Who Gets to Own the Neighborhood

SPEAKER_1 (0:05)

Welcome to Own the Block. This is the episode that earns the name, folks, where we ask who actually gets to own the neighborhood, and who makes that ownership possible in the first place, and what type of money that takes.

Joining me is Adriana Abizadeh-Barbour, Executive Director of Kensington Corridor Trust, where she's using collective ownership to build the neighborhood, build power, and preserve culture and affordability along the corridor. I'm also joined by Noni Session, Co-Founder and Executive Director of East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, EB PREC, a third generation West Oakland and cultural anthropologist who co-founded EB PREC to build cooperative economic power and slow racialized displacement in her own neighborhood.

Come on, come with me on this journey, and let's redefine what ownership really means. Let's get into it. All right. Adriana, when people hear community ownership, they usually picture residents owning property outright. So how does that picture match or not match what you've actually seen work at KCT?

Adriana Abizadeh-Barbour (1:16)

Yeah, I think most folks are so steeped in the traditional ownership rights, where we're all taught the way to build American wealth is through home ownership, and you have to have your name on the deed and the title, and that's what makes it yours. And at the Trust, what we're saying is you can actually do that in community with others. You can co-own spaces, and the Trust is how that works here in Kensington. So what we've done is we've built a perpetual purpose trust that's co-owned by folks in a specific geography. And so the deed name that comes up is the Trust, but the Trust is co-owned by the folks in the space. And so it's just a little bit different. It requires some education. It requires some kind of unearthing and unpacking of what we're used to, because we've been told that ownership means one very specific thing. And, you know, collective ownership can mean so many different things.

SPEAKER_1 (2:05)

Yes, I love that. So Adriana, what do you say to people who push back and say that that's not a wealth building strategy? How do you combat that narrative?

Adriana Abizadeh-Barbour (2:16)

Yeah, so I think we are really intentional that it's a yes and, right? So we do think that folks should own their homes and build their own wealth at the family level. And we can co-own lots of other buildings together and build wealth at the neighborhood level. I think oftentimes people are stuck in a scarcity mindset and feel like everything has to be and or or it has to be black and white, no gray.

Community ownership creates space for a new path for us to determine what we want ownership to look like, what we want stewardship to look like, what we want wealth building to look like. We get to define that together. And I think we at the trust are very intentional about ensuring that folks know that this is a real choice. It is a viable and very real choice that exists and that home ownership is still a part of that. And we're not saying stop owning homes. We're saying do that and let's build ownership together in the collective as well.

SPEAKER_1 (3:06)

I love that. So Noni, you've said building cooperative networks was a clear path to change than a city council.

What made you land on collective economic ownership as a strategy for slowing displacement in West Oakland?

Noni Session (3:23)

Well, when I was running for Oakland City Council, the whole process is that you spend a lot of time in debate or public conversation with folks who are in positions of leadership. Essentially, sitting on the days representing district one through six plus at large.

I ran for district three. It was the heart of West Oakland, power seat, the port of Oakland, a big swath of the left side of the lake, and almost all of the legacy black community in West Oakland. Our conditions have been pretty rough for quite some time, not to mention that West Oakland has been a sitting duck for unchecked speculative development, which has contributed really to the rising, rapid and racialized displacement of legacy-rooted Oaklanders.

At the time when I asked the incumbent and other folks who were still sitting on the days, why my city looked the way it looked, and I was really motivated to ask that question because after some time, I really got fatigued with the easy platitudes that I found them putting out like, hey, we're all in agreement here. Hey, we're all friends here. Actually, no. My friends would take care of my city and the way my city looks, I don't see any kind of friendship coming from you all. So my question was, why does my city look the way it looks? And the answer that I got almost to the person was in, at the time, quite disturbing and disheartening, which was that, hey, we can't do anything about the free market. We're essentially limited to running the city on grants and goodwill.