The port’s side was even more dominated by local workers: Nearly 66% of work hours were performed by Oaklanders, and more than 23% by apprentices.
Both jurisdictions exceeded their targets for hiring local apprentices from marginalized communities, and in total, individual contractors who didn’t meet the local hiring targets paid more than a quarter-million dollars in damages.
“The best benefit is that it provided a lot of really good jobs for the community of Oakland,” said Andrew Jaeger, the UC Berkeley Labor Center study’s author. “It brought in hundreds of new local apprentices who probably would not have become apprentices under other conditions, if it wasn’t for this agreement.”
Those job openings are what led Whittington to complete his parole in Oakland rather than San Francisco or Contra Costa County, where he grew up. He said other jurisdictions also didn’t have resources like those he could access at the West Oakland Job Resource Center, which was created by the Army base deal. That included skill-building classes and growth opportunities in addition to stable work.
“All of these things gave me a step to get to where I am today,” Whittington said.
Bringing the community to the table
The uses for the Coliseum land are more flexible, O’Hara said, and negotiations could secure benefits beyond jobs — like community spaces and neighborhood services that East Oaklanders need.
AASEG managing partner Ray Bobbitt and fellow member Shonda Scott told KQED in September that the entertainment group had over the last few years sought input from over 50 community organizations as well as relatives, residents and young people.
“Oftentimes those young people’s voices aren’t part of the discussion,” Scott said at the time. “And that’s really what this project is for. It’s not for us to sit under the shade of the tree. This is for us to put these trees up and then have shade for the next generation. This is a legacy project.”
AASEG has said that 25% of any housing it builds will be affordable. It is also eyeing commercial attractions that have slowly faded from East Oakland — a resounding desire of Castlemont High School’s urban design students, who have completed proposals for the space’s use as part of their class during the last few school years.
“Like movie theaters, [an] arcade, things that are fun, because East Oakland does not have a lot of that,” Lilly Jacobson, the school’s 11th-grade urban design teacher, told KQED last fall about what her students wrote in their proposals. “There’s been so much disinvestment that all of the fun stuff has left. Students have to go to San Leandro or Hayward to go to the movies or the mall.”
Despite the construction-related employment successes of the Oakland Army Base deal, Jaeger said permanent jobs haven’t materialized on the scale that the community coalition had hoped for.
“One of the reasons why [that is is] completely out of the hands of the coalition,” Jaeger told KQED. “The port has not been doing as much business as was projected, and so there’s actually just not as much permanent employment happening there.”
Such a consideration could be especially important for the community groups bargaining in the Coliseum deal, as the city tries to rebound from long-term disinvestment.
“Perhaps there should be institutions put into place that allow for … say, a warehouse, if it’s idle for years on end, maybe it could be used for something else for the community benefit,” Jaeger said.
Ultimately, he said, the biggest key to success for development that benefits the community is their presence at the bargaining table — something Bobbitt has told KQED will be key to the AASEG development deal, if and when the sale is complete.
“Everyone knows that businesses work individually, or through lobbying firms, to help write laws and policies. Then from their perspective, [the policies] work quite well for them,” Jaeger said. “Community groups and workers, they can do this too, and they should, and I think this is a case where they did it quite successfully.”
