Living on the Edge. Celine-Marie Pascale

Across town, the Deep East is a neighborhood roughly defined as running southeast of 73rd Avenue to the San Leandro Border. I stop for gas on 106th Avenue – deep in “the Deep East.” I am immediately and obviously out of place as an older, white woman, in a community that seems to be younger and without white faces. As in Mobridge, I don’t understand immediately how the gas station works. Familiar things can be so different. Here, the pumps do not take credit cards. I ask a young man sitting in a car on the opposite side of the island for help. He slowly, and wordlessly, points to a small bullet-proof booth with an attendant. I join the small but steady flow of people to the booth. A young woman arrives ahead of me and with a hand gesture offers me the opportunity to go ahead of her. No eye contact, no smile, not a word. Her face is closed to me and I don’t know how to read the interaction. I decline her offer and get a silent shrug. She leaves without speaking or making eye contact.

      On the road beside the gas station an old van is parallel parked. The hood is open and the engine exposed. Enough engine parts are scattered around the vehicle that it looks like a long-term repair project in process, yet no one is in sight. Not far from the van, on the chain link fence that surrounds the gas station, a man growls and snarls – I’ve never heard a person make sounds like this. He is splayed spread-eagle across the fence, his body twisting and turning. Although he is writhing, he remains so attached to the fence that I have to look closely to be sure he is not actually tied to it. He is not, but his grip is powerful. A line of men and one woman sit on a curb inside the parking area of the station. No one engages the growling man, no one stares, or even seems to notice.

      I follow their lead, pump my gas and return to collect my credit card. This time, a young man offers for me to go ahead of him. I decline but he insists with such firmness that I can only say thank you and accept. While waiting for the clerk to process my card, I turn around and start a casual conversation with this man. I talk about the weather; yesterday was unbearably hot and today is a breezy spring day that feels perfect. He agrees. I make a comment about the unpredictability of the weather that gets a laugh. He has a beautiful smile and for a moment I make eye contact. And then his face closes and I know to return to my business. I realize much too late that, in some communities, survival can depend on learning to see nothing and say nothing. That in some places in the country, eye contact might get you killed. Is this where I am? If so, it is all the more amazing that ordinary acts of kindness seep through in daily interactions. I collect my card receipt and leave.

      Signs of an informal economy are everywhere – in the particular presence of young men on street corners, in the sparkle of polished rims on new cars, and in the very serious young men scanning the environment as they drive slowly past. I wonder if the gas station, or the area around it, is some sort of drop point. As I type up my notes, I wonder if I should have used cash. Could my card have been skimmed while I pumped? The corrosive power of doubt seeps in as I reflect. My card was not skimmed, and it is worth noting that when it has been in the past it was always in wealthier, whiter places that I had not learned to see as dangerous. This is not to minimize or deny that violence that has come to characterize the communities around 106th Avenue, but to acknowledge the humanity of people living there and the prejudice that outsiders bring to it – intentionally or not.

Vanessa Torres is one of the more than 15,000 people who live in the Deep East. Vanessa grew up with her parents and four siblings in a two-bedroom apartment they rented for about $1,700 a month. As the oldest of the five children, she has had a lot of responsibility in the family. She began translating for her parents at age eight, and now at twenty-four describes herself as something of a parent to her parents, who rely on her to help navigate technologies as well as bureaucracies. “Something that is sometimes frustrating is that they think we know how to do everything.” It’s a common generational issue for immigrant families.

      Vanessa, like many others, feels the impact of gentrification in Oakland. In 2019, the mid-point for monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the Deep East was $2,300.³⁴ I hear the stress in Vanessa’s voice as she leans forward: “This is the ‘hood.’ If Latino, low-income communities can’t afford it anymore, well, shit, where do we go? We obviously can’t afford to live in nicer, affluent communities. If we can no longer afford to live in low-income communities that are considered dangerous, that are considered poor, then where do we see ourselves?” Vanessa answers her own question. She’s been watching Black and Brown families move from the Deep East to Tracy and Stockton, “cities where there’s essentially nothing,” sighs Vanessa.

“My mom sells tamales once a week, and my dad’s a laborer. I’m the one who has the job, a good social.³⁵ So I think that’s kind of pressure on me too to make sure that I stay well off so I can support myself and support my family. I am already at a big advantage: I speak English, I was raised in this country, and I have a four-year degree.” Vanessa works for an educational nonprofit that serves Latinx high school students. It’s a professional position that comes with health insurance and a salary that she ballparks between $45,000 and $59,999 a year. This puts Vanessa in the ballpark for the Economic Policy Institute calculations for self-sufficiency for a single person. By these numbers alone, she seems solidly middle class. But life is always more complicated than numbers. On paper, Vanessa is single. In reality she is responsible for her parents and younger siblings. Vanessa tells me: “If I wasn’t supporting my family, then I wouldn’t be considered low income, but a chunk of money and resources goes toward my family and it’s definitely more challenging.” There’s more to be said about this later. For now, it’s also worth noting that she remains tethered to the struggling class in other ways. For example, although she has health insurance, the Deep East is isolated from health-care providers. To get health care, she needs to take public transit, which can mean taking multiple buses to a different part of Oakland. For Vanessa and her family, there is no such thing as an easy, or a short, trip to the doctor.

      Again, keep in mind that Fair Market Rent (FMR) – the standard calculation used here – is quite different from actual housing prices. Sixty percent of local housing is more expensive than this. The reality of the rental market in 2019 meant that studios in Oakland went for $1,761 a month ($21,132 per year). We saw in Chapter 1 that HUD’s definition of affordable housing, includes utilities and costs no more than one-third of your pre-tax income. While most rentals do not include utilities, let’s bracket that issue and look just at the monthly rent. Using HUD’s parameters for assessing affordable housing, a renter would need to earn at least $5,283 a month or $63,396 a year to be able to consider a studio in Oakland affordable. Vanessa’s salary is not enough to enable her to afford this studio without becoming what HUD calls “cost burdened.” That is to say, she would have to pay more than 30% of her income for housing. The lack of affordable housing is the source of a lot of misery. A person living at the federal poverty line ($12,140 per year for a single person) could put 100% of their income toward rent and still not cover the cost of an average studio apartment. The federal recognition of poverty comes long after the point when housing in Oakland becomes unaffordable.

The self-sufficiency budget of $57,383 for a single person is in the neighborhood of what Vanessa earns – but it’s hard to say precisely, since we only have a ballpark figure for her income. To fully support herself and four others (two parents and her two youngest siblings), Vanessa would need to earn $156,717 a year. It isn’t clear to me just how fully she supports her family, but it becomes easy to see how quickly circumstances move Vanessa from middle class to low-income. This is exactly why income alone never tells the full story.