APEX Express – July 30, 2026

The following program is pre-recorded. Just past the top of the hour here at KPFA. Time for a special live but also recorded edition of East Bay yesterday. You're listening to East Bay yesterday. This show is about history, but it's not stuck in the past. Let's begin. Let's begin. The episode you're about to hear was recorded live in front of a sold-out crowd at Spire. In West Oakland, my guests were Alexis Madrigal and Noni Session. Alexis is the author of an essential new book about Oakland called The Pacific Circuit, a globalized account of the battle for the soul of an American city. Noni Session. is a third-generation West Oaklander and the executive director of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, or E.B. Prec. E.B. Prec is a community-funded organization that resists displacement by buying property in order to keep it in the hands of long-time residents instead of speculators. That's a wild oversimplification, and they do a lot of other great things too, but you're going to hear all about it in the episode. So that's all I'll say for now. This was such a fun event. Big thanks to everyone who came out. And don't forget to sign up for my free newsletter. the East Bay Yesterday substack. If you want to find out more about my upcoming events, you can find it by Googling East Bay Yesterday substack. Let's jump right into it. I'm Liam O'Donohue, and you're listening to East Bay Yesterday.

So kicking things off here, I just wanted to say that I believe that for a relatively small city, Oakland is globally significant. And I also believe that understanding Oakland history can provide a lot of insights into how the world works. And... This has been one of the main kind of underlying themes of East Bay yesterday for the past nine years. And I can't think of anything that makes this case stronger than Alexis's new book, The Pacific Circuit, a globalized account of the battle for the soul of an American city. It really, really emphasizes, I think, that point, Alexis, beautifully. And you're going to understand what I mean in the second when we get to the interview. But I just want to point out one recent headline, one recent book review headline in The Guardian that said, quote, the future happens in Oakland First. That's a cautionary tale for global cities. And I think that's an accurate assessment of one of the points this book is trying to make. So joining us tonight also, NONI Session, of course. Can we get a round of applause for NONI? Yeah, NONI. NONI is the executive director of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, E.B. Prec, for short. And I will be going with E.B. Prec, as other ways. A lot of syllables. And you're also a third generation West Oaklander. Yes. Right? And have the last line in the book. And has the last line in the book? The last line in the book, yes, you're going to, when you read the book, you're going to hear all about the important work that no one is doing, and I should say that that's when you get to the solutions part of the book. Yes, that's right. Very important. We're going to be unpacking that throughout the evening tonight. So. This event, I feel like, could not be happening at a more important time. Just a couple hours ago, I read an article that was put out by the Associated Press. I'm going to quote it here that said, the Environmental Protection Agency illegally canceled grants worth more than $1.5 billion focused on improving the environment in minority communities hit hard by pollution, Senate Democrats say. Now, the Trump administration's goal of, quote, eliminating environmental justice is literally saying that the history of pollution and discrimination in communities like West Oakland doesn't matter. But anyone who reads this book will understand how dishonest it is to pretend that decades of racist policy decisions don't matter, that decades of people suffering from asthma and lung cancer don't matter, that decades of struggle for justice don't matter.

Oh, sorry. I guess being up on this altar is making me feel a little bit like a preacher tonight. I'll stop there. We'll jump into the Q&A. But first, I want to give you something to really applaud, to really clap about. And this is a surprise for you, Alexis. You didn't know I was going to do this, but I want you to stand up and show people your newest tattoo. Oh, yeah. I could explain how Alexis has been devoted to this project for 10 years, but he can show you right there the shipping container tattoo on his arm to commemorate. Yes. This book is literally written on these pages and in your skin now. All right. So jumping right into the questions, we all know the expression. You shouldn't judge a book by its cover. I disagree with that statement in the case of your book, Alexis, because I think the cover of this book is actually a pretty good representation of what the book is about. And, of course, we're recording this for the radio. So I was wondering if you could describe what's on the cover and explain... how that sort of represents the concepts that your book is dealing with. Yeah, so the cover has kind of two main pieces. One is this kind of hovering structure built out of shipping containers that is sort of, I think, kind of representing the kind of mechanism of global trade and what it has done both to West Oakland and to the world. And I can talk more about that in a second. But there's actually another piece to the cover, which is actually... a real photo drawn from the Oakland Tribune archives which shows a tank running into homes in what is now the area of the post office down along 7th Street so people have seen that post office you know either walked in its shadow gone past it on on Bart and when the city of Oakland decided to do urban renewal they teamed up in this kind of ill-fated scheme to create an automated post office and used that as kind of the pretext to bulldoze a bunch of homes along 7th Street, which most people hear, if you're dedicated to East Bay yesterday, listener know, was kind of the main corridor of like sort of black commercial life, like where your doctor was, your dentist, but also like restaurants and bars and all that stuff, as well as some homes. And so they hired this cut rate demolition guy who went and bought a World War II era tank and like literally ran a tank through blocks of people's homes right there, right along 7th Street. And, you know, we know that there were a lot of young future leaders in the neighborhood at the time, maybe even attended, though we're not totally sure, like Paul Cobb, local leader, or Huey Newton, are in the neighborhood at the time. And for me, it's just like summed up the interrelationship between this big... kind of literature and discourse that I think rightfully has gotten a lot of attention over the last 15 years, which is about the ways that redlining and steering and racist real estate practices and disinvestment and predatory inclusion and all these things that are sort of done to black neighborhoods.

intersects with this sense of the global economy because you actually need these sacrifice zones to run the rest of the operation of global capitalism. And that's why if you look at the places where the early container ports are, they're Newark and Long Beach and Oakland. And also Cameron Bay and Vietnam because it's also tied up with the whole American Imperial project across the That's the voice of Alexis Magical in conversation with Liam O'Donohue, live on stage, but no longer live, now recorded. This is a special presentation of East Bay yesterday. I'm Brian Edwards Teaker, just jumping in here with two pieces of news. The first is that for the rest of the hour, while you are listening to this, the book that the two of them are discussing is available as a thank you gift for your donation to KPFA. It's the Pacific Circuit, a globalized account of the battle for the soul of an American city, and it's $17 a month or $170 all at once at KBFA.org or 1,800-439-5732. The second piece of news is that if you donate for the book or donate any amount just to help out KPFA, we have a chance to make that donation go further. I have just been informed that Colin in Hayward is offering to double the staggeringly large sum for this time of day of $1,000 if we can match it with contributions from everyone listening. There are 50 minutes left on the clock, and we're going right back to the show. So, KPFA.org is the best place to give, or you can call 1-800-439-5732. I'll let you know if we've made any progress in about 12 minutes. Well, we're definitely going to talk much more about the book in a minute, but Noni, I wanted to turn to you for a second. And whenever I'm interviewing someone who has deep roots in Oakland, I always like to start by asking about family history. I know that's a big topic, but I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about, you know, how your family got to us to Oakland and what it was like for you growing up here. Sure. Actually, I did not notice the tank at the bottom of the image. fairly symbolic using the offcastings of the military industrial complex to continue this nation building project and my family in particular on my father's side migrated from Sicily Island Louisiana in the late 30s And obviously, like most Black American folks, were fleeing the violence of the South. But my grandparents came here with a few professional skills. My grandmother was a nurse. My grandfather was working on the railroad. So that provided, when they first landed in what...

became one of the most notorious projects cypress village which sat under the shadow of the cypress double-decker freeway for decades that's where they landed but were very quickly relatively quickly, able to purchase a home on 9th Street, what is now that short block called Huey P. Newton Way. And my father, skipping from infancy to adulthood, my father owned the grocery store, one of the last black-owned grocery stores in West Oakland, Cypress Grocery, which still stands between 9th and 10th is now owned by other folks. And this is... kind of where they bloom from. Most folks who migrated had really high hopes in those decades, and those were slowly dashed by successive removals, exclusionary policies, et cetera. If anyone's read the color of law, you can kind of see the systematicity of that work. But my family in particular was one of the few families that was able to do well and raise me on 16th in murder, I still live where my parents purchased a home with some of the federal programs in the late 60s, early 70s. And I was educated here all the way through college until I left for graduate school. So growing up in my era, which is the 80s, this was the last gasp of really bonded community before we experienced many other communities are referring to it as this and it feels inspirational to me. until we had our lost generation. Right. It was the 90s where we lost our continuity between prior generations and where we stand today, right? With the flooding of our communities with crack and the acceleration of this project of benign neglect, all of the state hospitals being closed. And this is the first time you start to see homelessness where you start to see like high rates of children displaced from their homes. no grandparents in the home, right? So we kind of watch the disintegration of a bonded community and identity and in history and basically have spent the last 20 or 30 years sort of trying to build back from that place as folks who've been committed to Oakland since we first came here. I want to turn back to Alexis for a second here. Speaking of community organizing Alexis, one of the main characters in your book is local hero that I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with by the name of Miss Margaret Gordon, one of the co-founders of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project. Yes.

And I think Ms. Margaret is exactly the type of person who we need to be thinking about and reading about and studying right now because she's a perfect example in this time when a lot of us feel so powerless about how someone with relatively scarce means and humble upbringing can have a huge impact on their community. And so talk about that a little bit. What was Ms. Margaret organizing around and what kind of impact did she have? Because that's such a huge piece of the book. Yeah, you know, there's a writer named Ingrid Rojas Contreras who wrote an amazing book, Pulitzer Prize finalist, called The Man Who Could Move Clouds. And one of the things that she wrote recently in an essay, has told me in conversation before, was this kind of way of thinking about ghosts. And she thinks about ghosts essentially as like a way of being able to bring history into the press. right that it's not something that's just sort of like back there and we can like run away from which is what's happening at kind of the federal governmental level but in fact like you can do something with the coast right that's why that's what people do when they have these different kinds of rituals and I feel like environmental justice is one of those things that kind of directly provides entree into history to allow you to kind of do something with it when I look at West Oakland and I'm on the bar or I'm like walking around. What I see is all these empty lots and like people don't necessarily know well why is this lot empty? Well it's because there was probably a factory there that polluted the earth and now no one knows what to do with this land until someone's willing to pay to clean it up. Like to me that's like a haunting right I mean there's this thing where you you've got to do something to deal with history and I think you know Miss Margaret's version of environmental injustice and you know West Oakland Environmental Indicators project more more generally, I think has been this kind of beautiful way of dealing with taking all of these kind of broken federal and state projects and proposals and policies and finding ways to actually embed them in the community in a way that they'll actually do something. In the most recent example of that, you know, AB617 was a law passed in the state of California that took a little bit of money from, like, cap and trade and funneled it into a set of environmental justice communities. So AB617, a lot of environmental justice organizations were like, this is a broken law. Like, we can't actually use this. It has no teeth. There's all these problems with it. Some of them even, like, you know, wrote letters against it. Nonetheless, there's this, like, pile of money that could go to people in West Oakland. five years, like taking this broken tool that the state government had provided via this kind of cap and trade scheme that never seemed to actually do anything to reduce emissions in the state of California, and they formed it into something that reduced people's exposure to all kinds of pollution in West Oakland and helped fund the community's growth and organization. And I think that's almost just like the most perfect example of, like, you're never getting these perfect tools from the state. whether that's the state of California or the state, like in a broader sense.

But there are people who, because they can embed those things in the real lives of people and real communities, are able to turn those things into quite potent forces with actually very little money put behind them. And that, to me, also get at the deeper and realer and more important version of environmental justice, where you're not just talking about a certain amount of parts per million. You're not just talking about some chemical that may or may not be in the ground. But you're just like saying, no, this history is deeper and broader. And this is our whole tool for trying to deal with that history, for trying to sort of exercise these ghosts. I just want to add a little element to Ms. Margaret and how she has turned an arc of history for us in West Oakland as one lady that, you know, takes her little gruff self to every meeting and tracks what is going on there and unearthing the histories that led us there. And West Oakland has had some of the highest rates of asthma due to being an international goods and services port. Because every day from before I was birth, there are hundreds, if not thousands of trucks coming up the 7th Street corridor to go into the port to pick up goods and services. And in the 90s, the 80s and 90s, those ports would sometimes, those trucks would sometimes idle for days. Outside the school. Outside the school, outside of our houses, running their engines day and night. And Margaret, Margaret leveraged a 10-year fight, and trucks are no longer allowed to idle on our corridor. This one woman changed the air in West Oakland. Margaret Gordon got Mayor Delums to put her on the port commission, of which she was eventually kicked off of because of this action. But Margaret Gordon, as an individual, unearthed what the port owes us. So this idea of her moving ghosts to find what is beneath the soil, we're going to sorely miss her impact in West Oakland. another thing. I think it's really worth, you know, so I got, you know, Margaret and many other people tell me, told me stories, you know, about things in West Hill, including Noni, and then I felt like my job was like, I'm going to go find the receipts for these things. I'm going to go into archives. I'm going to go dig through government documents. Like, that's the skill set of journalism, you know, you can go do these things. And. Probably the highest impact document for me was realizing that the federal government, you know, kind of mid-1930s, runs this real property survey. They send people out. They get data on every single block in Oakland and a lot of other cities as well, in which they record these like pieces of information, including the number of non-white people who live on the block. And then they create these huge maps, some of which go in the FHA, some of which go in the city of Oakland Planning Department. But at the end of this huge real property survey,

there's like a sort of bit of analysis by I.F. Shattuck. We all know Shattuck from Shattuck, the street. And I. F. Shattuck suggests basically two things that should be done in West Oakland. He says, we should basically like, it's a two mixed race on the west side of West Oakland. So we should put a freeway there to segregate that piece of the community. And he also says, you know, this really should just be industrial land. Even though there's tons of people living there, it's one of the densest places in the whole Bay Area. They're like, there's tons of people living here. We should actually just crowd them out. We should allow more industrial pollution in West Oakland so that the people will leave. And I just, I mean, it's just written out. It's pollution as policy and it's really just continued for a really long time because people do. people in the power structures of both the city of Oakland as well as in the sort of broader set of users of the port of Oakland which includes like all the retailers who use the port of Oakland in northern California all the trucking company all that stuff they want that area for industrial development and they have been you trying to do whatever they can to use it for a long time The voice of Alexis Madrigal on stage with Liam O'Donohue as a live East Bay yesterday, spectacular. I'm Brian Edwards-Tickert. We are bringing this to you as a special presentation as part of KPFA's fundraising efforts. And the new book from Alexis is available in the featured box on the pledge page at kpFA.org. If you donate right now, it will also count towards a $1,000 challenge that we have until the end of the hour to make. and which we could desperately use your help with, because up till this moment, we have raised zero. So, the best way to show your love for the deep local history you get from East Bay yesterday and the radio station that brings it to you is to donate right now at KBFA.org or call 1-800-439-5732. That's 1-800. Hey, KPFA. Liam? Oh, Liam O'Donohue may have stepped away from his microphone or lean too hard in his mute button. KPFA.org, 1-800-439-5732. That's 1-800. Hey, KPFA. What we're particularly looking for is sustaining donations, if you can muster. 10 bucks a month. We are allowed to count the 12-month value of that donation towards this challenge fund, which means you would get us almost one-eighth of the way there. If you can get up to $17 a month, it is still quite a bargain. And also, you would be able to pick up a copy of the book that's getting discussed in this episode. Whatever you do, we're asking you to do it quickly because we have so much more of this live event to bring you. KPFA.org, 1-800-439-573-2-1-800, Hey, KPFA. Let's go back to East Bay yesterday.

And you know, we're doing a corridor improvement project on 7th Street. And we just recently learned despite the fact that there are 59,000 people in that district, it's still zoned as an industrial zone. Oh, yeah, Dayton. Until today. Yeah, yeah. Well, we're talking about the port in kind of broad terms right now, but I think it's also important to remember that there's sort of different specific areas of the port. And for about 50 years, a huge part of the port was taken up by the Oakland Army base. That closed down in the 1990s. And a couple years ago, I did an episode about the history of the Army base. I'm in collaboration with the oral history center over at Cal. And I was just re-listening to it, kind of getting in the mood for this conversation. And this... Quote from a longshoreman really struck me. And Longshoremen, of course, were people still, to this day, to ILW, who are in charge of unloading the ships. But there's a lot fewer now than there used to be, because before the containerization and the cranes were installed, you needed teams of dozens or hundreds of men to unload these ships. And I just want to read this quote a lesson, because I feel like it really ties into one of the themes of your book particularly relevantly. So I'm just going to start out by saying, Let's see this quote. And again, I'm quoting from this interview that took place in the 1990s, one of the old longshoremen. He says, he lived through the containerization revolution. He says, in the 1970s, the accident rate started going up. It started going out of sight. And then the interviewer says, even with containerization, and he says, even more so with containerization. See, what containerization did. it isolated the individual longshoremen. In the old days, when you worked with the gang, there was at least four to six men you worked with. And during the course of the week, there was constant conversation about anything and everything. Containerization took all that away. The crane driver, he's 118 feet up in the air, so he's not talking to the holdman or the men on deck. There's no gang boss, there's a walking boss, and his only concern is production. They've got them tied to how many cans, how many containers. You can move in an hour. So he's not interested in conversation with you. He's trying to get a bonus check. So there's no cohesion. All that was taken away. And that's the end of the quote. Now, of course, since the 1970s, the accident rate has gone down. And, you know, there are certainly benefits to containerization. But I think for the people that lived through this change at the port, it was a really... really, really rough transition. And the reason I'm bringing this up is because I feel like the automation of the port is foreshadowing of the automation that we're living through right now with the AI revolution. I mean, all of a sudden people, you know, across the world who studied and had good paying jobs realizing they are no longer employable because their skill sets are being automated. And so I'm wondering, you know, in the, you've not only read about the longshoremen, you've talked to many of them, I mean, a lot of these guys are still around, and they're happy to share their stories, and they did with you in the book. So I'm wondering if you have thoughts on what we can learn from people who live through that process of automation. So I feel like it's a lot of people are suffering from that process right now. Yeah, that's such a good question. I mean, these guys, yeah, I mean, I think did they like hand handling raw hides that were smeared?

Like, no, of course he didn't. He didn't like that specific, you know, kind of thing or moving asbestos or whatever. Or throwing their back out. Or throwing their back out. But, but the payoff of all of that was that they worked in community, that there was a kind of natural politics that the longshore of people. and, you know, able to have like a human life. I mean, they had friends on the Longshore. They tended to work as partners as well as in gangs. And I think what happened on the Longshore for the rest of us, the thing that's important about it is, you know, they didn't create little robot longshoremen who did the exact same thing that the Longshoremen did. They created an entire system that, like, brought labor down by like a factor of 10. And it's not actually even in the book, but... they have these like tapes of longshoremen chit-chatting you know they're talking about moving like pineapples you know and the guys are just like sitting in the in the break room at the APL terminal that used to be on the port of Oakland they're just like can you believe how many pineapples they moved you know and they were all realizing like our lives are are really going to change here and I think When you look at something like AI, you look at all the different kind of implementations, I think people sometimes look for like, well, how am I specifically going to be replaced? You know, I have this bundle of tasks that I do in my job, and could AI only replace like two of those? And like what really ends up happening is a new system gets created in which all the automatible tasks are bundled into a new thing. And then there's just no jobs over here anymore, you know? And I think it, you know, one of my earliest interests in the port was exactly this question of like, thinking about containerization as like a huge impact automation event. Because the next thing that happens after this, right, is SOMA basically exists because of containerization. Like Soma used to be filled with warehouses and those warehouses had all the goods that were then going to other places. After containerization, as Mark Levinson wrote this book called The Box, which is amazing on continuation, says it's like changed the whole economic geography of basically every single port city all across the world. Like even the entire aesthetic of like Brooklyn is essentially due to containerization because you've got warehouses, you've got these old crusty bars turned by the dogs, you've got all this stuff, which goes into being like what a city becomes, you know, from 1990 onwards, right? And I just think it's like it's almost every piece of it we can learn something from. Yeah. Well, that actually feeds perfectly in a question I had for Noni, which is that you're talking about. how sort of de-industrialization changed the fabric of urban landscapes because you know for example in Oakland and a lot of these places that were factories or warehouses in you know the 50s 60 70s once they emptied out These were not intended as places for artists and musicians, creative people to move into, but of course that's exactly what happened. I mean, so much of West Oakland, East Oakland, these empty industrial spaces got filled up with new creative people who were okay, you know, kind of living in sort of interesting conditions, and the rent was cheap.

And that era, I think, has dwindled significantly over the past 20 years or so. There's a couple of factors involved, like redevelopment. You know, a lot of these old factories were redeveloped into sort of more upscale lofts, cannabis operations, moved into a lot of these warehouses, and they could pay more than a bunch of artists. And, of course, after the ghost ship tragedy, there was a lot more code enforcement, so a lot of evictions. Now, what I'm getting to is that I'm driving around Oakland now, and I'm seeing a lot of empty big boxes where Walgreens and CVS existed up until about six months ago. So I'm kind of wondering, you know, you're looking, you're someone who's looking around at real estate opportunities for the community take back spaces. I could see these buildings sitting around crumbling if no one knows anything with them. They're just going to be empty lights. To say nothing of every ground floor retail space in all of downtown Oakland. Exactly. And so I'm wondering if like de-store frontification is the new... de-industrialization in terms of like, well, the next generation of artists and creative people and people looking for a cheap ramp be like moving into old CVS's. Or have you, you know, talk to people who are thinking about like what to do with these buildings? I mean, de-opposification. Yeah. Right? I was in LA for a, I don't know, some kind of conference or gathering. And we were walking through downtown LA with hundreds of empty buildings. Yeah. And I won't say ironically, because this is part of the structure of the system, with people sleeping in each doorway. Yes, yeah, exactly. And when you talk to developers, so we're also talking about the gamets of that one must run through a bureaucracy. And when you talk to developers about converting these office buildings into residence, because despite the fact that we have about 9,000 people on the streets, I think the number is higher as of the last census, maybe 12. We still have more empty units than we have people on the streets. Right. But under the regime of the commodity, that's irrelevant, that we have enough space for everyone. And so when you discuss, like, what's the barrier to turning buildings back into places where people can live? When you're thinking about the massive size of how we've built out our sort of knowledge economy, our service economy, the floor plans, according to many of these developers, are too large. to um You might say meet the human needs, but one might even say meet the bureaucratic permitting needs. Do you buy it? I mean, I've had these people tell me that there's no cost savings to their being a preexisting building. And I'm like, but you have the building. What are we talking about here? Like, how can a conversion of this kind somehow cost as much as like, you just imagine all the extraction from the earth that went into building that building and you're telling me that like that is nothing? Like, what do you?

make of that You know, if you ask yourself why the American democracy, the union, doesn't have everything that it needs, given the wealth that we've extracted and hoarded from the rest of the planet. Why are we still the folks without insurance, without housing? And some people attribute that to the racial polity and that the will to make resource available to our citizens. is sort of diminished by our desire to make sure that not every community has access to that. And I say that to connect it back to why wouldn't you give away, let's say a building to an organization like E.B. Prec or Oakland Community Land Trust or Bay Area Community Land Trust or Eden Community Land Trust. I'm going to name a lot of different kinds to understand. You're like, what do you land trust you got? Right. Why wouldn't you give it away? and let it be used. Why wouldn't you, for example, forgive student loans but bail out bankers? Why wouldn't you create pocket parks as opposed to a privatized Chase Bank Plaza, right? And I think we're... You know, it's structural. What you talked about about creating a new system, right? What's happening in our federal government right now and is appealing to the hearts of at least 30% of our population is the hope of a completely different system that is offset from, I think, what we experience as a hopelessness and a 13-mile-deep bureaucracy committed to withholding resources into the last gasp of this nation. You're listening to East Bay yesterday on KPFA, a special live recording. Liam O'Donoghue on stage with Noni Session from East Bay Prack, as well as Alexis Madrigal, author of the new book, The Pacific Circuit, a globalized account of the battle for the soul of an American city, which is the featured thank you gift on our website right now at KPFA.org. I'm breaking in briefly. First of all, because we have to get back to the show. Second of all, because Liam's having technical problems and he can't join me for the fundraising at the moment. We hope to have that worked out shortly. Just a very quick update on our effort. We were hit with the challenge from Colin in Hayward, who offered to double $1,000 if we could raise enough to match him during this program. We are down to 24 minutes left in the hour, and we have... $590 left to raise. So we are asking you to join the people who've already chipped anonymously from Santa Clara, Santa Rosa, and Salinas. If you're in the East Bay, show your love for East Bay yesterday. KPFA.org, 1-800-439-5732. Any amount will help.

We especially love monthly sustaining donations. And at 17 bucks a month or more, you can pick up a copy of the book. KBFA.org, 1-800-439-573-2. That is 1-800-Hey KPFA. All right. Let's go back to East Bay yesterday, live on stage with Noni Session and Alexis Magigal. And hopefully in about 10 minutes, we'll be back, actually live with Liam O'Donohue. I think in this last part of the conversation, we're kind of getting towards something that's been in the news a lot, recently, this concept of, quote-unquote, abundance liberalism, which has got a lot of overlap, let's say, with Yimbism, which essentially is this concept that one of the main failures of progressivism is that this, is that well-intentioned laws that were designed to protect the environment or give communities a say have made it impossible to build anything, to redevelop. And, you know, people of this mindset will point to really infuriating examples, like in San Francisco, how it'll take five years and two million dollars to build a single public toilet. You know, that was one of the big, you know, examples of this movement. And they, I think there's a point there. But I also think it's important to remember that these laws, you know, Sequa and a lot of these laws that the YIMBY and abundance liberalism people point to as the problem were created in response to. the excesses of the urban renewal era, which you write about so eloquently in your book, which was an era when basically greedy and frankly racist politicians to get away with basically wiping an entire community off a map with the stroke of a pen. And so I feel like there's got to be a middle ground between the urban renewal, you know, libertarian approach of just, you know, politicians or developers should be able to do whatever they want. Brennan, we need to protect your community from like a power plant going in next to a preschool or something like that. So you guys have both been thinking about these issues a lot, I'm sure. So I'm wondering if you can share some insights on how do we find that middle ground? What can we do to build without, you know, throwing out the laws that actually do protect our communities? Yeah, I'll say that these well-intentioned laws are consistently allowed to be captured by profit-seeking entities. So sure, CEQA is critical. But then to engage with the CEQA laws, you have to pay a consultant $50,000. Sure. Absolutely. Permitting for keeping rent safe in Oakland is super important. But when you engage with the permitting, you have to pay their vetted exclusionary consultants to take you through the process to get you back to a rentable unit. Right? We're talking nationally environmental protections means that if you don't have a half a million dollars, you can't protect your community because you can't run the gamut of the professionalized capture of the so-called doing good of our state, right? So when we talk about liberal abundance, we're also talking about it being captured by a body of professionals that maintain the gap between the ground floor humans and communities and being able to pass through that gate.

of permitting and approval. Yeah. Right. Even internationally, you saw that. Like, you want to support Malawi, but 75% of the budget is going to your Western experts that you're parachuting into Malawi. Well, you know, I'd love to bring this even more closer to home, and maybe we can sort of make it more concrete by talking about something that you've been working on for years now, which is the redevelopment of Ocester's orbit route. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe, Alexis, I want to come back to you and hear your thoughts on liberalism. But I mean, you're talking about running the gamut of, you know, the bureaucracy of how hard it is to build or rebuild in Oakland. What has your experience been like? And first of all, can you tell people for anyone who doesn't know what Esther's orbit room met to the 7th Street community and why it's so important to bring it back, which is what you're working on right now? Happy to. So Esther's orbit room actually is on the 7th Street corridor, which is the subject of much of Margaret Gordon's work in West Oakland, and really the place where we could call the ground zero of the disassembly of historic West Oakland that. And so one of the ways that removal and displacement has worked after the 980 freeway, after the Cypress double-decker, after the bar. after the post office, which could equate to about 30 square miles of community children, playgrounds, houses, grandmas, cousins, uncles. It's important to realize that these were humans' living stories, right, that then got disassembled and dispersed out into other sprawling cities that then contributes to our whole environmental challenge of designing a city around a car. So that's just important to see that sort of like ripple. effect of that displacement further out. And even the people who weren't displaced had lived next to a freeway. Oh my god, yeah. And underbark. Yeah, yeah. I appreciated you, including that passage at the end about us living in nighttime until I was 14 years old. But the Esther's orbit room is one of the last visible cultural assets remaining on the 7th Street corridor that would indicate what kind of community was there over the last four decades. And this is a woman who came from Palestine, Texas, 19, by 19 30 and originally had Esther's orbit room across the street where which was taken by eminent domain for the post office and opened the current Esther's orbit room right when they put Sputnik up in the sky or wrote the name and she held cultural space for the last gasp of that corridor for two decades after the original two decades we're talking about blues jazz music but also like economic components too there's amazing oral history with her where she talks about like she was a receiver of new migrants and helped hook them up with jobs and there were you know unions that met in there there were political groups or all these things so it wasn't just yes it was like a bar and you can go there now but it's like part of the whole economic infrastructure of the whole thing yeah the she she held the kind of space that's been disassembled for us at this point right where you you can't find so to the person when you run into

to them, they have a story about Esther or Esther's orbit room. Food, location, history, employment, emotions, like their stories lay out, it sort of epitomizes what the great migrations meant to people moving here. And so East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, we initially started believing, started with the sense that if we were able to buy enough residential units that we could bring down the cost of housing and sort of cool the market a bit with the way that we were bringing lower cost capital onto the market. And what we found is as low as we were bringing the capital, we were getting rooms like, I mean, if you're living in a single family house, our calculations, our equation was like getting rooms down to $810 a person, which is pretty much unheard of in our market. And we were finding that even our resident owners are how you are our member and a co-owner of EP PREC, we were finding that even at bringing, pressing down costs. to that extent, our folks were still not able to simply afford to live. And so we sort of turned up our theory of change and looking at the absence of economic ecosystems. And so we started looking at commercial spaces, mixed-use spaces, as a method of rebuilding the market that keeps a community alive. So you can think of it as a community base. You can think of it as a market base. one and the same when you're talking about a community that has all of its basic needs met. And so we're using 7th Street and Esther's Orbit Room as our first purchase along 7th Street. We now own about four parcels on 7th Street and we're doing a corridor improvement project ranging from Wood Street to Castro and Brush's Historic part of the corridor to model what is pretty part for the course of economic development. Notie Session from East Bay Permanent Real Estate Collective. a cooperative, excuse me, on stage with Alexis Magical, author of the new book, The Pacific Circuit, a globalized account of the battle for the soul of an American city, and of course, Liam O'Donohue from East Bay yesterday. The book is our featured thank you gift for the rest of the hour at KPFA.org or 1-800-439-5732. You will be showing your love for this program. for the work that Liam does taking deep dives into the politics of local history. You will be picking up something to read for yourself. And if you do it right now, you will be counting that donation towards a $1,000 challenge that we have to make by the end of the hour to help out KPFA's fundraising. We have raised $700, so we are 300 away. Another way to think of that is that two people donating for the book could take us over the top. It's $17 a month. If you do it as a sustainer, however you do it, we need you to do it now. KBFA.org or 1-800-439-5732, 1-800, hey.

KPFA. Live to Liam himself. Hello. I firstly just want to thank the people who have donated so far this hour. You know, $700. We're getting close to our goal. We've still got 300 to go. But those of you who have already made the call and donated, thank you so much for your generosity. Nextly, I just want to mention the fact that, you know, we all recognize how difficult things are out there right now. Financially, politically, kind of spiritually, no matter what you believe. It's just rough out there. And I think it's so important for people not to give up hope. You know, I do these tours. I do these events. And all the time, you know, people during, when we get to the Q&A section, people are saying, you know, what can I do? How can I make a difference? And, you know, I certainly don't have all the answers. But I think listening to KPFA will give you clues, we'll give you inspiration on what to do. Because you will hear from... people like Noni Session, who we've been listening to this hour, who are rebuilding their communities, who are taking real estate off of the private market out of, you know, the hands of investors and putting them into the hands of long-time residents, people who are at high risk for displacement. And that's just one example. You know, there's so many positive projects going on out there in the Bay Area throughout California, throughout the world. Just last night, I was up in Berkeley at an event regarding... creek restoration history. You know, this is volunteers out there saving their watersheds, rebuilding these creeks that were destroyed through, you know, environmental engineering in the 20th century, being culverted, put underground. People are daylighting these creeks and springing back fish and birds and insects and everything you need for a healthy environment. And again, that's just one other example. If you listen to KPFA, you know what I'm talking about. You're not just getting the news of, you know, the wars and the problems. you're also getting to hear from people who are offering you inspiration and a glimpse of the future that we want and that we're trying to build and in order to keep doing that we do need to stay on the air and that's where that's where you the listeners come in because we can't do this without you as Brian mentioned we have a $1,000 challenge this hour if we can make this it would be incredible you can be a part of helping us reach that goal by calling 1-800-439-5732 or jumping online at kpFA.org. And again, you can select a gift for your donation. If you donate the requisite amount, you'll get a copy of Alexis Madrigal's wonderful new book, The Pacific Circuit, that you've been hearing all about this hour. And Brian, like you said, all we need is two people to donate enough to get that book and we'll be at that $1,000 goal. What do you think? Are we getting any closer to achieving this task this hour? I got out of the predictions business long ago, even well before the 2016 election. That's why I'm a historian. Not a futurist because the answers are all there for me. I just have to find the right book. I will make no predictions, but I will tell you the only information you need to know, which is that our fate is in your hands and you control the future. $300 left to raise. And if we can get $300 more this hour, we get $1,000 more from Colin in Hayward. That's up to you. Whether you chip in $25,000 or $250, you get us closer.

KPFA.org, 1,800, 439, 5732, 1,800, hey, KPFA. There is $1,000 hanging in the balance for KPFA. I would be hopeful because we have already raised $700. Were it not for the fact that right this second, there is nobody calling, like not a single caller on the line. If we do not turn that around right now, we... could be in a lot of trouble. If you care about KPFA in general, if you care about this program, East Bay yesterday and its commitment to unearthing the deeply political, local history that you don't get through regular news, then what we're asking you to do is to show that love, to show that support with whatever you can muster so that hopefully, collectively, it's enough to get us the rest of the way there. KPFA.org, 1-800-439-5732, 1-800. Hey, KPFA or online at www.kfa.org. Liam? Brian, you know, I'm just thinking about how frustrating it is that, you know, stations like KPFA, that, you know, projects like this. have to, you know, scrape by when there's so much wealth out there. I mean, and so we do need, you know, every, every penny, every nickel, every dime, whatever you can scrape together. It's not big budget stations. Every dollar that you donate goes back into keeping the programming fresh goes on to, you know, paying the staffers, keeping the, you know, antenna maintained, cutting the brush back to make sure that the antenna is safe from, you know, any, any, buyers that might happen in the upcoming drought season. There's all these little expenses that you might not even think about if you're not involved with the operation of the station. But there really are serious bills to pay. We need to keep up on those bills. And that is why we do these fund drives every couple months. And somehow, miraculously, thanks to you, they have been working. KPFA has been on the station, or I'm sorry, KPFA has been on the air. for 76 years now. That's multiple generations of donors, you know, picking up the torch that was passed to them by previous generations, keeping it going. And we have, obviously, a very challenging road ahead of us here in the United States here on the whole planet, really. And we need lights like KPFA to stay on, to stay bright, to guide us, you know, into the kind of future that we want. Because honestly, you're not going to hear stories that you're hearing on KPFA just about anywhere else. I know you're not going to hear East Bay yesterday anywhere else because KPFA is the only station that would allow, you know, me to go on these deep historical dives into local history to unearth the lessons of, you know, why our world looks the way that it does now. And if you appreciate that, and I know you do because KPFA has been airing East Bay yesterday for, gosh, I think it's been about six or seven years now. And the feedback we get is amazing. So I'm so grateful to you for supporting the show. And in order to keep it on the air, again, we do need your donations. You can call in right now, 1-800-439-5732. We've only got about four minutes left this hour. And again, we're really, really trying to reach that.

$1,000 mark so we can get that matching donation. We only had a couple hundred dollars to go a few minutes ago. I don't know where we are right now, but it doesn't really matter. We've just got to keep plugging along because, again, there's only a couple minutes left and we really, really need to reach that goal. It not only helps support KPFA, but also sends a message to KPFA that you appreciate East Bay yesterday, that you want to keep hearing East Bay yesterday on these airwaves. And again, You don't even have to call in. You can just hit the link on your on the website, KPFA.org, make the donation there. And that is another way that you can make your voice heard by sending in your donation right now this hour in the next three minutes. Brian? 1-800-439-5732 if you want to do it on the phone. Liam, while you've been talking, two people have hopped onto the phone lines, which means it is time to whip out a can of sound effects. Two people calling right now. We don't know how much they are donating. We won't know until they complete their donations in a couple of minutes. But with $300, the last time we got to count, $300 to go to make our challenge, it means we are incredibly close. So what we ask you to do is join them? Can you do the cork popping sound effect of champagne bottles, you know, exploding? No, I've got something. I've got something, but it's not a cork popping. I've got something else. Liam, I have to tell you, like, the funniest moment of radio I had earlier this week. I was pitching with Kat Brooks at 8 a.m. And she was trying to sing your praises. But, you know, early in the morning, we all have circuits fail in our brains, even those of us whose job it is to be on the air. So she was describing. Richard Walker's event on stage with KPFA's Liam Neeson. Well, you know, Liam Neeson. So, Liam, I found the sound effect to play for this occasion should it happen again. I will look for you. I will find you. And I will kill you. That is astonishing. That is amazing. Folks, you're not going to get this kind of witty banter anywhere else. You've got to keep KPFA on the air if you want to keep hearing me and Brian, you know, going to add it like this. And thank you so much next time I see Kat Brooks. I'm definitely going to bring that up. And my mom's going to appreciate that as well. She loves those Liam Neeson-taking movies. So she's going to get a kick out of that. All right. Three minutes to go. KPFA.org. Oh, and there is a third caller on the line. Is that a real caller or just put your sound effects? No, that's a real caller. I'm playing the sound effect to reflect what is happening in the silent dashboard that tells us what's happening in the station. Maybe I should move forward in time to more modern technology. KBFA.org, 1-800-439-573-2-1-800. Hey, KPFA. We've got an update to the tally. Ed has come through from Woodacre, picked up a KPFA cap for himself, and we are now... Oh, wow.

Okay, the tally just updated. We are now $50 away from claiming our $1,000 challenge. And only about one minute left. If we get there in time, yes. If we get there in time, you will hear what sound effect we have on tap. KPFA.org, 1,800, 439, 5732, just 50 bucks to go on the challenge for East Bay yesterday. Liam? Well, I'm personally just walking on eggshells right now. I cannot wait to hear what the sound effect is. But again, that is up to you, the listener. I really don't know. I'm not defending. Oh, Spencer came through from Berkeley. Now we're $20 away from making it. Folks, who's got a Andrew Jackson burning a hole in their pocket that they can spare to donate to KPFA right now? $1,800, 439, 5732. $20 is all we need, and we've only got probably about 30 seconds left, I'm guessing, to get that goal. I cannot wait to hear what this is. Brian, I don't even know what you're going to pull out of your pocket next. It could be one of those old dial-up modem noises, for all I know, like... You know, so we need $20, folks, come on. Someone out there's got $20 to donate to help us reach the goal this hour. Brian, you're killing me now. My face is hurting from smiling. Oh, now my dog is providing sound effects. KPFA.org, 1-800-439-5732. That's 1-800. Hey, KPFA. Aiden in Berkeley has just contributed. $15. We are now $5 away for making that $1,000 challenge. I think Aiden just wanted to torture us. KPFA.org, 1,800, 439, 5732, 1,800, 439 5732, that is 1,800, hey, KPFA, or KPFA.org, Liam, I'm going to say we made it.

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