San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Black community’s local comfort zone
Emeryville gives African American people, businesses a welcoming vibe
Shandle Shaw takes a shot at the Bank Club bar in Emeryville during a Thursday night pool tournament.
On nights that I see folks belting out the lyrics to Marvin Gaye songs or dancing the Cupid Shuffle at Bank Club, I’m reminded of the sitcom “Cheers.” Except at this old-school Emeryville dive bar, nearly all of the main characters are Black.
Black folks are the ones packing this place on Tuesday karaoke nights and Thursday pool tournaments. It’s their elbows that have rubbed the shiny finish off the wooden bar top over the decades. Owner Anna Nikitaris, who is Greek, estimates that 98% of her customers are Black.
“We all care for each other, we go through ups and downs together,” Nikitaris told me over drinks last week. While we were chatting, a Black customer came over, hugged her and handed her a container filled with home-cooked salmon and rice.
I know the value of places like
Alicia Smith (left) and Meisha Humphrey visit Emeryville’s Bank Club bar. The business is a familiar gathering place for Black residents.
this. In rapidly gentrifying areas, they give people like me a sense of belonging.
Not far from the Bank Club is Rob Ben’s, a family-run soul food joint that NFL superstar Marshawn Lynch, an Oakland native, opened in 2018. It replaced another Blackowned soul food place called Scend’s. Just a few doors
down from there is one of my favorite Black-run haircut spots, DW Barbershop.
At times, Emeryville can feel like a Black city. Demographically, this has never been the case. But you’d be hard pressed to convince me Black culture isn’t alive there, especially on the days I can get a taper fade at one place, shoot pool with Black folks at another and eat soul food just down the block from both.
I bang the drum about these experiences because housing costs and economic disparity have been shoving Black people out of the Bay Area for decades.
In Oakland, Black residents went from making up 47% of the city’s population in 1980 down to 20.7% last year, according to new U.S. census figures. Just northwest of Oakland in Alameda County, smaller Emeryville saw its Black population decline from 28.2% in 1980 to 15.2% in 2020.
But something interesting happened in the past decade. While most Bay Area cities saw a net loss of Black residents — including Oakland, which lost more than 15,000 Black residents while gaining nearly 28,000 Latino residents since 2010 — Emeryville did not. In fact, the city added 235 new Black residents as well as 508 new Latino residents.
To what does Emeryville owe its marginal change?
City officials point to a combination of progressive housing legislation and eviction interventions aimed at place-keeping marginalized communities. For instance, Council Member John Bauters told me that a policy regarding rental housing developments has helped create 731 below-marketrate rentals with another 104 under construction.
Building affordable housing is important in a city where nearly 36% of Black residents live below the federal poverty level, according to one estimate. It’s also an issue of personal and professional significance to Courtney Welch. In May, Welch became one of Emeryville’s new Black residents when she moved into a belowmarket-rate unit to raise her two sons while also working on affordable housing policy as part of the city’s Housing Committee. She’s now coordinating a run for Emeryville City Council. If elected, she would be the city’s first Black woman elected to the office in more than 30 years. She says she would fight for stronger developer requirements. “We know that Black
“Making sure not just that Black people can come here, but they can stay here and sustain life here is important.”
Courtney Welch, Emeryville resident and City Council candidate
families are working with less personal financial capital than everyone else. Making sure not just that Black people can come here, but they can stay here and sustain life here is important,” she said. “You see the results of those efforts out in Emeryville being able to retain its Black residents.”
Housing polices are one way to keep Black folks in Emeryville. The city has also shown itself to be aggressively anti-racist and, at times, very pro-Black.
This is a city where leaders and community members work to push out racist business owners. During Black History Month, a PanAfrican flag, which represents Black liberation in the U.S., flapped above the Pixar Animation studio lot. It’s an aggressively progressive symbol to hang over one the city’s most recognizable companies. I can’t imagine San Francisco’s Salesforce doing the same above its towers.
Kecia Johnson, the operator of Rob Ben’s and the aunt of Marshawn Lynch, recently told me this sense of welcoming isn’t lost on Black residents. It’s why she chose to run a business in the city. It’s why others have chosen to move or stay there. “Marshawn told me when we got this place that he wanted it to feel like home for Black people,” she said. “Out here in Emeryville, it wasn’t hard to do that.”
For me, being Black in the Bay Area often means living more in the past than the present. I regularly pass homes where Black folks used to live. Shuttered nightclubs where Black folks used to
dance. Businesses Black folks used to own. But not so much in Emeryville.
It’s too soon to know whether the city’s efforts will create lasting change in a region that has done a shameful job of holding onto Black residents. But we’ll certainly have a better idea come next census.