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 organizations 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.
