by Annette Floystrup
This is the third article in a series on the history of the RCPC in Rockridge
When BART and Hwy 24 finally opened in 1970, the noise, air, and other types of pollution created by the elevated freeway and train tracks spread over large areas of the neighborhood. Fifty years later, due to how sound travels, the increase in noise pollution makes it difficult for residents as far away as the hills above Broadway to use their outdoor spaces. California air quality regulators say it’s unhealthful to put homes, schools, and day-cares within 500 feet of a freeway. Both Claremont Middle School and Chabot Elementary as well as many residential dwellings are located within that 500-foot zone, and hundreds more are impacted under certain weather conditions that allow particulate pollution to go much farther — extending more than a mile downwind from the freeway.
Prior to 1986, when leaded gas was discontinued in California, car exhaust typically accounted for 90 percent of airborne lead pollution. As a result, residents in a large area of Rockridge can’t grow leafy vegetables, root or tuber crops (carrots, potatoes, beets, turnips) in the now lead-contaminated soil, but must grow them in raised beds filled with clean soil.
Neighbors in the early 1970s realized the City was not developing a plan to revitalize their neighborhood. Rockridge neighbors subsequently organized into six sub-neighborhood areas, each with its own council, coordinated by the umbrella organization of RCPC. As neighbors met and planned what their future should look like, they engaged in smaller neighborhood improvement projects like street tree planting.
Meanwhile, the City of Oakland saw the Rockridge flatlands as expendable. In 1971, speculators bought land adjacent to BART and then asked the City to up-zone the area for major development. Most of the single-family homes around the BART station were to be torn down and replaced by high-rise apartments and office buildings. The retail and pedestrian atmosphere of College Avenue was to be replaced by office lobbies, fast food, and drive-through restaurants. The speculators bought lots on Birch Court and Oak Grove, proposing to build 10-story apartment buildings.
The final straw came in early 1974 when the new owners of Dreyer’s proposed to build a drive-through Taco Bell on the corner of Harwood and College, where the Golden Squirrel building is now. People were outraged and saw the proposal as the epitome of suburban culture enroaching into a neighborhood that was already negatively impacted by transit development. The Telegraph Avenue Neighborhood Group (TANG), Fairview Neighborhood Association, and Claremont-Elmwood Neighborhood Association (Berkeley) joined RCPC in opposing the fast-food drive-through.
Neighbors collected the trash thrown on the ground at a local Taco Bell for one hour and hung it in the windows of a popular deli, Curds & Whey (then next door to Yasai Market). Hundreds of neighbors signed petitions against the Taco Bell, and well over 400 neighbors went to the City Council meeting to determine Taco Bell’s fate — it was decided that College Avenue would not become a home to fast-food chains.
Armed with this success and backed by the then College Avenue Merchants Association, RCPC presented the City with proposals for new commercial and residential zoning plans for Rockridge’s College Avenue that eventually became the CN-1 “Pedestrian Oriented Retail District.” The neighborhood-designed commercial zoning became a model for five other neighborhoods over the years, and made College Avenue one of the highest sales tax revenue generators in Oakland (second only to car dealerships) for most of the past 50 years.
A one-block zone on either side of the commercial zone was rezoned for apartment buildings as well as single-family homes, and the single-family homes had the option of building a second house on their lots. For example, Birch Court, a one-block long, dead-end street, two-thirds of which is located across the street from the Claremont school, has 48 households, and, without the schoolyard, would have had many more.
The history of this early grassroots organizing is included in one of the early textbooks of grassroots organizing, The Grassroots Primer, published by Sierra Club Books in 1975. It is included with case studies from all over the United States and Canada as an example of effective citizen self-determination and political action.