It's a history of Oakland, California viewed through the lens of physical construction: buildings, roads, infrastructure, etc. I learned some things.
E.g. Why did San Francisco take off, population-wise, while Oakland stayed a sleepy set of farms for such a long time? OK, the Portola expedition stuck to the coast, so it makes sense that they'd establish a mission in San Francisco; and San Francisco had an OK port. But Oakland has a great port; and it's better-connected to more arable land. Why didn't Oakland become the hub?
Nowadays Oakland has a great port. That's the the result of a lot of dredging. Back when the Spanish first invaded, the waters around Oakland were shallow and marshy. If you convinced a seaship captain to sail into Oakland instead of San Francisco, that seaship would get stuck in the mud.
Nowadays, a lot of big businesses make stupid mistakes all together. One imagines an echo chamber of CEOs at their parties and group chats, talking each other into the most asinine schemes. Maybe that's not new. I read about Oakland's Mahogany Eucalyptus and Land Company planted a lot of trees in the Oakland hills, planning to use them for timber; but they chose a kind of tree that doesn't grow into good timber. I pinched myself: was I reading a book about San Francisco? Adolph Sutro planted a lot of eucalyptus around San Francisco, which turned into a nuisance; the trees grew fast, which would have been good from a quick-timber-harvesting point of view; but, alas, they didn't grow into useful timber.
Anyhow, sympathies, Oakland. Sorry about that big fire up in the hills some years back.
Back before BART, there was no commuter rail system from the east bay to SF; but before that absence, there was a different such commuter rail system: the Key System. When the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge was first built; one deck was for cars and one deck was for the Key System. But then the Key System wasn't working so well anymore. Train tracks were dismantled, replaced by buses; eventually taken over by AC Transit.
I always assumed this was some anti-train conspiracy of oil companies and auto manufacturers. That was a fine guess; oil companies and auto manufacturers have ruined many other things. But this book pointed out that I'd overlooked another wellspring of conspiracies: land speculators. The Key System itself was a sneaky ploy by real estate developers.
The Key System wasn't exactly an economically sustainable business. It often lost money. But it was owned by a real estate developer who was selling homes in Oakland. You could sell houses for much more money if homebuyers had an easy commute to their San Francisco jobs. So a little subsidy to the Key System meant making much much more money selling houses.
But when he had sold all those houses, he was no longer motivated to keep subsidizing the Key System. And thus it fell apart, and those homebuyers found out that they were going to have to figure out how to drive to San Francisco (and park there) after all.
Pretty sneaky.
Do sports fans in your cities try to attract teams by building massive sports complexes? Do they claim that these are wise investments that will, long-term, bring revenue to the city? The Oakland Coliseum had nine profitable years from 1966-1991; mostly it needed subsidies.
Oakland's politicians in power were pretty eager to tear down houses in not-white neighborhoods to build highways and BART tracks. This wasn't insane; racist whites had voted in Oakland's government. "Those people" in the torn-down neighborhoods already weren't happy. Surely Oakland's racist whites would appreciate the shorter commute times to their San Francisco jobs; surely they would re-elect Oakland's politicians for life, surely. And maybe that happened to some extent.
But many, many of those racist whites thought, I know I can tolerate a commute of N minutes. And thanks to this new highway/BART line, that N-minute commute could carry me further east, to one of these new developments in Contra Costa county. In the end, those highways and BART lines sped up white flight; and new politicians rose to power in Oakland.
Ha ha, kinda funny until you remember that those houses aren't coming back. Ah well.
A welcome bright spot: Eichler, as in "Eichler home," was willing to sell to minorities even before laws forced sellers to do that.
