Stadium first, affordable housing later? US developers dangle homes as perk of big construction deals

For more than a decade, John Fisher, the owner of the Athletics Major League Baseball team, has been threatening to move the club out of Oakland if the city didn’t pony up enough public money for a new ballpark.

Among his final bids were plans for a massive West Oakland redevelopment that included far more than just a stadium. It involved 1.8m sq ft of commercial space, a hotel, a performing venue and, most important for a region undergoing an immense housing crisis, 3,000 residential units. Arguments over how many of those units would be deemed “affordable” kept erupting and were often cited as the major hangup keeping shovels out of the ground. It was unclear how much of this was public posturing because, ultimately, any plans to keep the Athletics in Oakland were ditched.

In April 2023, Fisher and the Athletics’ president, Dave Kaval, announced they were moving forward with a relocation process to Las Vegas. In the aftermath, Oakland’s mayor, Sheng Thao, told reporters that the Athletics had “been using this process to try to extract a better deal out of Las

Vegas”. It was, in other words, a way to pit cities against one another to gain the corporation an advantage. And its primary tool would be a community bargaining agreement (CBA).

More and more developers are now trying to get projects approved by offering cities assistance with their ongoing housing crises through CBAs. These binding arrangements can be the best tool that affected residents and areas have to extract important concessions from developers. But they also are an imperfect mechanism, as communities negotiate with billion-dollar corporations amid extreme power imbalances.

The concept of a CBA is relatively straightforward. A developer wants access to land, and community organi

zations counter by saying they won’t cause any trouble as long as certain provisions are met. Sometimes these include promises to hire a certain percentage of unionized labor or, as in the Athletics’ troubled Vegas plan, paying a living wage to ballpark employees. Other times, the developer has to fund the creation of community spaces.

While John Fisher’s Oakland proposal appeared to have stalled, a development in St Petersburg, Florida, to build a new stadium for the Rays along with 1,200 units of affordable housing (out of a total of 4,800 residential units) has been approved. More recently, the Soloviev Group, a billion-dollar real estate developer, beefed up plans to build a casino near the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan with the promise of 513 units of affordable housing, about a third of the units it planned to build.

When developers throw in housing perks, “it suggests that public agencies aren’t filling that housing crisis – they’re not building public housing, social housing, and even non-profits are not able to build housing at the scale that’s needed”, said Samuel Stein, a housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society and author of Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State. “And that gives developers the leverage to say ‘We’ll be riding in on white horses and saving the day’.”

Many point to 2001’s LA Live sports and entertainment complex in downtown Los Angeles – near the previously built Staples Center (now the Crypto.com Arena) – as the first CBA. The proposed development by the LA Arena Company and partner AEG was set across a 27-acre swath of land in downtown LA. With it came a broad coalition of those who would be displaced by gentrification or affected by parking, noise and traffic issues. Ultimately, about 30 community organizations came together to form the Figueroa Corridor Coalition for Economic Justice (FCCEJ).

During negotiations, the FCCEJ was able to get certain handshake agreements – including a promise that 20% of the total housing units be affordable, that 70% of the jobs to be created would pay a living wage, and the setting aside of $1m to create or improve parks within a mile of the project – certified as an official CBA. That made the stipulations legally enforceable. In return, coalition members vowed not to oppose the development.

That fast-tracked the process, and the CBA was followed. The project became a model for bringing community input into development plans moving forward.

But the success of CBAs depends largely on the strength and diversity of the community interests trying to leverage their support into resources.

Adjacent to downtown Brooklyn, the Atlantic Yards (now Pacific Park) project was to become a mixed-use development above the tracks of the Long Island Rail Road. It had been in developers’ sights since at least the mid-1950s, but it wasn’t until 2003, after the company Forest City Ratner secured rights over the area, that concrete plans began to materialize. After word got out about the acquisition, Brooklyn community groups began to mobilize.

This time, a different dynamic emerged. Unlike the Los Angeles coalition that used its support as a bargaining chip, the Brooklyn negotiating coalition only involved community groups that supported the development, thus removing any teeth it had during the proceedings. And while the CBA resulted in community benefits – including 50% of residential units reserved for low-income families, 35% of construction work to minority-owned businesses, setting aside six acres of open space for public free use – a key component was missing from the process. Who would play the role of watchdog?

“Being able to enforce the agreement is the real key to a CBA,” said Robert Silverman, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University at Buffalo, “if there’s actually a real timetable and a monitoring process in place to make sure it happens, and a penalty if they don’t.”

Groundbreaking on Atlantic Yards occurred in 2007, with the centerpiece Barclays Center completed in 2012. The 2008 recession delayed the project, but as of the latest accounting, only half of the apartments have been built, with 57% of them market-rate. Nearly none of the park space has been created. A new deadline of 2025 to complete the affordable units won’t be met, according to the ongoing Atlantic Yards/ Pacific Park Report by Norman Oder.

Long-term timelines worry organizers in St Petersburg. While the Rays project includes 1,200 units of affordable housing, there are few stipulations for when the units have to be built during the 30-year lease.

“They have to erect at least a quarter of the affordable units by the end of the decade, or they’ll have to pay the city a penalty,” said Dylan Dames, an organizer for the non-profit group Faith in Florida. “[But] there’s no written affirmation of which quarter of the rent-restricted units must be built by then. Since they’re divided by different income levels, we could potentially see zero units affordable for those making $20 an hour or less by this date.”

If developers are left to their own protocols, they can choose to construct everything that is profitable first, before they begin to create the affordable housing that the community wants.

who has taken most of the flak for this is Winfrey, rather than Spielberg.

Barrino is careful not to pick sides: “That wasn’t my experience. But this was my first movie. I was so excited to be around all these great actors. I’m such a southern woman; I’ve seen a lot and I’ve been through a lot. Everything in life is not going to come peaches and cream. And Oprah never left – she was right in the back with us. I’ll say we really had a great time and I ate good. I gained a lot of weight.”

In the 1985 movie of the book, Whoopi Goldberg took the role of Celie. Barrino’s mother wouldn’t let her watch it when she was little, because it was too heavy, but she managed to see it anyway. “It was the first time I felt like I had seen me; it was the first time I had heard certain stories be told.” Did she feel pressure to match up to the original performance? “No. [Goldberg] laid down the work so beautifully – it can’t be touched.”

It is customary to mention how a gospel church upbringing shapes someone’s singing voice, but rarer to say how much it elevates spoken cadence. Barrino speaks with the kind of poetic brevity you might use to declare independence. I ask her how she got together with Taylor, whom she married in 2015. “We married after three weeks,” she says. “We married before we’d even laid with each other. Here’s how I knew he was the one … Are you ready for this?”

Sure, but only once we have filled in the backstory.

* **

Barrino was born into an intensely musical family: her uncles were the Barrino Brothers, a 70s R&B band; her cousins are K-Ci and JoJo, also an R&B duo. They were industrious, but not rich – she remembers eating grits (a kind of maize porridge) every day for a week, practising by candlelight because the lights had gone off – and she missed a lot of school.

Her grandmother had had her first child at 17 and felt it snuffed out her dreams of musical success; the same thing happened to her mother, to whom Barrino is very close. “Singing was everything in our home, right? The joy that music brought us, it was like a drug. You know, I didn’t come from a rich family. But I did have two parents who made sure we had.Me and my brothers laugh now because, like, those was good days – candles lit.”

Even in a family where singing was the norm, even at five years old, her voice was extraordinary. Her father, with whom she has a complicated relationship – “It is the best that it can be, right now” – had a lot, possibly everything, riding on musical success. “Sometimes people can be rooting for you for personal reasons,” she says.

When she was 14, she was raped at school and dropped out. She talks about that, and subsequent violence, in the broadest terms – doesn’t want to hide anything, doesn’t want to dwell. “My grandmother used to say they would try to beat the light out of you. I was in a lot of abusive relationships, but then it goes back to: I didn’t love myself at the time.” At 16, she got pregnant; she had her daughter, Zion, at 17. This could have been the end of her ambition, were it not for American Idol.

If you listen to Barrino’s first few auditions, the power of her voice is extraordinary: it sounds accomplished, mature, commanding. It simply doesn’t compute that she is only 19, has a two-year-old and no money and had to memorise the lyrics of Summertime because she wasn’t confident that she could read them in the moment. She sounds as powerful as an all-time great, but never as if she is doing an impression. “I can hear,” she says. “We call it a grit: the pain, the truth, the honesty. Since I was a little girl, playing Aretha Franklin over and over again, I could hear the honesty in a voice and I was attracted to it.”

Just before her performance of Summertime, well-meaning members of the American Idol production team had taken her aside. She had been getting flak online. “And they said: ‘Listen, you may want to not talk so much about being a young mom, your school situation.’ I went in the bathroom and I cried like a baby. I thought: ‘Either I’m going to change who I am, which is going to feel so weird, or I’m going to stand and show them that.’”

When it came to it, 65 million people voted for who she was. Simon Cowell makes a surprise hero appearance in this story: he called Barrino the best contestant who had ever appeared on the show (this was 2004, but there had still been a ton of them). Zion, of course, was too young to appreciate what was going on. Later, when Barrino had “a matte lipstick line, I had some jeans that my name was on, she finally reached a point in her life where she knew: ‘OK, she’s a celebrity.’ But she also wanted me home more.”

Two years after American Idol, Barrino wrote an autobiography, Life Is Not a Fairytale, which was adapted as a TV film, in which she starred. As monumental as her singing voice was, her speaking voice was still shy and high, as if she were scared of being told off. She got the Color Purple role on Broadway a year later. It was swings and roundabouts: a lot of daunting situations, a lot of crying and, more consequentially, a naivety about the industry that led to Barrino almost losing her home in 2009. “That’s why I’m so in love with the book of Job,” she says. “Because even when God started messing him again, he never took his eyes off God.”

She won a Grammy in 2011 and by 2014 was back on Broadway with After Midnight, which is where the love story with Taylor began. “I did a seven-month fast, just not dating anyone, dating myself. How can I let somebody else love me when I don’t love myself? I put a ring on my own finger, I fasted from television; the only music I would listen to was jazz. The funny part is, when I was fasting, everybody wanted to date me.”

This was when she made her list – intended for God, but helpfully written out on index cards – of what she was looking for in a man: “There will be no lusting, there will be no guy who says: ‘You so fine.’ I needed someone to spark me in a different way. Everything happens for a reason, and the reason here was me meeting my husband and him having bookshelves everywhere, reading all day.”

It really crops up a lot, the literacy – how she mastered it, how much shame was heaped upon her when she dared to be insecure about it in public. Her education was a straight trade, as she describes it, with her father: “A smart, wise man, thinking: ‘We can get out of this situation if we just get one hit single, if we get one record label to recognise us.’ And so that’s all we were focused on. It made me a very lax, lazy reader. It’s crazy that I marry a man who all he does is reads.”

Her father sued her for $10m after her autobiography was published. She didn’t even say anything that bad, just that he had put music before her education.

That said, when she is described as the embodiment of the American dream, it’s complicated: for sure, she overcame violence and poverty in her early life with pluck and endeavour. But if you have to be this talented to beat those odds, that is not a collective dream; it’s a fantasy.

Barrino interprets the dream differently, anyway, as a question of whether or not you can ever be satisfied: “I have decided to be content with where I am and what I have. If I don’t ever do another movie, I’ve done this one and I did it to the best of my ability. If I will never get another award, I don’t need one, because I woke up this morning and somebody didn’t wake up. This is a blessing that you and I got – be grateful.”

• This article was amended on 18 January 2024. The Color Purple is not yet showing in UK cinemas, as an earlier version said, but will be released on 26 January.

The Color Purple is in UK cinemas from 26 January