City Profiles / Large Cities / Oakland, CA

Oakland, California

Long plagued by high levels of unemployment and poverty, Oakland is now working to improve its environment and its opportunities by joining the green economy. As a part of the Green Industry Cluster group and the East Bay Green Technology Corridor, Oakland has partnered with neighboring cities, companies and institutions including the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to bring green industry to the region, and the Green Academy Workforce Initiative was created to train workers. To address poverty, the Oakland Green Jobs Corps is identifying entry-level green jobs for those with barriers to employment, and teaming up with local Laney College and other institutions to prepare them for these new jobs.

Healthy development and affordable housing are also matters of concern in Oakland. The New Urbanist 10K Downtown Housing Initiative, launched in 1999 by former mayor Jerry Brown to revitalize the downtown area with 10,000 new residents, was once criticized for encouraging high-income and low-diversity gentrification. Responding to these complaints from grassroots housing advocacy groups, the plan was modified to include a large percentage of affordable and low-income housing. To date, 10,765 units in the downtown area have been completed or are in the works.

In 2007, Oakland received the City Solar Award from NorCal Solar for having the most watts of solar power among large cities in Northern California, beating out green neighbors San Francisco and San José. The city gets about 17 percent of its electricity from renewable energy sources, including hydroelectric, biomass, geothermal and wind. The city's Oil Independent Oakland Task Force, inspired by a national program in Sweden, aims to reduce Oakland's oil consumption by 40 to 50 percent by 2020, serving as a model for the country. Through the University of Berkeley, Oakland's city government is studying how it can source 30 percent of its food locally, and the number of farmer's markets in the city doubled between 2005 and 2007. With its Zero Waste plan, the city will reduce its amount of waste by 90 percent by 2020; it has already surpassed the state mandate of 50 percent diversion.