When it closed in 2022, after a brief three years in existence, Community Foods left a swath of West Oakland without a grocery store. It was a return to the area’s status as a food desert.
But there might be a silver lining.
The city of Oakland is considering whether or not to buy the old grocery store building on San Pablo Avenue and turn it into a library.
While it won’t solve the food desert problem, it would address a book desert. The neighborhood hasn’t had a library for 45 years.
A committee of the City Council endorsed the $3.5 million purchase of 3105 San Pablo Ave. for a new library branch on Tuesday. The full council will vote in April.
A new library in that location would “enrich the lives” of residents, Alvirdia Owens, fundraising chair of Friends of Hoover Durant Public Library, told the Life Enrichment Committee. “We’re an underserved area — we’ve been pushed aside, forgotten about.”
Hoover-Foster, or Hoover-Durant, is the small, roughly triangular zone bounded by San Pablo, 35th Street, Martin Luther King Jr. Way, and W. Grand Avenue.
The first library in the area opened in 1888. At the time, it was called the North Oakland branch. In 1936, a now-infamous letter by a library executive targeted the branch for closure, saying the surrounding area was changing in character and was “not a reading neighborhood.” In the early and mid-1900s, the area was redlined, a policy under which the federal government refused to back mortgages in most Black neighborhoods. The library branch officially closed in 1981.
In 2006, the Oakland Public Library Master Plan recommended restoring a library in the area, and the volunteer-run Friends group formed the same year to advocate for the cause.
And advocate they did — meeting regularly for 20 years, imploring city officials, surveying hundreds of neighbors, and setting up “street corner libraries” to promote a new brick-and-mortar branch.
More recently, the city funded a feasibility study, which explored three potential locations. The former grocery store was identified as the most desirable and preferred by the community.
The Community Foods building sits at a wide intersection, next to a church, across the street from a liquor store, and surrounded by multiple shuttered commercial buildings. The nearest libraries are each about a mile away or more.
Oakland has money for the property, but millions more are needed to open a library
The Hoover-Foster neighborhood of West Oakland needs both a library and a broader injection of funds and services, some residents say. Credit: Natalie Orenstein/The Oaklandside
Speaking to the Life Enrichment Committee on Tuesday, OPL Director of Library Services Jamie Turbak said city staff negotiated a good price for the property, which was originally listed for sale at $5.1 million.
The money to buy the building would come from Measure KK and Measure U funds previously granted to other projects. The Brookfield Library renovation project came in under budget, leaving $1.7 million available for the new Hoover branch, Turbak said. And another $2 million would come from funds dedicated to a Melrose Library project, since that work is still in the early design stages. Those funds would need to be restored to Melrose in the future.
The purchase of the building would be a significant step, but hardly the only one needed to open a new library. Converting the old grocery store into a library would cost millions more, as would operating the branch. City staff would also need to negotiate a lease for the parking lot, which is not part of the property.
The city applied for a $1.5 million state grant for the library a few years ago, but it was denied because there was no site for the project yet.
At Tuesday’s committee meeting, library commissioners and users urged the council to fully fund the library system in its next budget.
Measure C, a parcel tax that funds a significant portion of the Oakland Public Library budget, requires a $14.5 million annual contribution from the city’s general fund. But the city has waived that requirement due to its poor financial state, this year giving the libraries $11.7 million from the general fund.
Turbak said the full funding is needed to open a new branch and to avoid putting the tax measure and library system in peril.
Fife urges young people to get involved with the Hoover branch project
The city would need to lease the parking lot next to the property if a library opened at 3105 San Pablo Ave. Credit: Natalie Orenstein/The Oaklandside
Councilmember Carroll Fife, whose district includes Hoover-Foster, co-sponsored the proposal to buy the building. She said she’s long been pursuing financial support for the project and supporting the community advocates.
“I said, ‘On my watch, we’re going to get this across the finish line,’” Fife said at the meeting. Investing in libraries improves public safety, she said, echoing a sentiment shared by several public speakers.
Architect June Grant, founder of blink!LAB, which authored the feasibility study, described her ethos of working directly with community members in disinvested neighborhoods, instead of only with developers. She recalled Alternier Cook, chair of the Friends group, walking into her studio in 2016, asking for her design services. They came up with the first step of creating a poster that said “Bring back our library” and was hung nearby on the California Hotel.
The street corner library they later built together was “agitprop,” Grant explained.
“We literally stood there on San Pablo with boxes and boxes of books, really to shame the city,” she said, but also to remind people that there had been a library serving the Black community there for almost a century.
She praised the selected location, calling it “adaptive reuse” that will begin to anchor the neighborhood, calming traffic and bringing a civic center to this community that lacks one.” It could spur other needed investment along that stretch of San Pablo, she said. Grant is also the architect for the Brookfield library project.
Cook urged the committee to approve the property purchase Tuesday, rattling off 13 names of people who’ve been advocating for the new branch for more than 10 years.
“It would be ideal, it would represent our community, it would help our community. We have worked hard for it,” she said.
Committee members Charlene Wang, Noel Gallo, Ken Houston, and Fife all voted to forward the item to the April 14 City Council meeting.
“Several ayes, all of the ayes,” Fife said when her name was called to vote.
She noted that the community support for the library project has been led by older residents of the neighborhood.
“If you’re a young person, get involved too, so they can rest,” she said.
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