Oakland finally has money to take care of a problem that residents complain about, whether they live in the hills of Montclair or the flatlands below Interstate 580: the city’s potholed, axle-breaking, hubcap-liberating roads.

But Oakland’s three-year proposal to pave its tattered roadways is already facing resistance. That’s because officials plan to shift a larger portion of the city’s infrastructure bond money to low-income neighborhoods such as Fruitvale and deep East Oakland, where residents have long felt ignored by City Hall. The wealthier, less populous hills would get a smaller share.

Some hills residents are furious.

“I feel that monetarily it’s horribly unfair — we’re paying 500 percent more in taxes and only getting 10 percent of the money,” said Dave McGuinness. He was among about a hundred attendees who packed the Berkeley Tennis Club for a tense community meeting Thursday night.

The event drew residents from Montclair, Rockridge and other neighborhoods where ranch houses and Craftsman bungalows dot the winding roads. Though property values are high in that leafy terrain, the roads are rutted and crumbling — just as bad, in many places, as the industrial corners of East and West Oakland.

Wearing tight smiles, the city’s transportation chief, Ryan Russo, and paving project manager, Sarah Fine, presented their three-year paving plan. Members of the audience hissed and jeered.

The $100 million plan is one of many attempts by Oakland City Hall to inject social justice ideals into the distribution of city services. It sets aside $25 million to maintain Oakland’s main thoroughfares while dividing the remaining $75 million among nine zones.

The department weighed two factors equally to decide how to dole out the money: how many miles of poor roads lie in each zone, and how many households qualify as “underserved” — meaning they are low-income, people of color, non-English speakers, elderly or young.

The city’s emphasis on helping its most vulnerable is the legacy of a controversial former city councilwoman, Desley Brooks. She created the Department of Race and Equity in 2016, and officials say it profoundly changed the delivery of services in Oakland. The City Council embedded ideas of economic and racial equality into the marijuana laws it passed in 2017, which became a model for San Francisco. Those values helped shape the paving plan.

If the City Council approves an equity framework for paving, then the Department of Transportation will direct its largest investment toward the flatlands of East Oakland, which stand to get $15.1 million. Next up would be Fruitvale, which is poised to receive $14.5 million. Neighborhoods in the north and east Oakland hills would draw $5.7 million and $5 million, respectively, about a third of their low-income counterparts.

This deliberate elevation of poor neighborhoods contrasts the city’s former “80/20” policy, which devoted 80 percent of paving dollars to major arteries such as Telegraph and 98th avenues, and 20 percent to side streets, prioritizing the ones that drew complaints. It allowed staff to make the most of limited, fluctuating funds, Fine said.

The Department of Transportation sought public feedback before moving forward with the new approach, Russo and Fine said. Staff conducted surveys throughout the city last year, and across every demographic split, Oaklanders said they wanted to see greater social equity, safer streets and more money invested in the worst pavement. Separately, the Oakland City Council directed transportation officials to consider equity when they spent money on infrastructure.

Yet the transportation staff got a mixed response during a series of community meetings this month.

Preston Turner, chairman of Melrose High Hopes — a crime watch group for a neighborhood southeast of Fruitvale — attended a presentation Wednesday night at Eastmont police substation deep in the flats. Turner welcomed the paving plan’s equity framework with wary optimism. He won’t believe it until the City Council signs on and the trucks roll up outside his door.

“They basically told us we’re underserved, and they proposed that we get our fair share of repaving,” Turner said. “Personally, I’ll say the consensus among our neighbors is that we’ve been fighting for this for years. We should not have to beg and plead — it should just be automatic.”

Members of the crowd at Berkeley Tennis Club said they’ve also been fighting for years. Some gasped when Russo acknowledged that streets left unfinished from a previous five-year paving plan might not be included in the new one. Others feared for the safety of cyclists who huff up Park Boulevard or speed down Thornhill Drive — two particularly dilapidated roadways. Still others worried they wouldn’t have a smooth escape route during a major earthquake or fire.

“If you don’t fix the roads here, you could literally kill an entire community,” said Montclair resident Alisa Hause. She and others vividly remember the devastating Oakland hills fire of 1991.

Oakland has long been a starkly divided city, with the I-580 freeway serving as a symbolic barrier. Neighborhoods above that line are rife with trees and opulent single-family homes. Below the line lies a giant swath of flatland, where smaller homes are wedged among warehouses and crowded boulevards. The median household income ranges from $37,000 a year in West Oakland to $45,000 in Fruitvale — roughly a third of average yearly earnings in the hills.

Stories like this — every morning in your inbox Subscribe to The Chronicle's Bay Briefing newsletter and get the Bay Area's best journalism in your inbox every weekday.

Read More

Bad roads, it seems, are the city’s great equalizer. Data the city collected last year show the pavement is cratered outside just about every doorstep, which contributes to the near-universal perception that the streets must be better on the other side of town.

“Everywhere I go in Oakland people have long-standing frustration about neglect in the public rights of way,” Russo said at the Berkeley Tennis Club. “We’re ready to get to work to address that disinvestment.”

Still, the urgency is greater in low-income neighborhoods, where the cost of fixing a popped tire or a broken axle could drain someone’s livelihood.

“Potholes are definitely our biggest concern,” said Cynthia Arrington, chairwoman of the Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council in Sobrante Park, an isosceles triangle near the southern edge of the city. She said that on some occasions, a car has hit a cavity in the road and then swerved and crashed into a parked vehicle.

Because more people live in these underserved zones, poor street conditions have a greater impact, city officials say. Staff at the Department of Transportation counted 1,400 people for every mile of dilapidated streets in the East Oakland flats. In comparison, each mile of poor roads in the North Oakland hills has 379 people.

“This equity lens — it’s absolutely important,” said City Councilman Loren Taylor, whose district spreads through East Oakland. He said that when he knocked on doors campaigning for the City Council seat last year, voters cited potholes as their No. 1 concern.

“Everyone had a story about how they ran into a pothole and it wrecked their tire or their wheels and cost them a lot of money,” Taylor said.

City Councilman Dan Kalb, who represents North Oakland, is in a more awkward position. Parts of his district will see a road repair increase if the three-year plan is approved; other parts will get very little.

“It highlights that we don’t have the resources to do all we need to do,” Kalb said.

Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan