Cities of the East Bay have their own individual personalities, each having absorbed a variety of immigrant residents, and pursued various economic developments. For example, Oakland, the second city to San Francisco, was developed as a rail hub for the Southern Pacific, while Berkeley was always a university town, growing outward toward its working-class neighbor Ocean View. But after the 1906 Earthquake, the area quickly developed, and many of the new neighborhoods included restrictive covenants. Restrictive covenants gave way to restrictive zoning… first promoted by local realtors, and then supported by the many homeowners that sought out such restrictions as insurance of their home's future value. This continued throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and despite sporadic lawsuits, many of these racist conditions that encouraged and created the earliest known zoning ordinances were supported at the highest levels.

 

Berkeley as a city would be an example for the rest of the country to follow. What became known as redlining spawned by Depression-era FHA policy mirrored many of the conditions that already existed at the local level. People of color, often subjugated by laws of exclusion, or daily discrimination were repeatedly affected by new zoning regulations that would force many to relocate. As California has become the most populous state in America, gentrification, shifting displaced communities, and a rethinking of zoning policy, have become contentious issues of our current time. Using Berkeley as a study for the effect development has had at the local level on immigrant populations, one must now look not only at the histories of the city and its location but the community’s relation to discriminatory policies of zoning. How did this begin? And what sorts of pressure do individual citizens (acting alone or as an organized group) affect housing discrimination in Berkeley? 

 

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