2A Work Session 2014 0211 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

1950s served to emphasize a divide between the more established parts of the city and these industrially -dominated flatlands areas to the west (Fig. 5). The Past Equation: For San Leandro, these annexations were linked to industry, taxation and revenue issues. In the postwar period, national corporations such as Chevrolet, Chrysler, Dodge, and General Foods opened West Coast branch plants in San Leandro and its immediate surroundings. In 1947 the City Council agreed to provide full municipal services to Chrysler Motor Parts, though its plant was located outside the city limits and paid no taxes. Within two years, taxpayer opposition overturned the political leadership that had made this deal. The new Council lost no time in annexing the Chrysler plant site and its surrounding area into the city. But in the following two decades property taxes were kept low to continue to attract and retain industry and investment in the city and tax rates were decreased as well, almost annually. Even with low rates, industrial expansion led to industry funding over a third of the cost of city government by the early 1960'ss. San Leandro's fiscal and community -building success led to the Wall Street Journal's praise of the city as a "model municipality' in a 1966 profile6, while it turned a blind eye to the racial exclusion of the period. The Prosperity Machine: During these golden decades, San Leandro's industrial districts were its engine of prosperity. At its peak, over 20,000 people worked in San Leandro's manufacturing sector 7. During this time, the city had "both a white-collar, foreman/managerial, and small business middle class ... as well as a working class of skilled tradespeople, clerical workers, and factory employees and their families$..." living in neighborhoods throughout the city and making their living from working in and supplying the industrial economy. The industrial districts were centers of 20th Century manufacturing. Hundreds of firms of all sizes took root here and the vast majority made things (Figs. 3 & 4). Railroads had shaped much of the district (Fig. 2), as the original development pattern of large factory blocks and few streets prioritized rail access and then truck access later as the freeway network grew — a machine - driven layout (Fig. 13). Economic Shift: By the mid -1970's, San Leandro's era of expansion slowed. Vacant lands filled up and American manufacturing began its shift to lower-cost areas elsewhere in the country and abroad. The generation -long "de -industrialization" and the loss of many of the district's large manufacturing companies that followed traumatized San Leandro as much as it did large Eastern and Midwestern manufacturing cities. As with other nearby communities, the city's economy became more regionally oriented. But through that period, San Leandro did not grown a large office employment segment — it had neither developed a large Central Business District (CBD) of office buildings in downtown, nor the large suburban office parks of newer, more outlying suburbs like Walnut Creek. The first and only significant "Class A" office development in the city, Creekside Plaza, opened near the San Leandro BART 5 Self, Robert 0., American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003, pp. 96-111. 6 Phelps, Lew, "Model Municipality — San Leandro, Calif., Manages to Surmount Many of the Problems That Plague Cities." The Wall Street Journal. New York: Dow Jones & Co., Inc., March 4, 1966, p. 10. Self, Robert 0., op cit; figure based on 1960 manufacturing statistics cited therein, plus additional growth estimated through the 1970's. 8 Self, Robert 0., op cit, pp. 105-6 5