One by one, their faces populated the Zoom screen. Renters, homeowners, a new parent holding a crying baby. Thirteen people—more than the number of candidates in Oakland’s last mayoral election—vying for six seats on the Rockridge Community Planning Council board.
Over the next hour of the April candidate forum, the board hopefuls shared their visions for a stronger neighborhood. More shops, more parks, walkability. Several people said they wanted more dense housing built in Rockridge—both low-income apartments and market-rate homes, too.
The North Oakland neighborhood was built out in the early 1900s as a peaceful, exclusive refuge from the hubbub downtown. Early on, the city limited development to single-family homes, and a leafy, suburban feel remains in Rockridge to this day. While some of the housing costs there were more moderate in the past, the average home price is now around $1.9 million and rent is higher than anywhere else in Oakland.
“Reading the candidate statements, I was really excited to see so many people speaking in support of affordable housing—that has not always been the case,” said board candidate Kristen Belt. “But I think it’s important to understand that affordable housing does not happen without market-rate housing.”
Belt ran alongside five other candidates, part of a slate that called itself “Inclusive Rockridge.” Their campaign materials said they’d “advocate for more diverse housing options” in the neighborhood. Several talked about having trouble renting or buying homes there themselves.
The slate swept the April election, which anyone living in Rockridge can vote in, grabbing all six open spots.
The Rockridge Community Planning Council was founded in 1985 to empower the neighborhood’s residents to weigh in on city policy and local development. The nonprofit also spearheads neighborhood projects—notably the creation of Frog Park and the Rockridge branch library—organizes events, and publishes a newspaper. RCPC is led by a 13-member board of directors, who serve two-year terms, with half of the board up for reelection each year.
“They are very influential,” said Courtney Welch, a former Rockridge resident who now serves as mayor of Emeryville. Welch was on the RCPC board from 2018 to 2020. Among politicos in Oakland, “they’re seen as a critical constituency to engage and get feedback from,” she said.
As Oakland has struggled to climb out of its housing crisis in recent years, Rockridge has been thrust into the spotlight. The affluent, expensive neighborhood has become a symbol of sorts, held up as a cautionary example of what happens following decades of exclusionary housing policy and a chronic under-building of homes. In 2022 the state weighed in, telling Oakland it had to plan for more housing construction in the neighborhood.
Many longtime Rockridge residents feel their neighborhood has been unfairly cast. They’re concerned that unfettered development will diminish what feels special about where they live—the small-town feel, the greenery, the historic architecture. Some remember the upheaval of Highway 24 and BART cutting through their neighborhood in the 1970s. Others say the last thing Rockridge needs is more expensive housing, pushing for only affordable development.
So the decisive RCPC board election was startling to some observers and candidates, both longtimers and newcomers. People on different sides of the housing debate told The Oaklandside there’s been a slow but steady shift in the stance of the board—a growing appetite for more density and development. One longterm member even resigned over the differences in 2022.
“This is the first time RCPC is near-majority pro-housing in the history of the organization,” said Muhammad Alameldin, one of the newly elected members. “Before, it seemed like a goal that was impossible.”
Building more than bungalows
Not too long ago, Alameldin lived in his car in Rockridge. He’d been evicted from his home in Contra Costa County when his roommates stopped paying rent.
“I had to claw my way,” he said in an interview. “I went to school through a scholarship and worked these odd jobs. I used to walk dogs for people in Rockridge.”
Now a policy associate at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation, Alameldin rents an apartment in the neighborhood. But said he can only afford it because he’s subleasing a unit in a duplex.
“I want to make this a livable neighborhood for everyone,” he said at the April candidate forum. “I think it’s worth sharing.”
From Alameldin’s vantage point, making the area more accessible means “upzoning” to allow larger buildings, and encouraging more types of development. Until recent changes to state and city laws, most of Rockridge was zoned to allow only single-family houses to be built.
A UC Berkeley study found that Bay Area cities with more single-family zoning tend to be disproportionately white. Rockridge has been majority white since the development of the neighborhood in the early 1900s. And its residents make more than double the median Oakland income.
Alameldin, who’s Palestinian American, decided to run for RCPC this year after noticing the board was entirely white.
“Communities of color are taking one for the team,” bearing the brunt of policies that make areas of the city inaccessible, he said. “We’re not in the conversation. We just need more housing supply.” At 28, he’s also the board’s youngest member.
Eli Kaplan, also newly elected on the “Inclusive Rockridge” slate, told voters he supports more construction of both affordable housing and market-rate rentals.
“It’s the existence of rental housing that enables my family to stay in the neighborhood,” he said at the April forum. “My wife and I both work in the public sector, and even though we make good money, we can’t afford to spend a million-plus dollars on a little bungalow.”
Welch, the Emeryville mayor, said housing was hardly part of the conversation when she joined the RCPC board in 2018. State lawmakers like California Senator Scott Wiener were just beginning to propose bills to override local restrictions and allow more housing development. The growing Yes In My Backyard, or YIMBY, movement was making similar demands at local government meetings. Tenant advocates—some skeptical about the benefit of for-profit development—were also raising alarm about displacement and the burgeoning homelessness crisis, calling for renter protections and affordable housing.
“One specific [RCPC] meeting, there was this long, drawn-out conversation around tree design at the BART station,” said Welch, who at the time was living at Oakland Elizabeth House, a transitional housing site for mothers. “I’m sitting there thinking, there are people that are living at the BART station and you all are dedicating a large portion of time to tree design? It was a completely out-of-touch conversation.”
But once the housing crisis got so bad that middle- and upper-class residents were impacted, awareness around housing insecurity grew, Welch said. She recalled a later meeting, where a Rockridge resident lamented that his children couldn’t afford housing.
“I kind of realized, they’re not out-of-touch because they don’t care—they actually don’t know what’s going on,” Welch said. “When you’ve lived in your house for 30 years, you’re not looking up rental listings.”
Homeowner and RCPC Chair Casey Farmer said she originally ran for the board in 2020 to push for more housing—and push against what she saw as opposition to it.
“This is a high-resource, extremely expensive neighborhood” with a history of housing discrimination, said Farmer, who was just elected to her third term, on the Inclusive Rockridge slate she helped establish. “I truly think we have a moral and climate imperative to grow.”
This year, Farmer and her slate campaigned furiously. Her pitch to voters? “Amidst our daunting housing crisis,” she’d tell them, “you can take action with just a few moments of your time to elect neighbors who will advocate for solutions that make our community more accessible and inclusive.”
RCPC has unified around vacant lots
At the end of the day, RCPC can only do so much to kickstart more building—even when there’s agreement on the board.
The full group in 2022 rallied against plans for a Home Depot at the massive vacant lot on the corner of Broadway and Pleasant Valley Avenue—calling instead for housing. But the property owner is reportedly opposed to residential development on the land, which is located next to the large “Ridge” shopping center.
RCPC has also pushed for housing on another vacant lot, the site of a former gas station on College and Claremont avenues. The group has criticized Shell for neglecting to clean up the site, and the county for neglecting to force it to. The lot remains empty.
RCPC board member Mark Aaronson, a 48-year Rockridge resident, said neighbors have always been more amenable to development than people think. He first served on the board in the late 1980s. At the time, Dreyer’s Ice Cream was trying to build a new headquarters and factory at its College Avenue location. RCPC and neighbors protested hard, the Oakland Tribune reported. They said the size would be disruptive and balked at plans to tear down some houses to make way.
According to Aaronson, he and others on RCPC proposed building senior housing there. And it was the city that quashed their plan, siding with the ice cream company in the end.
Aaronson believes the differences among board members are more “perceived” and a matter of personality clashes than of true discord around housing.
“I don’t think they really listen to each other,” Aaronson said. “With discussions, we can reach more tempered solutions.”
His position? “We need more housing,” he said. “But just building market-rate isn’t going to help the people who need it the most. And affordable housing for the very poor requires a lot of public subsidies. That’s the real problem.”
Farmer, the RCPC chair, is leading the charge to produce a “community vision plan” for Rockridge. The group last did something like this in the 1990s. There will be events and surveys where neighbors can weigh in, offering a venue for unity and imagination.
“There will be a big emphasis on housing, but also open space and transportation,” Farmer said.
Elitism or reality?
For Stuart Flashman, a board member who stepped down in 2022, the differences around housing issues felt significant.
“The new board’s philosophy seems to be ‘all housing is good housing,’” he wrote in his resignation letter in the Rockridge News. “Eventually, it seems likely that, driven by speculation, homes will be subdivided into condos and then replaced by higher-density condo buildings. Rockridge would become a mini-San Francisco.”
A land-use lawyer, Flashman criticized the board’s “unilateral” call for upzoning, proposing alternative affordability solutions like nonprofits purchasing homes.
In a response, Ken Rich—at the time the chair of the board’s Land Use Committee, countered that land in Rockridge is so pricey that the neighborhood is unlikely to see anything like a developer rush to tear down craftsman houses and develop high-rises in their place. Indeed, hardly any homeowners in Oakland have taken advantage of state laws permitting more density.
Flashman ran again this year unsuccessfully. Also running for reelection on that slate was architect Kirk Peterson. He said nobody on RCPC is actually “anti-housing,” and the housing-everywhere people who call them that are “like fundamentalists.”
“I’m really, really concerned about the quality of what happens here,” Peterson said in an interview. Beauty, not just bounty. Character, not just low cost. “As soon as I say that, I’m castigated because I’m ‘elitist.’ There’s going to be a bunch of development whether we like it or not. Some of us think we should shape it, more than be a lobbyist for developers.”
Peterson recalled two former board members who left Rockridge because they couldn’t buy there.
“They seemed to feel entitled to have their first house be here,” he said in an email. “They both had chosen relatively low-pay careers in the nonprofit world, and still thought they should be here in this lovely expensive neighborhood.” He noted his first house, decades ago, was an “abandoned wreck” in East Oakland that he bought and fixed up while making $4 an hour at work.
In 2019, Peterson co-founded another neighborhood group called Upper Broadway Advocates, to weigh in on a proposal to redevelop the 100-year-old California College of the Arts campus as housing, including a 19-story tower. The group called for a smaller-scale project to “preserve neighborhood character,” and more low-income homes.
The proposal was scaled back significantly, reducing units and height and adding some affordability. The RCPC board wrote a letter in support of the current project. Peterson said he reluctantly signed it, but is still anticipating a “gigantic, ugly, destructive project.”
Forging ahead, the CCA plan is Rockridge’s likeliest bet for mass housing construction anytime soon. But with the market for development a tough one today, the developer said even this project is now delayed indefinitely.
