As Uber downshifts on expansion, Oakland has chance to take a breath

Oakland is no longer as Uber-cool as San Francisco.

That’s because Uber put the brakes on its expansion plans here. Instead of moving some 2,000 to 3,000 workers into the former Sears building on Broadway that is being renovated, Uber will move in with a few hundred workers, moving the rest into other offices in San Francisco.

And that’s cool with me, because Oakland doesn’t need to become Silicon Valley’s next stomping ground.

What Oakland needs from the tech industry, if anything, is more than brick-and-mortar investment. And that’s not what Uber’s bringing. In community outreach meetings in Oakland, Uber said it would hire people and businesses for maintenance, food services and security work.

That doesn’t begin to address the technology employment gulf that exists for people of color in the Bay Area. I’m supposed to believe that Uber can build self-driving cars, but when it comes to approaching diversity the company would rather drive on a flat tire than

pull over and ask for help?

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who wants to increase the hiring of minorities at tech companies, has requested that Uber release its employee demographics so a glaring problem can be tracked and the company can be held accountable, like other companies that began releasing diversity data in 2014. So far, Uber, which hired a diversity officer in January, has declined.

Until tech companies realize that recruiting and hiring black and brown people adds value to companies that have black and brown people as users and customers, none of them will be a good fit for Oakland. According to 2010 census data, black people remain the single largest ethnic group at 27.3 percent of Oakland’s population, just slightly greater than the white and Hispanic populations, which were 25.9 and 25.4 percent of the population respectively.

So Oakland needs to guard against becoming an extension of San Francisco, which embraced tech only to see rocketing property values mute its soul. Already we are seeing how Uber’s coming has impacted commercial property value in Oakland.

In 2015, Uber purchased what it calls the Uptown Station for $123.5 million from developer Lane Partners, which bought the sevenstory, 380,000-squarefoot property in late 2014 from Sears for $24.25 million.

According to LoopNet, a San Franciscobased commercial real estate marketplace, the average asking rental rate per square foot for Oakland office space as of June was $32.42, representing a 30 percent year-over-year increase.

To put the increase into perspective, just two years ago — before Uber bought the former Sears building — the rental rate hovered just above $20 per square foot.

After the building was purchased: boom!

The Greenlining Institute, an Oakland nonprofit that has been vocal about how Uber could negatively impact the city, was lucky to get its foot in the door of Oakland real estate at just the right time — pre-Uber.

In 2013, it bought and began renovating a 24,000-square-foot building on 14th Street for $10 million, moving in last month. Orson Aguilar, the president of Greenlining, told me then that the nonprofit’s timing was lucky.

“We bought before Uber announced,” he said. “Had we waited, this never would’ve happened.”

Other nonprofits and small businesses won’t be so fortunate. It’s true that Uber won’t need all that space in Oakland and could lease some of it out — to companies that can afford it, of course.

Still, city leaders, including Mayor Libby Schaaf, have cheered Uber’s arrival because of the economic opportunities it can create and, ultimately, the other technology companies it may attract to Uptown. But this is Oakland, a city that prides itself on being diverse — something that Uber hasn’t been able to claim.

Oakland, the home of the Black Panthers, remains active with protests for social and economic justice. In San Francisco, protesters will hang out in front of Uber’s Market Street office for a few hours. In Oakland, they’ll camp overnight.

Uber recently hit a rough stretch that includes operating in territories where it has been banned or not approved, claims of sexual harassment, defections by executives and recorded mistreatment of an Uber driver — by the company’s CEO, no less.

If the Oakland office was open, can you imagine how Oakland activists might have responded?