This 1966 article highlights a pressure campaign to place an initiative to build 3,000 more public housing units in the city on the fall ballot for local elections, nearly tripling the city’s public housing capacity at the stroke of a pen. The campaign garnered approval from Oakland state assemblyman Nicholas Petris, a stalwart liberal and Flatlands endorsee, and organization for the measure was carried out by the Bay Area Council on Social Planning.
The Flatlands had an adversarial stance toward the city’s governing institutions, and its coverage of the statements of city councillors and Housing Authority officials was usually tinged with skepticism. Contra the testimony of a representative of the Oakland Real Estate Board regarding vacancies on the private rental market, the author notes (per testimony from Petris) that Oakland city planner Norman Lind estimates that the city would need 10,000 total units to fulfill its public housing needs.
The paper’s geographic loyalties can be found in the choice of photo that accompanies the article — frequent photographic contributor T.W. Tenney’s photo, of an idyllic house in the Oakland hills, stands in ironic contrast with the crowding and neglect that characterized the housing of the poor in the flats. While sympathetic residents of hill neighborhoods would always perform essential roles in Oakland civil rights and community organizations, flatlands residents had begun to build coalitions across neighborhood lines and articulate a political program that addressed the political and economic inequities that defined their lives.
