Could tearing up an Oakland freeway undo decades of racial injustice?

More than 40 years ago, Interstate 980 sliced Oakland down the middle. Wider than a city block in some places, the freeway’s builders justified it as concrete progress—a pipeline for distant commuters and shoppers to glide conveniently into downtown Oakland. But for many locals, the freeway descended like a curtain, separating West Oakland from the rest of the city, displacing thousands and driving out local businesses.

By the time the freeway was completed in 1985, more than 500 mostly Black-owned homes, four churches, and dozens of businesses in the so-called “Harlem of the West” had been destroyed. Thousands of people were displaced, and many more were physically cut off from the economic opportunities of downtown Oakland’s employers. The freeway became yet another source of smog and noise pollution rattling West Oaklanders’ windows. Decades later—once its impact was fully realized—urban planners began describing I-980 as one of Oakland’s main drivers of inequality. 

Some of the people who lost their homes to make room for the freeway worked at the Port of Oakland. Some may have lost their jobs as a result. Altogether, their descendants may have lost hundreds of millions of dollars in wealth because they weren’t allowed to see their homes appreciate in value and keep investing in their community. 

In 2022, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg toured West Oakland with Congresswoman Barbara Lee and then-Mayor Libby Schaaf. Upon seeing I-980, he called it “a literal gash on the neighborhood.” Schaaf previously called the freeway a “scar on our urban fabric.”

Today there’s a growing consensus that I-980 isn’t a crucial link in the highway system and that the land it occupies might have better uses. Caltrans is slowly moving forward with plans that could culminate in the removal of the freeway, or some other big changes to the area. To help Caltrans understand what Oaklanders want, the agency has hired a team of planners, engineers, and community consultants who can engage with the freeway’s complicated history and ensure the voices of longtime residents and communities of color are heard. 

Caltrans’ consultant team will be led by WSP, a professional consulting company focused on engineering and construction, and Arup, a construction, engineering, and design firm. Local groups that will do on-the-ground outreach, listening, and research include Urban Strategies Council, a policy research organization focused on communities of color, RBA Creative, a communication firm known for its cultural competency, the West Oakland Health Center, a neighborhood health, food, and education center, and the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, an environmental justice nonprofit.

Called Vision 980, Caltrans staff running the project told the city’s Bicyclist and Pedestrian Advisory Commission last fall that Oakland residents will have the opportunity to propose any idea for the freeway’s future. This could include keeping it as is, capping it like the Boston Big Dig, or tearing it up and building something new like housing or parks. 

City officials are excited about the prospect of removing I-980, hyping the potential benefits in the city’s Downtown Oakland Specific Plan and Oakland Bicycle Plan. Removal, they say, would reduce pervasive racial and economic disparities by relieving the city’s housing shortage with 5,000 new units. 

But not everyone thinks the answer is so simple. Many locals told The Oaklandside that building significant market-rate housing could further gentrify West Oakland, and doing so under the aegis of urban renewal and racial healing would make a mockery of these goals. 

As the process of creating a new vision for I-980 gears up, we decided to dig into the history of the freeway, its impact on the community, and what locals would like to see happen. We spoke to planners working on Vision 980, consultants helping Caltrans understand community perspectives, and West Oaklanders and advocates who want cleaner air, safer roads, affordable homes, and more economic opportunities. 

Long-time West Oakland residents say people who suffered most from freeway inequities need to be at the forefront

Originally imagined as an approach to a second bridge linking Oakland and San Francisco, I-980 was developed after World War II with little concern for how it would impact West Oakland residents. 

At the time, many Black and brown neighborhoods in the Bay Area were designated as “blighted” and needing redevelopment. This gave the government the excuse it needed to seize land through eminent domain. With the dual expansion of the federal highway system in the 1950s and 1960s and the move to the suburbs by white residents, city and state leaders were focused on building new infrastructure to cater to this new suburban population. They used their power to build highways to connect suburbanites with downtown Oakland and San Francisco as fast as possible. The needs of communities they would bypass along the way were an afterthought.

Ernestine Nettles was born in the Lower Bottoms area of West Oakland after her family moved there from the south in 1944. The big infrastructure projects like I-980 negatively affected her health and peace of mind while growing up, she said. 

In the 1950s, new freight train tracks, I-880, and the Cypress Freeway were all built next to schools and homes against the protests of the mostly Black population. Nettles, whose family lived on Union Street and was directly affected by this activity, is worried the removal of I-980 will bring more of the same to the community. 

“The noise of the late-night trains [and cars] right next to our homes disrupted our sleep,” Nettles told The Oaklandside. “No one cared about how [the freeways] would pollute the air. They did not care about the kids with asthma. It was an opportunity to help big business, and that’s exactly what it did.”

Nettles said the community lost access to sustainable, cheap food when the government moved some people from their Victorian homes into public housing. People could no longer keep summer gardens in their backyards and can fruits and vegetables to eat year-round.  

West Oakland residents whose homes were bought out by the government to make way for redevelopment may have also received a lower amount than they were worth because they lacked political power and because of prevailing racist policies. 

Robert Self, a history professor at Brown University who wrote a book about post-World War II Oakland called American Babylon, told The Oaklandside that highway construction redistributed wealth from urban residents, many of them people of color, and enriched suburban residents who were mostly white. Self said that even if Black residents had received a fair market value for their home, “near-downtown property in those years had plunged in value, so it was a buyer’s market.” 

A lot of this reduction in value was the result of racist policies. As Self explains in his book, “white mayors, city councils, and business leaders from Baltimore to Chicago, Cleveland and Oakland, worried about black neighborhoods encroaching on central businesses districts,” designating their neighborhoods as “slums” or blighted” after decades of forced segregation into West Oakland made conditions worse. 

Black residents in Oakland at the time of the highway expansion were also keenly aware of the value that they had already invested in their homes, said Self. Many Black World War II soldiers sent their paychecks to their families living in West Oakland to buy these homes. 

When ground broke on I-980 in 1962—it was at first identified as the western end of Highway 24—those in the community who opposed it seemed powerless to do anything. But by the 1970s the tide had turned. According to Elaine Brown’s A Taste of Power, the Black Panther Party and other activists created a powerful coalition, stalling freeway construction. Later, the community negotiated with then-Gov. Jerry Brown to give Black people jobs to complete it. They also wanted work building the new City Center and Federal Building, among other benefits, including preserving the African American Museum. Substantial and long-term economic benefits and jobs failed to materialize, but activists managed to slow I-980. Around the same time, two young attorneys, Stephen Berzon and Roger Clay Jr., managed to convince a judge to halt the bulldozers that were tearing down homes and leveling land for the freeway.

By the time the government got back to work, the community had been able to shape the freeway in some important ways. Perhaps the biggest change was the decision to hide the freeway in a trench instead of building an elevated freeway bridge that would have posed an even starker barrier between downtown and West Oakland. Still, the freeway was completed in the early 1980s.

Saturu Ned, an Oakland resident who joined the Black Panther Party in 1968 and worked at the party’s community school, said Caltrans needs to find the families who were harmed when they lost their homes and businesses and figure out what will make them and their descendants whole. 

Part of the Black Panther Party’s platform was for people to live in “decent housing fit for the shelter of human beings,” said Ned. The homes Black people owned in West Oakland were beautiful and well-kept, and the community was thriving before the freeway displaced them. Any development project that dares to say it will right the wrongs of the past needs to follow the most progressive model possible that makes people, and the community who lost those homes whole, said Ned. 

An example of the kind of project he’d like to see more of in West Oakland is Elaine Brown’s affordable housing and commercial project on 7th Street. Called “The Black Panther,” the building is slated to host businesses and an urban garden employing formerly incarcerated people and include affordable rental housing. 

Caltrans’ consultants should avoid centering West Oakland homeowners when they consider the needs of the local community, said Ned. Whereas most of the homes in the area were owned by Black and brown families up through the early 2000s, Ned believes many were purchased by large corporate landlords and other investors, especially after the financial crisis in 2008. Investigations by the East Bay Express, San Francisco Chronicle, and others have found that large landlords did buy up hundreds of properties across West Oakland after the Great Recession. 

Successful outreach might require talking to more renters as well as people who used to live in the neighborhood but no longer do. If the outreach is attentive to past harms, Ned said it could provide opportunities for low-income families, seniors, single parents, and teachers. 

Measure the harms of the past to repair the future

Randolph Charles Belle is in charge of outreach for Vision 980. The 55-year-old Oakland resident says a lot of community members are inherently distrustful of government and big projects that could impact their neighborhoods. But he thinks he has a good method of surfacing these concerns.

“The community sentiment is always going to be that a transportation infrastructure project is going to be harmful to the Black community,” he said in an interview. 

Belle hopes to address these concerns by leading a process that honestly quantifies the past harms done to the community when I-980 was built. This will allow Caltrans, Oakland, and the community to consider ways of repairing these harms.

Other cities have tried to use this kind of method to reverse the legacies of racism, with mixed results. For example, in Portland, Oregon city and state officials researched home values and the earnings of businesses that were displaced by eminent domain to build a highway and a hospital expansion from 1960 to 1980. They created a program to help Black families return to the neighborhood by giving preference to them above other applicants for rental housing. Qualifying families can also get a $100,000 down-payment loan that is fully forgivable after 30 years to buy a home. The program hasn’t fully lived up to its promise: a Willamette Week story reported in 2022 that less than 100 people had returned to the Albina area neighborhood in about eight years, mostly due to a convoluted down-payment loan process. Albina, like West Oakland, also had a majority Black population for most of the 20th century. 

The Equitable Black Berkeley project is using a similar one-on-one outreach method through interviews with Black people displaced to build BART stations in the 1960s. The city has a “certificate of preference” program that prioritizes home-buying applications from displaced or evicted minority families from its previously redlined neighborhoods.

For Vision 980, Belle says outreach will be combined with hard data and financial forecasting to create a “data narrative” so that people can see the lifetime costs of racism. Once it’s quantified, the option is there to repair the harm through economic and housing programs. 

Belle said that West Oakland has been “the poster child” of gentrification in Oakland, which has led to a lot of cynicism in the Black community about development. However, he believes this cynicism doesn’t necessarily mean the community will reject freeway removal if they become real economic partners with the city. 

“If Caltrans is looking at healing, they have made the first move, so we’re going to push them and help them along in the same direction,” he said. 

Working with Belle to gather community input is David Harris from the Urban Strategies Council, Robert Phillips, the CEO of the West Oakland Health Center, and Margaret Gordon of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project.

The group will focus the beginning of its outreach on the “super OGs,” as Belle described them, elders who lived through I-980’s construction and still live in the neighborhood. 

Brian Beveridge, the co-executive director of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, told The Oaklandside that equity in housing development at the I-980 location likely means “100% affordable housing with a reasonable height limit,” maybe eight-stories tall with extra discounts for old West Oakland families if they want to rent or buy there. 

Most importantly, Beveridge said this project, like others focusing on the environment, transportation, and land use, should reduce the cost of living for poor people. This will require developers to think differently than in other parts of the city.  

“Equity standards are not finite but are context specific. [You have to] commit public resources to projects that focus on the creation of public benefit rather than economic growth. Rebuild communities and reduce the cost of living for poor and working-class people,” he said.

Some West Oaklanders oppose removing I-980, saying there are more direct ways to improve people’s lives

David Peters, the founder of the Black Liberation Walking Tour and the West Oakland Cultural Action Network, remembers being five years old and seeing houses in the Hoover Foster area flattened to make way for I-980, wondering why it was only happening in his backyard. 

In recent years, he said he has come to understand how these memories activate a traumatic response around conversations of property values and Black people’s self-reliance. 

“A feeling of helplessness lives with me. I have an irrational reaction when we start talking about the community’s ability to have some input and say in what gets built, what doesn’t get built, what gets torn down, and what doesn’t get torn down,” said Peters. “It reaffirmed for me that the government, our city, can wreck my neighborhood, displace us, and we don’t get no say in it.”

Peters said small business districts never recovered from the era of urban renewal. On Martin Luther King Jr. Way, he sees glimmers of hope, but the businesses are a far cry from what used to be there. He is skeptical Vision 980 will bring residents a sense of justice. 

“There’s a possibility for redress, but it’s gonna be a hard-ass fight,” he said. “If money doesn’t flow back to those exact people who had their property seized, they’re paying lip service.

Desiree McSwain-Mims, from the Black Organizing Project, a grassroots Black leadership nonprofit based in West Oakland, is constantly talking to members of the community. She said that Vision 980 has a credibility problem right out of the gate because it did not originate from the community. Rather, it’s an idea dreamed up by planners and developers.

“If community members are not asking for this, I think it’s a miss,” said McSwain-Mims. “There are other things that the community can use. There’s been devastating school closures. It’s a food desert. The housing is terrible,” she said. “Even thinking about a commercial space that large in that area feels disconnected between where Oakland is now and what the city’s needs are.” 

But if it happens, McSwain-Mims said she’d be interested in a project that would have “truly affordable housing,” meaning over 80% of units would be priced affordably. And she thinks it would need other community benefits, like a mental health clinic for the unhoused. 

Dieudonné Brou, who works on juvenile justice reform at the Urban Peace Movement, says gentrification has forced friends of his to move away. He’s wary of what removing I-980 would mean for West Oakland and would rather see the state invest by improving the existing housing stock. 

“Folks are already used to the freeway. Put the money into the neighborhoods. Oakland’s got potholes everywhere,” Brou said. “Fix buildings that are not up to code. Turn empty lots into parks.”

Empress Xia Nei, a chef who owns the Third Eye bakery on 29th Street, said that while lots of new housing has been built in Oakland in recent years, this has not made the city safer or better for its residents. 

“How do we really create change? It takes real investment in our community, like how the Black Panthers took investment in our people, and [the I-980 building] took that away from us,” she said.

Vanessa Riles, from East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, a social justice nonprofit that has negotiated community benefits agreements for major development projects, said tearing up the freeway and building a new neighborhood would have its own harmful impact on the environment. 

“There definitely needs to be some real conversation about how folks’ health and safety are gonna be protected, especially if there’s now gonna be additional development and construction happening,” she said. 

Riles said she looks forward to working in coalition with other local organizations to make sure regular people are heard. 

Leo Bazile, a City Council member in the 1980s who remembers the twists and turns construction of the I-980 took, has perhaps the most pessimistic view. He told The Oaklandside he doesn’t think removing the freeway will benefit the community most affected by its rise 40 years ago. Instead, he thinks it will lead to further gentrification. 

“This is not meant to help Black people. You put housing in, and you put in parks, but who will be in the housing? They’ll throw us a little bone with affordable housing, but Oakland is the geographic center of the Bay Area, and people want to live there,” he said. “Don’t let anyone fool you that poor minorities are going to win. Nothing is going to be built for them. I don’t know who are the people fighting but god bless them.”

Environmentalists and road safety advocates prefer the freeway be removed

Warren Logan, the former transportation policy director for Oakland under Mayor Libby Schaff, told The Oaklandside that even though I-980 ultimately separated the community, its trench design demonstrates that the community has the power to adjust infrastructure designs to its wishes. 

Logan said this empowering mindset could help West Oaklanders who want more access to transportation get a new BART station built where I-980 is today. 

Part of Logan’s old job in Oakland involved working with regional agencies like the Metropolitan Transportation Commission to help them match their transportation and economic development goals to the city’s needs. Recent government reports noted West Oakland could be part of a future hub of a second BART tunnel connecting San Francisco and Oakland. 

But even if government authorities want to remove a freeway to help improve regional transit, it won’t happen if the outreach process says Oaklanders don’t want it. 

“There isn’t really a world in which the state, Caltrans, or the federal government and the USDOT would say, ‘We’re gonna get rid of this freeway, even though the city wants to keep it,’” Logan said. 

He knows people are cynical about the project but hopes Caltrans convinces them it could happen in a racially equitable way, including affordable housing and public open space. If they get involved in the planning process, the government will be open to more options, he said. 

Logan suggested the state could shut down the freeway for a day for a concert, as it did in Los Angeles, to show people how these spaces can be reimagined. 

Jonathan Fearn is a developer and member of the Oakland Planning Commission. He’s also one of the organizers of ConnectOakland, the group that jump-started the conversation around tearing up the I-980 with a website envisioning the process in 2017. Fearn told The Oaklandside that based on his group’s studies, I-980 won’t be missed much by people who currently drive along it.

“At peak traffic periods, I-980 only carries 25% of its designed capacity and less than one-third of the typical traffic on the Nimitz Freeway,” according to the ConnectOakland website. If traffic were moved to roadside streets with synchronous traffic control, travel time might only increase by a few minutes. 

Similar projects in other cities like San Francisco, where the Embarcadero Freeway was removed following the Loma Prieta earthquake, led to positive urban renewal, the group argues. Connect Oakland’s plan for the I-980 would create “14 new city blocks to the east, creating approximately 17 net new acres of publicly controlled land.” 

Fearn also says that a multi-lane boulevard would better connect the street grids and neighborhoods. This could also make them safer if they have slow-speeding designs. If apartments are built, property taxes could be “recycled” into local programs for low-income people. 

The Center for New Urbanism, a national urban design advocacy organization, has called for removing freeways that affected U.S. minority communities since publishing its first Freeways Without Futures report in 2008. The group first included I-980 in their 2017 version of the report.

Lauren Mayer, one of the center’s policy leads, told us freeways like the I-980 were nearing “the end of their useful lifespan” and continuing to use them would require a level of investment that is not worth it based on cost-benefit analyses. 

“A boulevard is more pedestrian-oriented, slows down traffic, and is more multimodal,” she said, referring to the use of bikes, scooters, walking, and other ways of getting around besides cars. “Remade streets can become places for people who live around them already to become more reconnected with their communities.”

Most other projects to remove or alter underutilized freeways in other parts of the country are also in the study stage. But some are moving into the construction stage, including I-81 in Syracuse, New York, which has financial backing from the state. New York is also supporting projects in New York City, Buffalo, and Rochester. 

Based on previous projects, keeping the highway or getting rid of it entirely might be a better, cheaper alternative than putting it in a tunnel, Mayer said. A tunnel-cap project in Alaska was $200 million over budget for a total of $3.3 billion. 

Fearn said his group’s studies also show that capping I-980 and building apartment buildings on top is too costly and wouldn’t use all the land available. 

“If you filled the trench and made the transit right of way a hundred feet wide instead of the 560 feet wide it is right now, you can have most of that trench become land that exists on both sides of the trench,” he said. “And then it’s much easier to construct buildings on raw soil than on a structurally engineered concrete cap.”

Despite their desires to tear down highways, Fearn and Mayer say the community ultimately gets to decide.

“These communities cannot be silenced. They were already silenced once,” Mayer said. 

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