Can gentrification be slowed in Oak Park? Inside the dramatic effort to save a neighborhood
Millicent Belser, a state worker and foster mom of four, stood on the front porch of her rented Oak Park bungalow on a warm April evening, surveying her corner of the world and searching to come up with a worrisome word she had recently heard.
“Gentrification?” she finally said. “I never knew there was such a word. I had to look it up.”
Oak Park, a historically Black neighborhood of Sacramento that’s experienced poverty and disinvestment for decades, is in dizzying transformation. Rents and real estate prices, on the rise for a decade, have now skyrocketed. Stylish condos and chic businesses are popping up. Young professionals are moving in, some from the Bay Area.
And UC Davis is about to build a $1 billion medical technology hub at Second Avenue and Stockton Boulevard, next to its sprawling medical center campus. Called Aggie Square, it will be a gathering place for scientists, researchers, entrepreneurs and medical students.
Longtime residents, many of them renters, are on edge. They’re talking on online forums and at the farmer’s market about how they soon may no longer be able to afford to live here. Belser’s landlord has warned he may sell, forcing her family to move.
But something unprecedented is also happening in Oak Park this spring. An old narrative may be changing.
Fueled by the national debate over social and racial justice, and pushed by a savvy generation of community activists and organizers, the city and university signed a sweeping Community Benefits Partnership Agreement to spur several hundred million dollars in investment in Oak Park and Tahoe Park, focused on new affordable housing, local hiring requirements, job training and eviction protections.
The deal, signed last month, has turned the old streetcar neighborhood into the biggest social and economic engineering experiment in Sacramento since downtown redevelopment a half-century ago.
The hope is to leverage Aggie Square to change the Oak Park and Tahoe Park gentrification stories into a renaissance story.
Mayor Darrell Steinberg called it an evolution of priorities that “will test my strong belief that modern cities can attract new clean industries, create thousands of jobs for neighborhood residents, revitalize struggling commercial corridors, and still maintain affordability for the surrounding neighborhoods.”
Steinberg, an optimist, says, “I am confident Sacramento will meet the test.”
In fact, he already wants to replicate the Oak Park agreement. He is laying plans for a city ordinance requiring similar comprehensive community benefit agreements in other neighborhoods when taxpayer money is involved in a major business deal.
Aggie Square community benefits deal
The deal, which covers several Aggie Square-area ZIP codes, is basic in its intent, though complex in details.
The city, UC Davis and developer Wexford Science & Technology have structured an agreement that would funnel 20% of future increased Aggie Square property taxes toward subsidies to affordable housing developers to build new apartments near the Stockton Boulevard corridor.
The city also has set up a housing fund, taking advantage of increased sales tax revenue from the 2018 voter-approved Measure U, to put toward new affordable housing construction in the area.
The first such investment will be a $10 million loan the city will give Mercy Housing for 225 units on Stockton Boulevard near 21st Avenue, a little less than two miles south of the Aggie Square site. Councilman Eric Guerra called it a revisioning of the old commercial corridor as a live-work neighborhood.
UC Davis also promises that one out of every five employees hired at Aggie Square will live in the surrounding ZIP codes. The university will provide training to qualify those hirees for the jobs, allowing some to get jobs usually reserved for college graduates.
To address concerns about the displacement of renters, the city and UC Davis will raise $5 million. Some of it will be spent as direct checks to renters to help temporarily cover back rent, while some may go to landlords to help repair their properties in exchange for keeping rents affordable.
The Aggie Square concept was brought to Sacramento by UC Davis Chancellor Gary May and patterned after a Georgia Tech complex in Atlanta. It will connect the university better to the community, May said, improving the previously distant relationship between UC Davis’ Sacramento campus and the surrounding neighborhoods.
“There should never be a wall” between a public research university and the community, May said. Aggie Square “will move our research more efficiently from the lab to the marketplace. That is part of the mission for a public university.”
Oak Park’s real estate price problem
Gentrification concerns and home-price shock aren’t new in Oak Park. In fact, critics say it is late in the game for this type of investment.
A decade ago, Oak Park median home prices had sunk to $50,000, when repossessions were common amid the Great Recession. Now, the average sale price is $350,000, a 600% increase, one of the steepest escalations in the region, according to Ryan Lundquist, a real estate data analyst and appraiser.
The real estate boom has already fractured the community, said Eliza Deed, an Oak Park resident, founding member of Speak Out Oak Park and chronicler of the Black experience in the neighborhood.
Aggie Square will further disrupt the lives of residents of color in Oak Park, she said. Newer residents, “those near Sac High are a majority white and benefit from Aggie Square,” Deed said. “But people on Fifth and 35th live in havoc. It’s a huge change in dynamics, and they’re just two minutes away.”
Twice a week, Deed walks through residential Oak Park, knocking on doors to inform neighbors about the upcoming development. Many residents hear about the massive project for the first time from Deed and her street team, made up of students and community advocates.
“A majority of the time, people respond with shock,” Deed said. “They always have questions.”
Belser, a seasonal state worker who delivers sandwiches to homeless camps near her house, is among those wary of Aggie Square. She’s looked around and hasn’t seen any nearby house big enough for her family for her current $2,100 rent. Instead, she’s seeing nearby places for around $3,000.
“Any day I could come home and see there’s a for sale sign in my yard,” she said. “Where do I go?”
Joany Titherington, a longtime community activist who runs the Oak Park Farmer’s Market in McClatchy Park, hopes the Aggie Square agreements will mean positive economic impacts for residents, rather than their displacement.
“Renaissance,” she said, “assures that everybody can live here. Gentrification prices people out.”
New political era in Sacramento
The Aggie Square community benefits deal did not emerge from a vacuum, or even from Oak Park-specific needs in particular.
It reflects a notable shift to the left in city politics over the last decade, propelled by a resurgence of a volatile brand of activism not seen here in a generation.
“When people have change coming, and don’t feel like they have a voice and access to good information, I think that’s one of the major causes of advocacy, and for good reason,” said Sacramento State public policy assistant professor Sara McClellan.
The roots of Sacramento’s emerging equity agenda are multiple, but it arguably started during the Great Recession when thousands of Sacramentans lost their homes and homelessness surged, prompting a protest movement called Occupy Sacramento with a tactic of pitching homeless tent encampments at City Hall as a way to jar local leaders into action.
Housing and labor organizer Tamie Dramer, chief executive of Organize Sacramento, said some of the seeds of the community benefits partnership agreement were sown when the city invested heavily in helping multi-millionaire team owners build a downtown arena with the Sacramento Kings.
An ad hoc group of advocates pushed the city and Kings to hire a number of local workers and companies, figuring local residents and businesses should benefit from the deal. Dramer said the group walked away feeling empowered, and vowing to achieve more the next time the city invested in a major project.
The shooting of Stephon Clark in 2018 was another pivotal moment. Black Lives Matter supporters marched in the streets decrying institutional racism. Activists gathered in front of Steinberg’s house, and threatened the police chief and city manager. Days after the shooting, Stevante Clark, Stephon Clark’s brother, angrily jumped on the City Council dais, shattering a council meeting decorum.
“When a young man like Stevante Clark jumps on your dais and gets in your face, you are going to have a moment,” Dramer said.
In the last year, following the killing of George Floyd and in the midst of a pandemic where deep-rooted disparities were laid bare, the national conversation around racial justice and equity has intensified.
‘Reparations’ for systemic racism
This isn’t the biggest investment of government money poured into remaking a Sacramento neighborhood in modern times.
That came in the 1960s, when vast swaths of downtown Sacramento like Japantown were destroyed to make room for government buildings and new businesses, despite the pleas of residents. Lower-income downtown neighborhoods were replaced with a massive freeway, an antiseptic Capitol Mall and the K Street pedestrian mall.
City officials say their investment in neighborhoods around Aggie Square will be different because it focuses on keeping people in their communities and offering new opportunities.
Steinberg got the ball rolling fiscally with the Measure U sales tax ballot initiative in 2018, raising tens of millions of dollars annually in new taxes. Much if it is covering general city operations. But a chunk is available for the city to fund civic improvements to under resourced neighborhoods, like housing for lower-income people and job training opportunities.
Steinberg has referred to the Oak Park deal as the product of a new City Hall view of community-building, but also pointedly as “reparations” for a history of systemic racism that’s impacted the economic and social mobility of residents of color.
Steinberg is now proposing to take the Aggie Square community benefits concept citywide with an ordinance that will require certain large new development projects — ones that get a subsidy or other financial assistance from taxpayers — to sign similar agreements to improve the surrounding neighborhood.
“We are redefining our core priorities,” Steinberg said. “The city core priority must elevate economic equity. I want Major League Soccer very badly, and I want to grow the creative economy, but if we just do that and don’t extend the benefits of growth to our kids, especially from disadvantaged backgrounds, our work is at best incomplete.”
It’s unclear when that ordinance will be drafted and how it will be implemented. Steinberg said it will be written in a way that accommodates different needs in different neighborhoods.
Community Benefit Agreements
The big question is how far this community benefit agreement can go in creating real and lasting positive impacts in Oak and Tahoe parks, and how quickly elements can be implemented, especially the construction of new affordable housing.
The first affordable housing project likely will not be underway until next year, about the time UC Davis plans to break ground on the first phase of Aggie Square.
Such agreements do work, however. They have existed in California since the late 1990s, and have been a tool for communities — particularly those at risk of displacement or experiencing negative economic impacts — to have a seat at the table of major development projects.
Often signed directly between a developer of a proposed project and a coalition of community-based organizations, the agreements can include stipulations such as affordable housing, targeted hiring, and living wage and environmental impact requirements.
In turn, developers can avoid costly litigation or push back, and even turn critical residents into vocal advocates, paving the way for the project to get built and bring about desired improvements.
In 2001, a coalition of labor and community groups secured what is now considered the model of a community benefits agreement with the developers of the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles. That contract required the developers to hire locally, offer living wages, and fund new affordable housing and parks.
The construction of the Golden 1 Center arena downtown included a community benefits agreement, focused mainly on construction hiring. But the larger array of community benefits secured for the Aggie Square development is a first for the city, Sacramento State professor McClellan said, and it’s especially important for a neighborhood like Oak Park.
“We have historic inequity, and even if development is well-intentioned, it comes on the heals of patterns of redlining and urban renewal,” she said. “There’s understandably a lot of distrust.”
Community organizers score
Notably, the community benefits agreement is between the city of Sacramento, the university and the development team, and did not directly include approval of any community groups.
But it was heavily influenced by a young – but seasoned – group of savvy community organizers who want to transform the anger of street marches into concrete city housing and jobs policy changes.
That group, which includes Dramer, Tamika L’Ecluse, Gabby Trejo, Kendra Lewis and Erica Jaramillo, among others, formed last year as Sacramento Investment Without Displacement. Jaramillo, an Oak Park resident, faces eviction from her rental, she said, because her landlord is selling the property.
The group had sought to negotiate a community benefits agreement directly with UC Davis, but Davis turned them down, saying it preferred to negotiate with the city. So SIWD filed a lawsuit, challenging the Aggie Square project for its negative impact on nearby neighborhoods.
Steinberg and other city officials decried the SIWD lawsuit as obstructionist. But the community benefits agreement that Councilmen Jay Schenirer and Eric Guerra ultimately negotiated with UC Davis largely mirrored the concerns and proposals raised by SIWD and neighborhood associations.
Schenirer, Guerra and city officials then reached a settlement with SIWD, getting them to drop their lawsuit in exchange for what SIWD considers a noteworthy safety backstop agreement with the city: The city gave SIWD a written promise that it will make sure the entire community benefits program gets implemented, regardless of who is on the City Council in the future.
“Part of the language of these terms is to make sure those accountability pieces were documented and memorialized,” said L’Ecluse, one of the SIWD organizers. “That’s going to be our laminated, golden contract to make sure they honor the CBA as well as future CBAs.”
Schenirer lauded the city agreement with SIWD as a second victory for Oak Park. “This is a pivotal point for the city in working with our communities. To be successful, we need to be successful together.”
But UC Davis human ecology associate professor David de la Peña warned that the overall deal may be weaker than a classic community benefits agreement because SIWD or other community-based groups were not co-signatories of the main deal.
“These neighborhoods have suffered long enough from that lack of transparency,” De la Peña said. “You’re asking the neighborhood to trust the good will of these three entities who don’t necessarily have a good track record.”
Future community benefit agreements the city or its residents pursue should have stronger accountability measures, he said. While the current deal is not bad, De la Peña said, it’s insufficient to prevent displacement and fails to adequately study the housing and economic impact of Aggie Square.
“I think UC Davis is getting off the hook,” De la Peña said.
Michael Benjamin III, a native Oak Park resident and community advocate, remains skeptical of Aggie Square. The legacy of racist redlining practices across the neighborhood and decades of disinvestment are palpable, he said. Many families have been unable to accumulate the kind of wealth needed to reap the benefits of the major development. Already, residents are being forced out of their homes.
“A lot of owners are putting houses on the market without people knowing,” Benjamin said. “A lot of people are being displaced with 60-day notices.”
L’Ecluse of SIWD agrees that the current benefits agreement isn’t all that her group wanted. Although SIWD agreed to drop its lawsuit against the first phase of Aggie Square, her group declined the city’s efforts during negotiations to get it to agree not to file lawsuits over future phases of the project.
“We have some protections in place to keep an eye on the project if anything veers too off-course,” L’Ecluse said. Equity is “starting to be a regular lens to look at policy through, but I think it’s not where it needs to be. We have a lot of minds we need to change and soften.”
This story was originally published May 14, 2021 at 5:00 AM.