Boots Riley in Oakland, California, in April. Photograph by Ilona Szwarc.

We used to drive. Drive for hours. Till we ran out of gas and had to fill up again. All the while, the car never traveled more than a mile outside the bounds of Oakland, California. My friends and I repeated our route as often as we could, as slow as we could, playing music out of car speakers as loud as we could. Never taking freeways because all the stuff that freeways tried to avoid were the things we wanted to run into, get lost in: other cars with people in them; red lights that might have you stop on a corner where everybody was gathered, allowing you to run into friends you hadn’t seen since the last time you passed, pulling over to get the latest news about somebody, get a girl’s phone number. Anything to fight the boredom and fill the ride, fill our lives, with details. Details felt like action and excitement, made the place we called “the town” feel more like a city. We wanted to feel like this place was important—which would make us more powerful, relevant. The fight against a feeling of irrelevancy was a long-standing fight against city government and many local businesses. Much of it centered around access to places and legalities of expression. It was a fight that paralleled the fight going on in many cities across the U.S.

When we cruised down East 14th, through downtown, and up San Pablo, we would pass the stores, dive bars, and boarded-up buildings that became the third-wave coffee shops, five-star restaurants, and houses of fine bourbon that Oakland holds today. Past vacant lots and sidewalks that later became camps of homeless people who had been evicted due to pyramid scheme-like development policies and trickle-down solutions.

In those days, when we were just out of high school, there were very few places for us to go into and hang out. Mixed with the lack of jobs that paid a living wage, this made the drives feel like mining for gold. Like we were going to discover something that would change our lives. We would pass out flyers for the parties we threw to hustle up money and feel like we were in the mix. We’d throw in some phrase or sign that this was a party for those of us who wanted to be upwardly mobile: we’d call it “upscale elegance” or have a dress code that made it an unaffordable lifestyle for some. We all wanted to feel like things were getting better. Changing. But they weren’t. We were all still broke and had little individual power over our circumstances.

Oakland has always had artists attempting to define the immense beauty and ridiculousness around them.

In 1960s Oakland, urban-renewal projects steadily pushed out black residents and their businesses, effectively eradicating the city’s once thriving blues scene. In the 70s, there were continued efforts to shut down Oakland’s pool halls. Throughout the 80s, skating rinks in the East Bay—gathering spots for people of color—were shuttered one by one amid scrutiny from local police. Lowrider gatherings were demonized and pushed out. In the 90s, the ban on BBQs and alcohol at Lake Merritt was newly enforced in a stated effort to stop people (who just so happened to be mainly people of color) from hanging out, and it became illegal to drive around the lake more than once. When they had the Festival at the Lake in the 80s and 90s, police would use batons and pepper spray to clear the area of young black and brown kids who wanted to hang out together after the festival closed at six P.M. In 1994, the youth rightfully fought back. Around the same time, bars and music venues in Oakland refused to book hip-hop performers or parties that catered to young crowds of color, so we had our events in rented union halls, restaurants, and warehouses. This required permits, which the city answered by banning permits for hip-hop events for a few years. And so, driving from one side of town to the other was all we had for entertainment on some days.

The solution put forward by civic leaders to the problems of low pay, joblessness, and lack of access and opportunity always had to do with the mystical word “development.” Bring businesses in, give people jobs, stimulate the economy, create more jobs. So goes the trickle-down theory, attributed to Reagan but just as often espoused by local Democrats. The businesses that came had very few requisite hires from the pool of historical residents of Oakland, so they just moved people in from other places. The jobs that local people managed to get didn’t pay very well at all. But the development happened—in the form of city programs such as grants and emergency loans to renovate façades of homes and businesses. If those façade programs were for homes mostly occupied by renters, merely driving up housing values and contributing to eviction, so be it. The development happened, and the direct result was homelessness.