Russell City

This is the brief history of a city government pushing people they didn't like out of their homes and turning their neighborhood into an industrial wasteland. This is a story of a government weaponizing zoning laws, weaponizing eminent domain, and weaponizing...arson.

Hayward grossly violated the rights of black residents to gain views like this along their shoreline. // photo by myself (released to public domain)

I recently moved out of Hayward, over the hill to Dublin.

We lived in the Fairview District in Hayward, which was to the east of the city proper, up the hills. Several blocks down, our neighbors said when we moved in, gets a bit rough, but we were okay up there, about three blocks above the proverbial railroad tracks.

The demographics of our neighborhood were primarily aging or next-generation black families, but there was quite a bit of diversity surrounding our house. We bought our home from a black family that fled to Texas coming out of the Great Recession. The neighborhood to our right was predominantly black families. Behind us and to our left were Hispanic families. Another house to the left was a white family. Across the street was a Pacific Islander veteran. A house left of him was a mixed Asian family that moved out shortly after to rent to a white couple.

While talking to one of our black neighbors, he told us the story of Russell City.

Russell City was a region close to the bay, that has since been annexed into Hayward. It was founded in the 1800s by a Danish immigrant named Joel Russell, who welcomed different immigrant groups as well as black people following the Civil War. The surrounding areas of Hayward and San Leandro had racist laws that prevented the sale of homes to non-whites. By the mid-1900s, Russell City was predominantly black and Hispanic.

It became known as an underdog city with a burgeoning blues scene, with even Ray Charles swinging by to play at the local clubs. That's about it for the positive nostalgia of the city. The remaining aspects of life there were hardship and segregation from the surrounding cities.

According to Megan Wilkinson, who wrote a thesis on Russell City, former residents stated that the city received no funding, resources, or assistance from the city of Hayward or Alameda County. So the residents pooled money to purchase community services that were typically handled by the local government, like firefighting. It was, in some respects, a libertarian community, though repressed by surrounding governments, since they had to provide their own services.

Then the domestic imperialists of the Hayward city council around that time looked down on the city as "blighted" (read: filled with people that don't look like us), and desired the land to build an industrial wasteland, while city planning theory was shifting to locate recreation near bodies of water, not industry.

What tools could they use to force black residents from expanding the city?

Hrm.

Zoning laws! These same legal tools utilized by Californian progressives to give us housing shortages also gave city councils the power to force out "undesirables" in their eyes. With Russell City no longer really able to expand due to restrictive zoning laws, it was now time to clear the residents out.

What tools could they use to force black residents out of the area?

Hrm.

Eminent domain! The legal procedure that is often abused to force lower-income residents out of their homes to give to wealthy corporations (which even Ruth Bader Ginsberg upheld in Kelo v New London), used to be utilized to force out a particular race in favor of wealthy corporations. The use of eminent domain in Russell City was eerily similar to Kelo v New London, just with an added component of race. 

While that did the trick for many residents, others, like always, refused to leave. So, mysteriously, buildings started to burn down. Reverend Green, interviewed by Wilkinson, claims that the Hayward government hired mercenaries to commit arson to drive people away. My neighbor was also adamant that this was what happened.

Also according to my neighbor, he and many other residents were forced to move into the hills of the Fairview District, opposite the city of Hayward from Russell City, also an unincorporated region of Hayward. It was also an undesirable area at the time, but times have quickly changed. In the past, hills were seen as undesirable places to live as they were further from services and cars were more of a luxury than they are today. If you visit poor areas, say, Cusco, Peru, one would find that the poor regions are all in the hills, away from the city center. Now, cars make living in the hills tenable and the views make them desirable. As my neighbor said, "We couldn't have known it then, but the move was the best thing that could have happened to us."

Mural of Russell City culture and life, in downtown Hayward. It doesn't depict any homes on fire, nor does it appear to depict the fact that Hayward did what it could to segregate them away from the white people of Hayward. Must be a government-funded mural. // photo by myself (released to public domain)

Today, nobody wants to go to where Russell City was unless they work at one of the industrial companies that had taken up residence there. You do what you need to do, then GTFO over the pothole-ridden roads. Even if the city reclaims it back to residential, the industry created massive brownfields where soil toxicity makes it less than ideal for a family to reside. The city center and the surrounding flatlands of Hayward are where all the crime exists. A friend used to live in the area and would tell me that they would hear random gunshots in the middle of the night. If you're unlucky enough to live in Hayward, the hills are where you want to be.

Although they never should have been forced to leave, I'm glad it worked out for some of them.

The city of Hayward, on the other hand, can go fuck themselves. Although I'm not part of the group they're apologizing to, I hope those groups tell them to take their apology and shove it up their ass. Maybe if the "restitution" and "reparative justice" they promise include finding those government actors that perpetrated these actions and rescinding the power afforded to the city council to allow them to do these heinous acts, they can be forgiven. But you can bet the house that any monetary compensation will come from the taxpayers that had nothing to do with it, and the city will retain all the power they used to do this.