by Steve Early
Locally this scenario seemed fanciful to some. But Shaw’s projected time frame for Oaklandization became far more plausible after Richmond won a five-city competition to provide additional space for the University of California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). Lobbyists for Richmond, including then city council member Jeff Ritterman, Mayor McLaughlin, and City Manager Lindsay, steered UC toward a Richmond site it already owned several miles south of Point Molate. Unfortunately LBNL then lost the federal funding necessary to pay for its relocation, but UC-Berkeley’s powerful chancellor, Nicholas Dirks, reconceived the project on a far grander scale. He announced plans to build in Richmond a new educational and research complex that would be the school’s biggest expansion in 147 years, adding 40 percent to its existing campus infrastructure and creating a student and staff population there of ten thousand.
According to Dirks, this Berkeley Global Campus (BGC) would function as an “international hub where some of the world’s leading universities and high-tech companies will work side-by-side in a campus setting . . . advancing knowledge in bioscience, health, energy development, and data studies”—all funded by hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of private investment. If sufficient private capital was raised, the BGC would have a bigger Richmond workforce than the Chevron refinery and Kaiser’s downtown medical center. Describing its local impact, Dirks likened his planned new campus to the Kaiser shipyards during World War II. It would be a major “catalyst for developing the city’s shoreline into a vibrant mixture of high-intensity light industrial, commercial, and residential uses.”4
During the 2014 municipal election, incumbent city council members from Bates to Butt to Team Richmond all claimed credit for luring LBNL to Richmond. Yet Dirks’s change in plan raised concerns about one likely consequence of university expansion—namely, an influx of upscale, white-collar young people fleeing the gentrification of San Francisco and Oakland but contributing to it in Richmond. As BGC development manager Terezia Nemeth told the San Francisco Business Times, one of the key “benefits of the Richmond location is that there is housing available . . . probably the most reasonably priced housing in the Bay Area at this point.”5
What remains reasonably priced—and for how long—depends on the size of your pocketbook. “The Richmond real estate market is exploding,” reported Joe Eskenazi for San Francisco Magazine after finding that a Richmond home selling for $225,000 in 2013 was going for $375,000 two years later. “You cannot underprice your home,” real estate agent Luther Martin told him. “You will get multiple offers. The market dictates price.”6 This sellers’ market was good news for older homeowners able to cash in and move out. It was not promising for residents generally because, except for neighboring San Pablo, Richmond still has the lowest median household income of 101 cities in the nine-county Bay Area. Among Richmond Latinos, annual family income is about five thousand dollars less than the median, making their search for affordable rental units or homes to buy even more challenging.
Two East Bay organizations—Local 3299 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society—helped shape the emerging debate about housing, employment, and the BGC’s impact on both. Their partners in the campaign to “Raise Up Richmond” included the Contra Costa Interfaith Supporting Community Organization (CCISCO), the ACCE, and the RPA. Researchers at the Haas Institute produced a glossy fifty-page study entitled “Anchor Richmond.” It weighed the potential costs and benefits of UC expansion in a place with “a concentration of low-wage jobs, an education system unable to prepare students to access opportunity, a heavy environmental health burden, and housing costs that outpace income.” A companion report, “Belonging and Community in Richmond,” warned that the risk of displacement was greatest among sixty-seven hundred tenants who earn less than $35,000 annually and already spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing.
Local 3299 based its BGC strategy advice on many years of collective bargaining for twenty-two thousand UC-system workers. These include several hundred Richmond residents, largely black and Latino, who are employed as janitors, groundskeepers, and service workers at UC-Berkeley. According to AFSCME, their labor has been so undervalued in the past that some could even qualify for public assistance. In 2014, Local 3299 won a new collective bargaining agreement, improving pay, benefits, and conditions, but only after statewide strike activity. One unresolved issue was subcontracting. The union’s warning to Richmond reflected that experience: “When the university plans a major expansion in your midst, get all its promises in writing!”
LOCAL 3299 CAREFULLY DOCUMENTED the university’s growing reliance on private contractors. This trend has adversely affected immigrants and people of color by relegating them to the bottom tier of a two-tier workforce. The union unearthed nearly forty-five contracts covering thousands of workers providing custodial services, groundskeeping, building maintenance, food services, parking lot work, and related services. Some of these long-term contingent laborers earn half the pay of their union-represented counterparts. According to AFSCME, many have been hired during the same time that direct employment of UC service workers has shrunk despite enrollment growth and facility expansion.7
With good reason, AFSCME members in Richmond feared that the university itself or its private sector BGC partners would opt for further outsourcing. Contracting out would leave BGC employees doing the same job as career UC workers, just a few miles away in Berkeley, with less pay, few benefits, and no job rights. At Richmond church briefings about the BGC, in campus meetings with students, and in rally speeches, AFSCME members made a strong case for the City of Richmond being proactive vis-à-vis their employer. “UC likes to staff with temporary contract workers,” warned Luster Howard, a husky, bearded Local 3299 leader who earns sixty thousand dollars a year as a driver for LBNL. “I have friends and family who need job opportunities. We already have plenty of McJobs in Richmond. We need better ones.”
Local 3299 also includes Latino immigrants who live in Richmond and landed union jobs on the Berkeley campus after years of personal struggle. One frequent public speaker on their behalf was Maricruz Manzanarez, formerly an undocumented worker but now a UC-Berkeley janitor, Richmond homeowner, and mother of three children. “I came up from nothing to make a life in this country that would be better for my kids,” she told her student and community allies. Based on her union experience, she warned that it would take escalating pressure on UC to get a community benefits deal that is legally enforceable. “We have to make it happen,” she said. “They’re not going to do it out of goodwill.”
Feeling pressure from the “Fight for $15” movement locally and nationally, UC president Janet Napolitano did raise hourly wages to thirteen dollars in October 2015 for lower-paid members of its direct workforce of two hundred thousand and contract employees on ten campuses. By late 2017, further increases would bring them to fifteen dollars an hour. However, Napolitano still balked at changing UC contracting practices.8 The university continued to use private firms for permanent staffing needs, leading AFSCME to file unfair labor practice charges over wage cuts and management retaliation against workers who protested their employment status. The union also organized a successful campaign to persuade invited speakers to boycott UC-Berkeley until one hundred subcontracted custodians and parking attendants were offered direct employment with the university.
In Sacramento, AFSCME got the Democratic majority in the state legislature to pass a bill requiring that subcontracted workers receive equal pay for equal work. But California’s labor-backed governor Jerry Brown vetoed it, so AFSCME members in Richmond had no recourse other than future collective bargaining over the issue or securing a “community benefits agreement” (CBA). By a vote of 5 to 1, the Richmond City Council, including Mayor Butt, urged UC-Berkeley to sign such an agreement with community stakeholders covering the BGC. According to the council, its terms should include local h
iring and job training goals, living wage standards, use of unionized construction labor, respect for collective bargaining rights of campus workers, use of local businesses as vendors, and creation of an “anti-displacement fund” to subsidize the development of affordable housing units and protect low-income tenants from gentrification of adjoining neighborhoods.
After the council’s resolution, a UC-appointed twenty-five-member working group held monthly meetings in Richmond, open to the public, to consider such proposals. The City of Richmond, local businesses, two local labor councils, faith-based and community organizations (including the ACCE and CCISCO), and neighborhood groups were all represented. The group’s coordinator, UC-Berkeley community relations director Ruben Lizardo, pledged that this advisory body’s mission would include “evaluating strategies to mitigate displacement of local residents.” Working-group recommendations landed on Dirks’s desk by the end of 2015. Seven months later, Dirks was still waffling on what commitments the university could make. While awaiting a more definitive response, AFSCME tried but failed to collect enough signatures in Richmond to put a measure before voters designed to give CBA campaigners more leverage in their dealings with UC-B. This ballot initiative would have required developers of a city-assisted project, like the Global Campus, to get voter approval for any related tax breaks or public borrowing.
While supporting the concept of community benefits, Mayor Butt predicted that the city council’s proposed “displacement fund” would be a nonstarter with the university. According to Butt, “There are a lot creative ways UC and Richmond can collaborate to address affordable housing, but a cash transfer is probably not going to be one of them.” He chided ACCE, whose political action committee had endorsed him for mayor, for failing to understand that “UC-Berkeley is not Chevron. It is a cash-strapped public agency with limited resources.” In late August 2016, Chancellor Dirks cited lack of funding as his reason for indefinitely suspending the multibillion-dollar BGC project.9
The mayor also came to the defense of Guadalupe Campos, a Mexican immigrant who owns two Bissell Avenue apartment buildings in Richmond and nine more in four other cities. ACCE members, including tenants of Campos, trekked to Millbrae, south of San Francisco, to picket his home over recent rent increases. With ACCE help, about thirty tenants also conducted a rent strike, protesting the same 20 percent hike. After Butt intervened, Campos and his son, who manages the buildings, scaled the increase back to 15 percent. This left most tenants still facing a $150 per month increase and ACCE organizer David Sharples questioning whether we could expect Mayor Butt “to swoop in and negotiate with every landlord every time they jack up the rent on a vulnerable tenant.”10
In an e-mail exchange with Sharples, Butt said that he and the ACCE shared “a fundamental belief that the inequality gap in America is harming us all and that lifting people out of poverty in Richmond and the Bay Area is an objective that will make all of our lives better.” Rather than rent control, which he called “a failed experiment” in other cities, Butt favored “supply side solutions” like setting up a community land trust to acquire properties for both rental and sale to low-income people and using social impact bonds to acquire vacant properties that could be rehabilitated and resold to them.
Above all, Richmond needed “increased economic vitality to create jobs and provide more housing.” The policies advocated by ACCE will have the opposite effect, Butt argued. “They would destroy Richmond’s economy in the name of mitigating poverty.”
As for his old allies in the RPA, Butt urged them to “support the level of construction needed to increase Richmond’s housing stock, particularly low-income housing.” Butt noted that “no significant market rate housing has been built in Richmond for over a decade.” Yet, in his view, RPA council members raised unreasonable objections to Shea Homes, a market rate, luxury condo project whose construction would generate $14 million worth of “in-lieu fees” to build affordable housing elsewhere in the city. He also accused progressives of being “opposed to a 155-unit affordable housing project because it was ‘too dense.’” His bottom line: “You can’t have it both ways: guaranteed low rents and no new housing or only low density projects.”11
A PAINFUL PERSONAL ISSUE
Butt’s arguments against rent control were not persuasive among Richmond reformers of more modest means. Local rent increases at rates far greater than inflation or average wage growth were a painful personal problem for some longtime activists. Even Gayle McLaughlin, Butt’s city hall predecessor—now living on half her previous income as mayor—expressed personal anxiety over her future as a Richmond renter.
Andres Soto, the RPA member who ran with McLaughlin for city council in 2004, had rented a nice three-bedroom house in Richmond with a front yard, back yard, and fruit trees, for twenty-nine years. By 2010, when he was evicted, he was paying $1,100 a month. Soto’s subsequent search for a similarly affordable rental place proved fruitless, so he ended up moving twenty miles away to a mobile home in Benicia, in Solano County.12 Like Soto, Stephanie Hervey has roots in Richmond and wanted to stay. But she was evicted from her apartment in May 2014 after a dispute with the landlord over poor maintenance and unsafe conditions. A year later, the forty-two-year-old single mother of two teenagers who belongs to both Black Mobilization Organization Education Richmond (BMOER) and the RPA, was still living with friends. “For two bedrooms, there is no affordable housing in Richmond that we can find,” she reported, “that does not have a one-year waiting list.”13
Alma Rodriquez and Roberto Cortes were threatened with displacement and became rent control advocates when their landlord suddenly announced a four-hundred-dollar-a-month increase—from $850 to $1,250—effective August 1, 2015. Roberto earns eighteen dollars an hour doing construction, with little prospect of getting an equivalent 47 percent boost in his wages to cover his increased housing costs.
To drum up participation in city hall hearings and meetings of tenants like these, ACCE organizer Melvin Willis went door to door, day after day, in apartment complexes throughout the city. Willis is a veteran of soda-tax and anti-foreclosure campaigning who belongs to BMOER. A native of the city, he is funded by the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, which carries on the work of ACORN. (The latter’s national network of low-income community organization imploded in 2009 after external attacks and internal problems.)
Under the leadership of statewide campaign director Amy Schur and Contra Costa County coordinator David Sharples, ACCE became a key catalyst of local resistance to bank foreclosures and then rent hikes. Unlike the low-budget RPA, which receives no foundation funding and rarely has full-time campaign staff, ACCE has plenty of both. In Richmond alone it was able to field two part-time and two full-time organizers in addition to Willis. With a claimed membership of ten thousand in six cities, ACCE operated with a budget of $2.5 million a year, primarily funded by social change foundations and some unions.
The critical doorstep conversations that Willis and other ACCE organizers had with tenants in some of Richmond’s toughest neighborhoods enabled them to identify people with landlord problems, then get them registered to vote and to sign pro–rent control petitions. In some cases, those canvassed were willing to attend a public meeting or session of the city council. Perhaps further on down the line they would even become dues-paying ACCE members or new local leaders. As a result of this issue-oriented outreach, ACCE boosted its local membership by several hundred.
GOING TOO FAST OR TOO SLOW?
On June 23, turnout efforts by the ACCE, the RPA, and other groups packed the city council chamber. The meeting got off to a grumpy start. Tom Butt objected to changing the agenda so that nearly forty signed-up speakers could weigh in on rent control earlier rather than later in the evening. A city hall staff presentation by City Manager Lindsay proposed a “go slow” approach that offered less immediate protection for tenants. The largely pro–rent control crowd was not sympathetic to gradualism.
“I
f we take strong action now,” argued Richmond resident Rebecca Auerbach, “we are free to scale back, but if we do less, and we discover later that our actions were too weak, it will be too late. If rents skyrocket, we cannot lower them. If struggling families lose their homes, we cannot give their homes back to them. If our community is torn apart, we will have no way to put it back together. Please don’t let this opportunity go by. There won’t be another.”
Gayle McLaughlin seemed reinvigorated by the ACCE-assisted surge in favor of rent control. Calling the council meeting audience “amazing,” she confided that it brought “back memories of meetings related to the Chevron fire and the proposed, and now rejected, Point Molate casino.” The former mayor reminded her council colleagues and constituents that “Richmond has gained prestige nationwide by showcasing itself as a city that cares for all our residents.” It would be a mistake, she said, to “sacrifice that prestige now” based on “wishful thinking” that “market forces, apart from our involvement, will solve the problem of affordable housing.”14
For his part, Butt began to see his latest disagreements with the RPA as “signaling an end to a long and productive working relationship.” He reminded his E-Forum readers that “when the RPA came to town, they set themselves up as the antidote to corruption and old style power politics in Richmond.” Now, he lamented, the “RPA has taken on many of the trappings of the power politics they once eschewed.” Privately he was even more scathing, telling me that RPA leaders were “only interested in Richmond issues that fit their narrow interests.”15 Publicly Butt expressed resentment, and not for the first time, about his council colleagues’ alleged unwillingness “to share credit for anything good that has happened in Richmond.” In his sarcastic rendition of its publicity claims, the RPA “single-handedly saved Richmond, beat Chevron, won every election (including mine), and will go on the save the world.”
