Oakland’s empty houses were once some of its most beautiful. A-frames painted the color of fresh cream, with curling gilded border details. Three-story Edwardians surrounded by spindly palms.



A year ago I drove up and down streets in the West part of the city, counting them: The Craftsman that leaned like a drunk; the Victorian with a hole the size of a man in the roof; the half-burnt four-unit apartment building that collected new graffiti each Saturday, a kind of neighborhood art gallery.



Some of these homes were foreclosed upon in recent years, while others have been empty for decades. Oakland’s home prices are up more than 120 percent over the last four years. But a year after I first wrote about those homes, one is being rehabbed. All are still empty.



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The Bay Area is in the grips of a housing crisis – you’ve heard this before. If only we had more market-rate homes, we could relieve some pressure and bring down prices.



This is not strictly false. Piles of investment from the technology sector and wealthy foreign citizens have flooded the Bay, as the housing bubble collapsed in near-perfect symmetry with the rise of a new tech boom. Landlords bought up whole distressed neighborhoods on the cheap. Speculators are evicting whole apartment buildings and turning them into Airbnbs. Buyers are outbidding one another $100,000 at a time, and they’re paying all of it in cash.



What is happening in the Bay Area is not the organic shift of neighborhood demographics, nor is it a massive capital conspiracy (or at least it is no larger or more conspiratorial than all the other capital conspiracies). It is the result of decades of public policies and planning decisions that time and again favored the landed gentry and left poor communities of color vulnerable. And while San Francisco still has by far the highest rents, Oakland’s are rising fastest.



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The Bay Area is a beast of a metropolis, featuring nine counties, 101 towns and cities, and 7.4 million people across about 6,900 square miles (not counting the water).



California has never exactly been a leader in forward-thinking urban policies. People moved to the West for space, not for dense city life – cars and ranch houses, not trains and high rises. Laws limiting growth and protecting the natural environment and farm land spurred the region’s sprawl, while suburbs, especially Silicon Valley, have fought affordable housing and dense living for decades.



Now the Bay’s tastes are changing – though only a bit. Homegrown multinational corporations in the suburbs are now eyeing high rises instead of office parks. Young tech talent is cheaper in the cities because that’s where those workers want to be. Suddenly cities like San Francisco and Oakland that clung tight to their California ideals are in turn being squeezed to death.



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Oakland has weathered many crises with varying degrees of success. Most recently, between 2007 and 2011, there were more than 10,500 foreclosures in the town. Investors scooped up more than 40 percent of those, often in all-cash purchases. The average single family home foreclosure then was less than $150,000. Today the median list price for a home in West Oakland is $442,450, according to Redfin.



Many formerly owned homes were flipped into rentals. More cheap real estate was purchased, residents evicted in order to make upgrades, and rents raised. Said one investor’s leasing agent in 2012: “We want to bring in good, productive people and really change the area.”



Oakland’s western neighborhoods have seen some of the swiftest changes: Their close proximity to San Francisco and beautiful housing stock made them especially attractive to would-be residents and landlords alike. The foreclosure crisis disproportionately effected the local Black community, which decreased by a quarter between 2000 and 2010.



Daily struggles that defined life here are not an issue for new residents. Who needs a grocery store when you have meal delivery on-demand? Who needs mass transit when you have Uber, Lyft, and a company shuttle? Who cares about environmental pollution when you have the resources to seal windows and rehabilitate yard soil?



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Oakland may be feeling the effects of all that new investment, but it remains a step removed, abjectly Other. Oakland has so far seen little of the building boom that’s come to define San Francisco’s current skyline, a collection of cranes set about on constructing a new skyline altogether. It’s also been largely spared the kinds of large Ellis evictions that San Francisco has seen.



Oakland is actively courting large tech companies, but the city’s growth has so far been in service to the workers at those companies.



According to the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, Oakland’s fastest growing sectors are food service, hospitality, and real estate. A higher cost of living has motivated some reactive progressive policies, including a new minimum wage. Starting next March, $12.25 hourly pay will certainly be welcome, but it will be a small dent in a workers’ costs, barely meeting accepted livable wage standards for single adults.



Where Oakland was once “an Extremely Dangerous Urban Mad Max Wasteland,” it is becoming a playground. Soon you might even be able to take the school bus to the new bars.



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In the midst of all this crisis, Oakland’s empty homes still stand, lean, crumble.



There are a host of reasons why land owners might choose to sit on these properties. The homes may need expensive upgrades beyond an owner’s budget; they may not want to get locked in to a less-than-ideal tenant, who would enjoy rent control and other protections under local and state law; they might not want to be landlords at all, and are waiting for the peak of the market to sell.



This class of absentee owner was largely made possible by California’s Proposition 13, passed in 1978, which set tight limits on property taxes and counties’ ability to reassess private property. Ostensibly meant to keep seniors on fixed incomes in their homes, Prop 13 also gave rise to a new class of land bankers, speculative investors, and profiteers. Thanks to Prop 13 and foreclosure fire sales, those empty homes I see in West Oakland are easy to keep empty, with annual property taxes adding up to an average month’s rent.



For some longtime Oakland residents, Prop 13 has been a boon: It’s kept their taxes low while their home equity rocketed. Among homeowners – and likely voters – Prop 13 is popular, with about 53% supporting; among renters, the law has 29% approval. The vast majority of Oakland rents.



We need homes. We should probably build some. But we should also use what we’ve already got.



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The Bay Area is indeed in the grips of an affordability crisis that will change the region forever, even if (and when) the tech boom busts and Oakland’s vulnerable service economy is the first to falter. This genie isn’t going back in the bottle. And it’s only offering wishes to a privileged few.