The Sierra Club moved our headquarters from San Francisco last year, a city we called home for over one hundred years, to our new location in downtown Oakland. We entered the Oakland community at a time of crisis, in a historical moment when income inequality, trauma and white supremacy are visible everywhere you look.
I moved to Oakland not too long beforehand, making me a recent transplant and frankly - a gentrifier. Like most of the nonprofit workers and activists I know, as well as the Sierra Club itself, I am caught up in a system where my only available housing options are in places where my income is above the median and where my neighbors are struggling to keep a roof over their heads in this housing crisis.
Recently nearly one hundred of my neighbors lost that struggle.
The San Pablo Fire, unlike the prominent Ghost Ship tragedy, didn’t capture much attention from the media or the public outside the Bay Area. But on the street where I live, where four people died in a fire that displaced over 80 of my neighbors, we don’t talk about much else.
Many in the Oakland community are asking questions about negligence from a landlord bent on evicting tenants served by a housing nonprofit, most of them veterans, people struggling with mental health challenges or addiction, and nearly all of them Black. Given the long history in the Bay Area of fires meant to drive tenants protected by rent control from their homes, attorneys for the tenants have called for the fire to be investigated as arson.
Tenants reported substandard living conditions in the building for years - an inspection report from 2005 indicates that children living in the building were at risk of developing asthma from toxic mold. Just weeks before the fire, inspectors found extension cables running from room to room, broken plumbing and massive infestations. According to tenants fortunate enough to actually escape, no fire alarms or sprinklers deployed during the fire.
I spent a good portion of the last year of my life advocating against the dangerous proposal to transport coal through a new shipping terminal in my neighborhood of West Oakland. I felt lucky to get to work on something so close to home, on behalf of Sierra Club. One of the main issues we raised was the impact that coal dust from open-top trains would have on a neighborhood already burdened by air pollution. West Oakland residents are twice as likely to go to the emergency room with asthma as people in our county overall.
But I didn’t even realize that on my own block, children were at risk of getting asthma from the toxic mold in their own apartment building. Walking past on the street, it wasn’t obvious what kind of living conditions my neighbors were experiencing. 2551 San Pablo Avenue was an environment unfit for human beings to occupy. The housing crisis is an environmental issue.
We must radically expand our understanding of what the “environment” really is. Having grown up in a national park, I place tremendous importance on protecting public lands and fragile ecosystems. But my home is Oakland now, and the environment that my neighbors and I live in is equally worthy and in need of protection. It’s the Sierra Club’s mission to protect both the natural and human environment.
I don’t know how we do that. I don’t have a roadmap to guaranteeing the access to safe, healthy housing that is every person’s right. But I’m going to keep thinking about my role in housing displacement, and about the systems of power that created this unsafe living environment and forced vulnerable people into it.
In the meantime, if you agree that every person has a right to a safe, healthy environment to live in, I ask you to join me in supporting my neighbors as they search for affordable housing in a region that has nearly nothing to offer them.