Reaction:
Oakland neighbors weigh in on A’s ballpark proposal.
Squeezing a ballpark into the Eastlake neighborhood of Oakland — aesthetically, culturally, physically — baffles Seifu Gebremichael, proprietor of the Kefa Coffee shop, no matter how many times he imagines it on a map.
“I thought they were joking,” he said. “This is crazy.”
A day after the Oakland A’s proposed building a ballpark near Laney College and Gebremichael’s shop, business owners and residents of Eastlake and Chinatown on Wednesday reacted to the news with varying degrees of resistance, apathy and excitement.
For Gebremichael, a ballpark so close to his shop could be great for business. On the other hand, the 66year-old Fremont resident said he worried about traffic congestion.
“The citizens have to fight,” he said. “This is already a dense area, with 20,000 people at the college. You add a baseball crowd on top of that, I don’t know. It’s not a done deal.”
Symone Brown Johnson, a 21-year-old business student at Laney College, said she doesn’t count herself as an A’s fan, though her father is and she grew up in Oakland. But she said she could see herself taking her children to a ballpark near Laney.
“I’m on board,” she said. “I’m down with it.”
Johnson said she found out about the ballpark plan Wednesday when a teacher raised it as the subject of a class discussion. Everyone seemed to have a different opinion, she said.
Mayor Libby Schaaf and Councilman Abel Guillén, who represents the district, applauded the A’s commitment to stay in town and privately finance the ballpark. They said that issues of displacement, gentrification and traffic will need to be addressed by the city and team.
Team President Dave Kaval said the A’s are working with city officials to keep the surrounding community and its culture intact, including on measures like increased rent control and a plan to build affordable housing. Among the first people he will have to persuade are the trustees of the Peralta Community College District, which owns much of the land at the site and whose district offices would need to move. Kaval said that he wants to see the A’s and the district partner up for workforce development and internship programs.
On the Laney College campus, whose students and faculty would be among the groups most impacted by the ballpark, reactions ranged from unease to elation.
UC Berkeley graduate and jazz percussionist Butch Haynes, 74, who is taking a photography class at the college, said the ballpark will be a “major conflict” for students and will distract them from their education. The Oakland native said he worried, too, about displacement of lowincome renters.
“It’s going to be a whole ballpark business infrastructure,” he said. “You either have it to live here or you don’t and you’ll have to move.”
Some, like 22-year-old Will Varner, who’s studying communications and wants to be a professional boxer, said that keeping the A’s in Oakland is vital. Plus, he said, a new ballpark nearby could be a positive outlet for stressed-out students.
While the team works to put together a community benefits agreement in the coming months and years, plenty of people already have ideas.
Claire Crosetti, for instance, a mental health counselor and adjunct faculty member at the college, said that far too many students she sees are homeless or couch-surfing. If affordable student housing could be built along with the stadium, she said, it would be a “win-win.”
Economists who have studied ballparks and stadiums said the impacts may not be as severe as community members fear. Roger Noll, a Stanford professor emeritus, said that unless the facility is part of a larger development push, property values may actually decline in the immediate vicinity because of negative effects such as traffic congestion.
“Gentrification in Oakland is surely happening and is likely to continue, but a new A’s stadium will play no significant role,” Noll said. “I see the opposition as rooted in the fact that the vast majority of people in the neighborhood are not likely to attend A’s games and see, correctly, that they will derive no benefit but experience some inconvenience.”
But if the ballpark does become an anchor for shopping, restaurants and entertainment, as most new facilities tend to do, then home prices and rents will likely increase in the area, said Victor Matheson, a sports economist and professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. But outside a mile-wide radius, he said, it will be impossible to see the effects.
The endeavor will be “landscape-changing” and create “tremendous opportunities but also tremendous threats,” said Schaaf, whose preferred ballpark site was at Howard Terminal near Jack London Square.
“The A’s have their work cut out for them,” she said. “They are going to have to convince many community stakeholders that this project is going to be good for them.”