By Daisha Williams

Post Staff

Black Cultural Zone (BCZ) and Block Inc., co-opened a space called “Uptown Market: The Best of Oakland” on Thursday, Aug. 17. They have created a free-to-use retail space in order to give small business owners a more expansive market.

Block Inc. is a tech company that owns Uptown Station, a historic building in the heart of downtown Oakland. On the upper floors is office space, and the first floor is home to their Community Hub in addition to Uptown Market.

Located at 1955 Broadway, Block opened Uptown Station in 2020, with the intention of using this space to support entrepreneurs. They’ve been partnering with BCZ since the pandemic, and together, with the creation of this space, they have done just that.

The market is open from Wednesday to Friday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Every market day there will be multiple stations to shop at as well as a food station. The vendors are rotated every 30 days, so each time someone visits there may be new products to purchase.

The vendors, who were chosen through an application process earlier in the year, all went through a training workshop, with the goal that at the end of their experience with them they will have gained all the skills necessary to open and manage their own storefront.

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COVID-19 caused many small businesses to close — especially BIPOC businesses. BCZ and Block are attempting to remedy this, using Uptown Market as a way to help these businesses get back on their feet and continue to thrive.

“We hope that by the end of the program they will have the knowledge and experience that they can take to scale their business into a brick-and-mortar space — not just Downtown, but in other opportunities of Oakland that Black Cultural Zone is also investing in,” said Jazmine Kelly.

BCZ has been putting on events like these to help strengthen the Black community by circulating the Black dollar since 2014. During the pandemic, they created and regulated Akoma Market to help businesses stay afloat. Since then, they’ve hosted markets at Liberation Park in 7101 Foothill Blvd. in East Oakland.

Carolyn Johnson, CEO of BCZ, talked about why they made the shift from these outdoor markets to Uptown Station:

“A great step for those vendors that are still with us is to give them the opportunity to be in a retail space, to get a sense of what a brick-and-mortar feels like: what it means to deal with your inventory, to get the support you need, the systems you need, and to engage one-on-one with a different group of people that come to downtown Oakland as opposed to East Oakland.”

This market was created with hopes that they would be able to create something more stable and beneficial long-term for businesses, and Uptown Market is the realization of that dream.

By Ken Epstein

Residents of Sojourner Truth Manor in North Oakland, a housing complex for seniors founded by local civil rights and community leaders almost 50 years ago, are involved in a fight for dignity and decent living conditions with HumanGood, a nonprofit company that manages senior housing in Oakland and across the country.

Tenants interviewed by the Oakland Post said that they are kept in the dark about what the management is planning or what repairs are underway. They say management often does not respond to their complaints and concerns about needed repairs such as broken fixtures, flooding, and lack of heat or hot water in individual apartments, vermin, broken security cameras, televisions and building elevators, while the complex’s community room has been out of operation for 11 years.

More general concerns are the lack of a social service coordinator, a position that in the past offered community-building activities and provided information and support for residents. Tenants are also concerned about the failure to provide translation for tenants who are not English-speaking, including those who are Ethiopian, Eritrean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, or Arabic-speaking.

Beverly Colston, an eight-year tenant at Sojourner Truth Manor, serves as chairperson of the tenant association. Photo by Ken Epstein.

“They’re not treating us seniors like we’re human beings; since this management company has been here, there is no communication whatsoever,” said Beverley Colston, who has lived at Sojourner Truth for eight years and serves as the chairperson of the tenant association.

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Underscoring the lack of transparency, 14-year-resident Nancy Delaney said, “Management is treating us like we’re livestock; they feel they don’t have to give us common courtesy, even to tell us what they’re doing.”

Sojourner Truth, located at 6015 Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Oakland, consists of three buildings with 74 studios and 13 one-bedroom apartments.

In the past few years, there has been turn-over of management companies that operate and maintain the complex. Since mid-2022, Sojourner Truth has been managed by HumanGood, the largest nonprofit provider of senior housing and services in California and among the 10 largest organizations of its kind in the nation, according to reports on the internet.

In Oakland, besides Sojourner Truth, HumanGood operates at Piedmont Gardens, Allen Temple’s senior residences, JL Richard Terrace and Irene Cooper Terrace.

Overall, the company has over 5,000 employees and serves over 14,000 residents in seven states.

Annual reports on the nonprofit senior living market sector are produced by LeadingEdge Ziegler 200. Ziegler is described on its website, as a “privately held investment bank, capital markets and proprietary investments firm and the nation’s leading underwriters of financings for not-for-profit senior living providers.”

While the lack of repairs is a serious concern for many tenants, the most pressing need at Sojourner Truth, said Colston, is to hire a full-time social services coordinator, a social worker “who would serve as an advocate for tenants with management and help with recertification for food stamps, health services and all the other forms we have to submit on a yearly basis.”

“We have too many people who speak too many different languages, and we get written notices in English,” she said. “They don’t communicate with us except by letters, and we often don’t understand them.”

The tenants need someone who can patiently and respectfully explain these notices, Colson said. In the past, the social services coordinator also organized bingo, exercise sessions, dominos, activities and celebrations of holidays and birthdays, she said.

In fairness, Colston said, the deterioration of physical conditions at Sojourner Truth did not begin with HumanGood but with the previous manager, Christian Church Homes. HumanGood is responsible for not communicating. “With these people here, there is no communication whatsoever,” she said.

By the Oakland Post’s deadline, HumanGood had not replied to email questions. Calls to the office of Sojourner Truth were not picked up.

Tenants at Sojourner Truth have been meeting with residents of Harriet Tubman Terrace apartments in Berkeley who are also pushing for improved conditions.

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