This spring, we briefly explained the injustices of California’s Article 34. In this piece, we explore its dark history of bigotry and exclusion.
California needs more housing. By standard estimates, it needs about 3 million more homes to ease this shortage, which has stunted the economic fortunes of an entire generation. This November, Proposition 1 aims to raise $4 billion in bonds to provide subsidized housing for the neediest, but it won’t be enough. Nor can California cities cover the gap on their own—tragically, the state’s Constitution hamstrings our ability to provide public housing at the necessary scale. How did this happen?
The short answer is racism, with a unique mid-century Bay Area flavor of classism and McCarthyism.
Article 34 of the California Constitution states that no city, town or county may develop, construct or acquire low-rent housing without electoral approval of a majority of voters. Today, the public sector provides low-rent housing through a convoluted spread of funding sources and market incentives, including Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC), to circumvent this requirement. By requiring a local popular vote to approve any instance of genuine, municipal social housing, California’s constitution calcifies its widening economic inequality.
The City of Emeryville recently invoked Article 34 in June 2018 with the passage of Measure C, a $50 million bond measure that will fund the construction of 500 new homes. Such a feat is nigh on impossible in more segregated, wealthy parts of the state—take Palo Alto, for example, where voters overturned a zoning ordinance to prevent a 60-unit apartment building for low-income seniors from being built.
Not surprisingly, the historical genesis of Article 34 is inextricably linked to Cold War-era racism and classism that spread like a wildfire in a rapidly industrializing California.
While a majority of the Supreme Court could not detect unlawful racial or class animus in Article 34 (see part I), the history of the people that designed, passed and enforced it reveals no shortage of prejudice against African-Americans and all people of color. Historic records show that the intensity and power of this political coalition against public housing reached its apex at a time that African-Americans gained widespread access to public housing programs and private housing markets for the first time, due in no small part to a booming post-war economy.
We focus our study on Oakland, the heart of the Bay Area’s postwar industrial growth. The city had grown in leaps and bounds since 1906, when the earthquake pushed many of San Francisco’s middle-class families to eastern shores. Oakland grew more blue collar but stayed racially homogenous – as much as 95% white in 1940. But the siting of naval docks and war industry manufacturing in Oakland and its East Bay environs drew workers at a pace that exceeded what the private housing market or charitable institutions could provide.
The Great Depression hamstrung the private construction industry, and World War II brought about massive supply and labor shortages. For all intents and purposes, new private home-building was on pause from 1929 to 1945. With the end of wartime rationing, property owners, realtors, and builders anticipated that they could rise to meet the demand of the returning GIs. These soldiers, sailors and marines, armed with government-backed mortgages, would be ready to buy or rent homes. But they didn’t anticipate that the industrial workforce of the war machine would keep booming, drawing migrants from all over, including African-Americans from the South. An exhaustive account of this period can be found in “The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II.”
To grow and diversify its workforce, Oakland would need a rapid infusion of public housing—and civil rights and labor groups, the offshoots of the “New Deal” coalition, demanded that it be desegregated. Local interest groups would be forced to choose between their racism and their economic interests, and their resistance to these conditions ultimately drove the campaign for Article 34.
How “Improvement Clubs” Worsened Segregation
Contrary to its public image today, Oakland was dominated largely by white, conservative business interests for nearly a century. That lasted until 1947, when a social democratic coalition won a majority of the seats on Oakland City Council in the “Oakland Revolution.” This social democratic bloc made low-cost housing one of its key priorities.
As soon as the City Council began planning for public housing, neighborhood resentment grew—in part from incumbent homeowners, but later by real estate interests that astroturfed their grassroots operations. These organizing groups were so-called “improvement clubs.”
“Improvement clubs” were neighborhood associations that sprung up in the early 20th century dedicated to social and spatial order. They were early advocates for explicitly segregationist zoning codes. After the U.S. Supreme Court found such schemes unconstitutional in Buchanan vs Warley, East Bay improvement clubs adopted the non-explicitly racial zoning pioneered in Berkeley’s Elmwood District.
For example, the Rockridge Improvement Club categorized buildings and uses that tended to undermine their vision of social order and worked to ban them by city ordinance. Mixed-use structures, commercial uses and apartment buildings were all found to be detrimental to the overall health of the Rockridge community by the Rockridge Improvement Club. Special scrutiny was applied to laundries, typically owned and operated by Chinese immigrants and Chinese-Americans. The Club went so far as to advocate for and secure demolition of buildings in violation of their new ordinances.
For the time being, state and federal law seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. In 1937 Congress passed the Wagner-Steagall Act, which provided subsidies for local housing agencies to improve housing conditions for low-income people through the construction of public housing. Subsequently, the Housing Act of 1949 banned explicit racial segregation in public housing, which left cities scrambling to find ways to separate communities of color from white neighborhoods. The act also required one-for-one demolition “blighted” properties. A year prior, progressive groups placed a landmark public housing measure, Proposition 14, on the ballot. It would have created a state housing agency equipped with a $100 million revolving loan fund to assist in the construction of low-cost homes. Oakland’s new City Council, meanwhile, sought to implement these policies to build 3,000 units of public housing.
The looming promise of a widespread public housing blitz across Oakland spurred segregationist Improvement Clubs into action. The coalition behind Article 34 was born.
The real estate industry, unable to stop the passage of the Housing Act of 1949 at the federal level, sought to slow and stop its implementation at the state and local level. In California, these interests were spearheaded by Fritz Burns, a Los Angeles suburban tract developer. With the help of an expensive San Francisco ad agency, the Committee for Home Protection capitalized on Red Scare hysteria to deliver a crushing defeat to Proposition 14.
With the passage of the Housing Act of 1949, local public housing authorities and city councils throughout the state would be the new political arena. Burns enlisted realtors and landlords to start the Committee for Home Protection to counteract this perceived threat to their bottom line. In Oakland, he selected Piedmont landlord attorney Adrian Thiel to head the local chapter.
Local chapters of the Committee for Home Protection became loci of opposition to public housing in California. But the Oakland chapter was one of the most vocal, organized and powerful in the state. Thiel recruited realtors, landlords, and homeowners to form the membership of the Oakland Committee for Home Protection. Thiel already had a steady source of organized homeowners to bring into his coalition: improvement clubs. In particular, he tapped into reactionary tendencies in middle-class neighborhoods that were undergoing more change thanks to postwar population growth.
These neighborhoods were closer to factories, had lower property values and less political capital to resist the siting of public housing. Affluent North Oakland and foothill neighborhoods were never seriously considered for siting public housing.
West Oakland’s Counter-Revolution
The West Oakland Improvement Club proved to be the most fertile source of recruits for Thiel. West Oakland was traditionally a working-class, immigrant neighborhood focused around the railroad, port and factories. Prior to the war, many of the workers lived in modest, Victorian single-family homes. As white and Black defense workers from the South moved to Oakland, many…
