From a car, Oakland’s Interstate 980 passes in moments. The two miles it covers between other, busier freeways are a blur of BART tracks, the downtown skyline to the east and the tops of homes obscured by an embankment to the west.
It’s an entirely different story on foot. Crossing the overpasses from the West Oakland neighborhoods on one side of the sunken freeway to downtown on the other requires walking nearly the distance of two football fields, with speeding cars all around you on 980’s frontage streets and off-ramps.
“I’m scared to cross my own street half of the time,” said Shirley Foster, a retired teacher’s assistant who has lived a block from the freeway for more than four decades – ever since its construction in the 1970s forced her and hundreds of other residents in its path to move.
The interstate connects Oakland’s Nimitz freeway with Interstate 580 and Highway 24 to Contra Costa County. But in the eyes of its critics, who include Oakland planners and Mayor Libby Schaaf, 980’s massive trench might as well be a moat that seals off the city’s resurgent downtown and bustling nightlife in Uptown from historically Black and working-class West Oakland.
Their solution is to fill it in, turning one of the Bay Area’s least-used freeways into a tree-lined boulevard and converting the 17 acres of prime land it takes up into new parks, housing and other development.
The federal government may soon unleash a torrent of money to make that vision a reality. But Interstate 980’s unique history and the tricky politics of a rapidly changing Oakland could complicate the plans.
“It represents an injustice,” Warren Logan, the policy director for mobility and interagency relations in Schaaf’s office, said of the interstate. “And frankly, the city doesn’t need a freeway bisecting downtown and West Oakland.”
The $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal President Joe Biden rolled out earlier this spring includes $20 billion in funding for projects to “reconnect neighborhoods cut off by historic investments,” which his administration argues would be a step toward correcting the Interstate system’s history of tearing through and segregating Black and Latino neighborhoods in cities across the country.
Congress is also considering funding for freeway removal projects as part of a separate federal highway bill. And Senate Democrats have proposed legislation to create a federal grant program that would award money to those projects; in a statement touting the bill, California Sen. Alex Padilla singled out 980 as a potential candidate.
Caltrans, which hasn’t taken a position on the freeway’s future, is seeking funding for a study that would consider turning it into a surface street, among other potential changes.
“Oakland, in the opinion of a lot of people, has been the victim of infrastructure projects,” said Jonathan Fearn, a city planning commissioner and founding member of Connect Oakland, which advocates for removing 980’s most disruptive stretch.
That’s especially true in West Oakland, which in addition to 980, was split in two for decades by the double-decker Cypress freeway section of I-880, and has borne the brunt of air pollution from truck and ship traffic at the city’s port. West Oakland also lost hundreds of homes and a vibrant strip of legendary Black music venues and other businesses along 7th Street to the construction of BART and a massive regional postal facility.
“What we are trying to put forward is a vision where Oakland can harness and use infrastructure to be something that actually benefits Oakland,” Fearn said.
There are no exact plans for what would be built on the 980 site at this point. How the project unfolds also depends on BART, which envisions building a second transbay crossing that could use the freeway route for a path through Oakland. Fearn estimated it will take a decade — if not much longer — for a new streetscape to take the freeway’s place.
In broad strokes, though, Fearn and other proponents envision the 980 corridor joining the ranks of San Francisco’s Embarcadero and Hayes Valley neighborhoods as places that were revitalized following the removal of hulking freeways. Less than a mile from 980, Mandela Parkway — a wide, long boulevard with a greenway running down the middle — replaced the Cypress years after it collapsed in the Loma Prieta Earthquake, the result of neighbors who organized and successfully blocked an attempt to rebuild the freeway in the same place. It was eventually rerouted around West Oakland’s residential neighborhoods.
The plan endorsed by Schaaf and Connect Oakland would convert the southern half of Interstate 980 — between I-880 and Grand Avenue — from a freeway to a four-lane surface street, much like Octavia Boulevard along San Francisco’s former Central Freeway route. The northern half of 980 above Grand Avenue would stay essentially the same.
Foster said she is intrigued by the idea of converting the freeway, which she called “really ugly and tricky.”
“I think it would help a lot because those streets (around 980) are really dangerous,” Foster said.
In Oakland’s 2019 downtown specific plan, city officials wrote that the blocks the project would restore could hold 5,000 units of new housing and 1.5 million square feet of commercial space.
But as more White and well-off residents move into new apartment buildings downtown and historic Victorians in West Oakland — and while many long-time Black residents struggle to stay amid the Bay Area’s housing crisis — city planners will face deep skepticism about their plans for 980.
“It’s going to appear like now you’re doing this to bring new people to Oakland, who are going to be White,” said Roger Clay Jr., a retired attorney who filed a federal lawsuit that held up the freeway’s construction in the 1970s. “You’re not doing this for people who live here now.”
Foster said she is similarly concerned that new development on the 980 site might be “just for the people with money.”
The freeway, which opened in 1985, was first envisioned nearly four decades earlier as a route to another bridge across the bay. Although the bridge plan had fallen through by the 70s, developers and city officials were still pushing to extend Highway 24, which then ended at 27th Street, as part of plans for a massive regional shopping center downtown, which was never built either.
Clay represented Foster and others who lived in the 503 homes that were torn down or moved to make room for the freeway. His lawsuit delayed construction until Caltrans agreed to build replacement housing for people being displaced and to change the freeway’s design from an elevated structure that would roar overhead to the trench drivers pass through today, limiting noise in the surrounding neighborhoods. He said the neighbors were mostly satisfied with the compromise.
Clay also worries about the question that faces every freeway removal effort: More than 100,000 cars passed through Interstate 980 per day before the pandemic, according to Caltrans – can a surface street handle that many drivers?
“It’s going to mean a lot more traffic on the city streets,” he predicted.
Drivers from North Oakland, Berkeley, Walnut Creek and beyond could complain about a plan that adds time to their most direct route to downtown, A’s games or the Oakland airport. But Logan, Fearn and others who want to convert the freeway argue that convenience hasn’t been worth the cost to West Oakland.
“The needs of somebody coming from Berkeley or Orinda or Rockridge that wants an easy way to the Coliseum should not outweigh the impacts on the communities that they’re cutting through,” Fearn said.
As to whether replacing the freeway would fuel gentrification, Connect Oakland members say they want decisions about what will replace 980 to be driven by the needs of longtime residents, rather than developers.
“The north star,” Fearn said, “should be: How does it benefit the community that was so harmed by its initial construction?”
