WEST OAKLAND STORIES


LIFE IN WEST OAKLAND:


THE CORNER: Campbell and 8th is a neighborhood hangout in front of one of the low-income housing developments built in the l960s. Most everyone says it's a bad corner and the Yemeni man who runs the corner liquor store calls 911 a lot because of fights. But there are also a lot of the older regulars still around, as well as some kids with their moms. The Yemeni woman who lives above the store says she lets her children play outside because she knows the regulars will watch over them.


BOB ROSENBERG is a San Francisco-born Jewish guy - a rebel and long-time meth user. He calls himself “a workaholic” and from what I’ve seen that’s right. He’s a good mechanic and can get a lot of junked cars to run, but mostly he scraps metal, including cars and trucks. Because of this, he’s usually covered with dirt and grease. Some think of him as a kind of Godfather to the lost souls and addicts of Oakland's Lower Bottoms because he's smart, honest, and a soft-touch for a clean-up job or a loan. But since I’ve taken these photos his life has caught up with him. He’s 50 now and the junkyard where he lived and worked has been cleared out. The market for metal has tanked. Bob is now living in a mobile home in a homeless camp, figuring out how to survive.


ALLIANCE METALS RECYCLING is (was) an old recycling center on the west edge of West Oakland that supported a cottage industry for the poor. It was a way for families with a car or truck and anyone with a shopping cart to get some cash and supplement poverty-level incomes. It also supported some lost souls who needed money to buy alcohol or drugs. The city closed Alliance down in August 2016 because of neighbors complaining about trash left by shopping cart recyclers and things being stolen from front yards. But it also turned out that a large, market-rate, condo development wanted to build across the street. Today, two-bedroom apartments in that development go for $3,300 a month.


RIP: REST IN PEACE. There are a lot of murders in West Oakland, mostly gang-related. Donald Washington was a 21-year-old man who had three kids, and a lot of people who loved him. His grandmother says "he was actually a Mama's boy” because he liked to cook, visit his ailing grandmother, and play with his kids. He was shot, perhaps by mistake, while sitting in the back seat of a van. Most of these murders don't make the news, but all the lives lost are deeply mourned.