a crisis. For many, that realization came
in July when Rock Paper Scissors Collective, a gallery and nonprofit
community space that specializes in arts programming for low-income
youth, announced that it could no longer afford the space it had
occupied on the corner of 24th Street and Telegraph for eleven years.
The landlord, who had long worked with the collective's members to keep
the rent affordable, finally decided to raise the rent to market-rate —
more than triple what the collective had been paying. RPSC had been the
last founding member of the First Friday art walk and Art Murmur — its
organizing body of galleries — to still exist in the area.
"This space has become attractive to wealthier tenants
because
of the years of hard work we have put into building a community of
engaged artists, musicians, and performers, and as a reward we are being
kicked out to make way for a wealthier class of renters," read the July
10 announcement from RPSC. "Will they share RPSC's dedication to making
art accessible for everyone? Will they be as community-focused? Will
they stand in solidarity with the people of Oakland, as we have?"
The physical closure of RPSC (the collective is still doing
programming out of other arts spaces) was followed by a series of
similarly unsettling events. Also in July, the city declared that
Humanist Hall, a community space on 27th Street, between Broadway and
Telegraph Avenue, was a public nuisance due to noise complaints from
neighbors. The city imposed a $3,500 fine and threatened daily $500
penalties if the complaints should persist. Not long after, a longtime
West Oakland gospel church, Pleasant Grove Baptist Church, received
similar threats of fines for noise complaints about its choir. And in
September, as covered widely in the local press (including in the
Express),
a white Lake Merritt neighborhood resident called the police on a group
of Samba Funk African drummers playing at the lake, resulting in a
clash between drummers and Oakland police.
The issues collided at the fourth OCNC meeting in October, which was
held at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center. In the crowd of about one
hundred attendees was Oakland Museum of California director Lori
Fogarty; Pleasant Grove Baptist Church pastor Thomas A. Harris III;
Samba Funk African drummers; and curators, dancers, and visual artists
of all stripes — all airing grievances about Oakland's apparent cultural
shift. At one point, Pastor Harris took the floor to passionately
demand that the church community be included in the coalition's
campaign. In the moment of tension, Barber made it clear that she felt
every issue that had been brought to the table was part of one complex
struggle to fight displacement and cultural erasure in Oakland. "The
issues that are impacting the churches are the same issues that are
impacting the arts and culture community," she asserted. "It's not
separate."
Marvin X Jackmon, a West Oakland native, co-founder of the Black Arts
Movement, and seminal writer on Black radical politics, can often be
found across the street from Betti Ono Gallery, at the intersection of
Broadway and 14th Street, where for years he has set up his "academy on
da corner." There, Jackmon works to preserve Oakland's legacy of Black
radicalism — for which the 14th Street corridor has historically served
as an anchor — while urging pedestrians to wake up to the reality of the
Black struggle in America.
Marvin X Jackmon was a crucial proponent of the Black Arts Movement and Business District.
For the past year, Jackmon has also been an essential advocate for a
resolution — sponsored by city council President Lynette Gibson
McElhaney — to create a Black Arts Movement and Business District along
14th Street, from Oak Street to Frontage Road. The stretch includes
Betti Ono, Geoffrey's Inner Circle, the Niles Club, Joyce Gordon
Gallery, Club Vinyl, The Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts, and a
number of other longtime Black-owned businesses.
The Oakland City Council unanimously passed the resolution on January
19. As is, the official designation only entails signage for the
district — Jackmon envisions Pan-African flags flying above the street.
But proponents hope the council will also enact legislation that will
ensure community members have a powerful voice in how the district
develops and are protected from displacement. In a recent interview,
Jackmon said that his ultimate goal is to build a trust fund that would
allow for community members to acquire the buildings that their
businesses inhabit. "The main point is how do we maintain the longevity
of this district after what we went through in West Oakland, in the
Fillmore, and what Harlem is going through right now?" said Jackmon.
"It's the same thing, so even if you build it, will it stand? And how
long will it stand?"
At the January 19 council meeting, when the resolution was passed, a
number of prominent community members urged councilmembers to not let
the designation prove to be an empty gesture. "This is the first step,
and I appreciate it, but there's so much more that we need to do to
ensure that we don't become a relic and this Black Arts District is not
just superficial, but we actually have Black bodies that are living in
the city that can continue this legacy of artistic engagement and Black
businesses," said Carroll Fife of Oakland Alliance, a coalition for
racial, social, and economic justice. "Folks at the Malonga Casquelourd
Center ... will they be able to impact the decisions that could displace
them? Like the condo that is going up in front of the mural across the
street from [the Malonga Center], what kind of say will these
individuals who are part of this district, and who are business owners,
have in the development of the city moving forward?"
Fife was referring to a 126-unit condominium project that's planned
for a parking lot across from the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the
Arts, a historic home to some of Oakland's most vital dance communities,
such as Bantaba Dance Ensemble; Dance-A-Vision Entertainment; Diamano
Coura West African Dance Company; Dimensions Dance Theater; and AXIS
Dance Company, a company that works with disabled dancers. Members of
the Malonga community have opposed the development in part because it
would cover a large cultural mural that was the product of a three-year
effort by the mural arts organization Community Rejuvenation Project
(CRP). The mural project cost $80,000 — and nearly half of the money
came from Oakland's cultural funding program.
In a recent interview, CRP director Desi Mundo said that the city had
initially recommended the wall as a location for the mural because it
was blighted. To create the mural, CRP muralists interviewed Malonga's
artistic residents and Chinatown cultural leaders in order to create art
that would depict the cultural legacy of the area and its resilience in
the face of ongoing threats of gentrification. But only three months
after the mural's completion, Mundo learned about the development plans.
Desi Mundo is the director of the Community Rejuvenation Project.
At a planning commission meeting earlier this month, developer Maria
Poncel said her company, Bay Development, plans to help "kickstart" a
replacement mural project on the Laney College campus to make up for
CRP's loss. But during public comment, Mundo urged the commissioners to
delay the project's approval until Poncel offers the CRP a memorandum of
understanding concerning the funding.
"The idea that we're just gonna be capable of re-raising all that
money and that the developer won't be responsible for it, even though
they said that they would, feels very disingenuous to us," Mundo later
told me.
The planning commission, however, green-lighted the condo project
without requiring a firm commitment from the developer, thereby
seemingly not taking the community's concerns into account.
Since the project's approval, Mundo and others have filed an appeal of
the decision and are waiting to be notified of when it will appear in
front of the city council. They ask not that the project be denied, but
that the developer include community benefits in the project, including
funding 100 percent of the mural replacement costs. Supporters also
marched on City Hall on February 11 to draw attention to their concerns.
On the evening of January 13, a group of Uptown artists and curators
convened at the 25th Street Collective, pulling up about twenty
mismatched chairs around a snack table. They were nervous that the city
doesn't care about preserving their neighborhood.
Signature Development Group, run by Michael Ghielmetti, has been
buying up properties in the area in order to build condos. And, as the
Express
reported, the Oakland Planning and Building Department, at a planning
commission meeting last fall, attempted to sneak through a zoning change
that would have benefited Signature by allowing the developer to
construct taller buildings than would normally be allowed in the area
(see "Special Deal Would Benefit Influential Developer," 11/4). After an
uproar from gallerists, who are concerned about rising rents,
construction inconveniences, and depleted natural light, the city
postponed the decision.
Members of the Uptown artists contingent are also vying for their own
cultural district designation. But they hope to have artist-protection
legislation folded into the designation from the get-go, possibly
including a requirement that a certain percentage of each new
development in the area go toward cultural use. They are also
considering proposing that the city offer landlords incentives, like tax
breaks, in exchange for renting to cultural arts spaces at below
market-rate.
Vessel Gallery owners Lonnie Lee and Ken Ehrhardt are currently
spearheading an effort to write a resolution based on the community's
input, and rallying people to ask their city councilmembers to support
it. Their hope is that if it gets passed, it can serve as a template for
other cultural districts to be designated throughout the city.
Lonnie Lee spent six months renovating Vessel, her gallery in Uptown Oakland.
Lee and Ehrhardt moved into the neighborhood before much was there in
the way of art. Like many gallerists in Oakland, they completely
renovated the space, which had once been a stable for the Oakland Fire
Department's horses. Now, the worn wooden floors and vaulted ceilings
add a hip charm to the loft, which glows with natural light in the
afternoon and often has a pleasant breeze passing through it. Such
improvements, however, have also contributed to what makes the area
enticing to developers and wealthier tenants.
"[Developers] say, 'Oh, look at what the arts have done. Isn't it
cool? We want to buy property here. We want to be here because of them,"
Lee said.
For some, the Uptown gallerists' attempt to protect the area's art
scene is already too late. The 25th Street Collective — the venue for
the January 13 meeting and a shared incubating space for local makers —
will soon close. The collective's rent recently shot up by nearly 40
percent, and by August, all of the resident artists will have to be out
because they can no longer afford it.
But Hiroko Kurihara, founder of 25th Street Collective as well as
Oakland Makers — an organization that supports small-scale local
manufacturers and artisan producers — seems more concerned with the
bigger picture. She's worked at the intersection of manufacturing and
social enterprise for many years, and has also been an active member of
Mayor Schaaf's Artist Affordable Housing and Workspace task force, which
Kurihara has represented multiple times at meetings for the Downtown
Oakland Specific Plan.
Kurihara is interested in creating a citywide cultural district that
would try to reap funding benefits from the statewide California Arts
Commission budget. That way, Oakland's arts community won't be divided.
"There's a little pot of money, and then all these competing interests
end up squabbling over scraps," said Kurihara. "We can't do that if
we're gonna really try to coalesce and build a cultural arts-based
community."
But she's also concerned with how the housing crisis crucially plays
into the plight of Oakland's artists. She argues that without
development impact fees to pay for more affordable housing — a program
that the city has yet to approve — attempts at saving art spaces will be
futile, because there won't be any artists left who can afford to live
in Oakland.
"I understand that the mayor, her platform is 'Made in Oakland,' but
she really needs to be able to say 'Stayed in Oakland,'" said Kurihara
in a recent interview. "And I understand that right now, the city
doesn't have the revenue [to build affordable housing], and there's a
fear that if we don't create a transitional easing into what the impact
fees are going to be that development will cease. But I think if you
were to ask anybody — I mean anybody — if Oakland will remain dormant
[if impact fees go into effect], it's just not gonna happen."
Hiroko Kurihara at the latest Downtown Specific Plan community meeting.
The city has been studying the idea of requiring market-rate
developers to pay impact fees on new housing projects for more than a
year. Earlier this month, a city council committee voted to move forward
a plan to launch the fee program in September, but the full council is
not expected to officially approve the proposal until sometime in March —
at the earliest. Numerous other Bay Area cities, including both
Berkeley and Emeryville, already have such fees in place to pay for
affordable housing.
Kristi Holohan of RPSC said Schaaf recently assisted her in setting up
a potential deal for RPSC to move into the bottom floor of a new condo
project to be built by Signature Development Group on the parking lot
directly behind the building that RPSC used to be in. Holohan said it
would be a relief to finally find a space after months of being turned
down by landlords all over the city, but she is also concerned that if
there's no affordable housing in the area, it may no longer be an
appropriate place for RPSC's programming.
"Are they going to have affordable housing?" Holohan asked, while
painting a mural with youth in San Francisco. "Because we serve a
demographic that is really diverse."
At the January 22 opening of the newly expanded San Francisco Arts
Commission galleries, attendees could barely move through the three
exhibitions. The main gallery, which featured work by recently deceased
East Bay artist Susan O'Malley, was packed so densely that you could
barely hear internationally celebrated performance artist Guillermo
Goméz-Peña giving a monologue in the center. Housed in the War Memorial
Veterans Building, the galleries are a gorgeous new addition to the
city's arts landscape, yet the support that the galleries are meant to
offer to local artists has arrived a few years too late. Most of the
local artists who show there will likely be commuting from the East Bay.
Over the past few years, San Francisco has partnered with
organizations like ArtSpan and The Community Arts Stabilization Trust
(CAST) to preserve what's left of its arts community. ArtSpan organizes
art exhibitions in underutilized or vacant spaces in San Francisco. CAST
is a nonprofit that uses foundation money to purchase buildings that
are already inhabited by important cultural hubs, then leases the
buildings back to them at an affordable rate with the intention of
eventually selling it to them at the same price that the nonprofit
originally paid.
Joshua Simon — who is CAST's treasurer and is the executive director
of the East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation (a nonprofit
community development organization) and a member of Mayor Schaaf's task
force on artist housing and workspace — described the problem that CAST
addresses as a "space chase." That's when buying property is just
financially out of reach for arts organizations, leaving them
perpetually vulnerable. CAST attempts to close that gap by buying an
artspace and helping the arts organization build itself financially
until it's ready to purchase the space at the same price that CAST paid
for it. In the last few years, CAST has acquired buildings for San
Francisco's CounterPulse and Luggage Store Gallery.
The memorandum that Schaaf's task force submitted in December outlines
the top strategies for preserving the arts in Oakland based on case
studies from across the country. Most of them focus on ways for art
spaces to achieve ownership and long-term affordability. One of the most
promising strategies is to create an acquisition program for Oakland
that's modeled like CAST. Other strategies include creating community
land trusts through which artists could collectively own properties;
leasing underutilized city-owned buildings to artists at affordable
rates (until tenants are found); incentivizing private developers to
offer affordable, long-term artists spaces by using zoning tools; and
greatly increasing available technical assistance and educational
resources for artists. According to Kelley Kahn of the mayor's task
force, the city is currently devising programming for training artists
and gallerists on topics such as how to negotiate a long-term protective
lease, how to build a business plan, and how to get funding from
foundations.
"Where Oakland is and where San Francisco is, I think there's a lot
more hope for Oakland," Schaaf said in a recent interview. "I think we
are intervening at a much earlier stage than San Francisco did. We are
absolutely looking to learn lessons from San Francisco and avoid the
displacement."
But according to Kahn and Schaaf, in order to move forward with many
of these strategies, it will be crucial to reinstate the city's arts
commission in order to work through complicated details. Kahn also
pointed out that the last Oakland arts commission stopped meeting
because they were having trouble reaching quorum. And she thinks that's
because the commission had very little power to influence the city and
rarely dealt with heated issues. She and Schaaf also both want the city
to resurrect the Cultural Affairs manager position that was cut a few
years ago, and for the council to then heed both the commission and the
cultural affairs manager's recommendations.
"We also need someone who can just be mindful of the very issues we're
all talking about," said Kahn. "About what does it mean to be an artist
in Oakland? What kind of support can the city give them? What can we do
from a real estate perspective to improve their ability to stay in
Oakland? What can we do with our own arts and cultural space that we
own? There's a broader scope of work that needs to be held by this unit
than they're currently capable of doing."
Schaaf said the city received a National Endowment for the Arts grant
for the purpose of creating a cultural plan to preserve Oakland's arts
and to reestablish the city's arts commission, but that process hasn't
started because Oakland needs a Cultural Affairs manager to lead it.
Plus, the commission can't be reinstated until the cultural arts
department hires more staff to support it, she said. "I don't think
there's anyone who does not support having a cultural arts commission,"
said Schaaf. "It's just that we don't want to ask people to volunteer
their time if there's no staff support to provide them the assistance."
Schaaf, who has been mayor since January 2015, said she plans to bring
forth legislation to the council on February 23 to reinstate the
Cultural Affairs manager position.
Meanwhile, the full results and analysis of the task force's survey
will be publicly released in about a month, although it could be longer,
according to Kahn. Schaaf said the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, a major
funder of the arts, has agreed to partner with the city to move forward
with some of the strategies presented by her task force. The Rainin
Foundation recently formed its own working group to conduct a study of
Oakland's art ecosystem to identify how best to support those
strategies, said Schaaf. When asked for a general timeline, she offered
only that "work is underway."
At the most recent presentation for the Downtown Oakland Specific
Plan, which was held at the Malonga Casquelourd Center, the plans
presented were meant to reflect adjustments made based on community
input. For example, in the uptown area (technically called Koreatown
Northgate), planners had applied a "surgical" approach to infill
development so as not to displace galleries in the area, and plans for
the 14th Street corridor were titled "Black Arts Movement and Business
District." The adjustments were somewhat promising, but seemed like baby
steps to many.
As he presented, the planning head, Victor Dover, projected a slide
that read "Development Without Displacement" in large, bold letters. But
toward the end of the lengthy presentation, an older Black woman could
not wait any longer. She walked in front of the audience to exit, and
voiced angry concerns about local, Black-owned establishments having
already been displaced because of development.
Soon, Betti Ono could be the next of those to go.
"We need something implemented right now. Today," Barber told me.
"We've needed it before the lease expired, and we've needed it for four
or five years, so to say just hold on and at the same time we can't even
do business is damaging."
"We're being pushed out," she continued. "We're being priced out, and we need the city to act now. What are you waiting for?"
Correction: The original version of this report erroneously referred to AXIS Dance Company as Axis Dance Group.
Bert Johnson
Bert Johnson
Bert Johnson
Bert Johnson
l
L
Wish
I Could Tell You the Truth, Essays 
Land
of My Daughters: Poem's 1995-2005
