(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 529: The Pacific Circuit

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by journalist and host of KQED’s Forum Alexis Madrigal to discuss his book The Pacific Circuit: A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City. Alexis connects containerization to globalization and its direct impacts on an Oakland neighborhood. We also chat about histories of determining blight, silicon valley’s part in global trade, and why we need new thinking about urban change.

Listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it in our hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:

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Jeff Wood: Alexis Madrigal, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.

Alexis Madrigal: Oh, thanks for having me.

Jeff Wood: Thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, sure. I was a long time science and technology writer wrote for Wired in The Atlantic, and now I’m actually the host of a very long running Kern Affair show on the San Francisco NPR affiliate called Forum, which is like you’re just immersed in the everyday political, social, cultural life of the Bay Area.

Jeff Wood: So I have to ask this question. I wonder what it’s like to take over for somebody who’s a legend, like Michael Krasney you had heard his voice in the morning and you’re just like, yeah that’s, that’s one.

Alexis Madrigal: It’s 9:00 AM Yeah. It’s funny, in the beginning everyone said to me like, oh, big shoes, I was like, what?

Everybody said, oh, I think it’s just been a delight. Like I. I think that over time he built like a really smart, [00:03:00] civically engaged audience. That is just wonderful, really. And I think over time, the audience has changed in response to, having different hosts, me and Mina, but it retains its core.

This is people who really are like the civic backbone of the Bay Area, and that’s who listens to forum. And it feels like an incredibly privileged position to be in a place to speak with those folks all the time, yeah. And I don’t even just mean it’s all fancy people. It’s, we’ve got our fair share of, executive director, nonprofit.

Sure. But it’s also like just people who really care about the city, who are like street level activists. We have a contingent that always calls in from SROs whenever we have shows about them. Like it’s broadcast is broad in a way that like. Nothing else I’ve ever done feels like we reach all kinds of people.

Jeff Wood: You talk in the book about the show that you did in West Oakland. Talking specifically with the homeless and other folks too. So I think that’s really important and interesting too.

Alexis Madrigal: Absolutely.

Jeff Wood: So what was your first indication that cities were interesting to you? I.

Alexis Madrigal: I think I got [00:04:00] interested in cities as a level of analysis, mostly moving to Oakland.

Like I’d always been an ideas guy. I was interested in technology, I was interested in the social application of technology, but I saw it as part of a different set of stories. I think that Oakland has a way of bringing your attention to the sort of. Underlying infrastructure on which whole regions run.

Part of it is you just see the cranes, you see the train tracks, you see the freeways. This is the kind of back end of an industrial civilization. It’s all there, laid out for you. And it’s really complicated because you see the incredible wealth that’s generated by the technology industry and a bunch of other, large corporations centered in San Francisco and the Bay Area, but like how wildly unequal that distribution is.

So it was that slippage between the spatial and the sort of other modes of analysis you could do. That started [00:05:00] to really interest me in cities more generally. And Oakland quite specifically.

Jeff Wood: The book really struck me because I worked in Oakland for eight years at 14th and Broadway. And, during all the Occupy protests and a lot of stuff that was going on down there, I took Bart to work from San Francisco every day.

And so I feel like I was connected to that seventh Street corridor in some way because I looked out the windows. I could see the port and the highway and going over the tracks and you can see the homelessness, you can see everything when you’re coming into the city. And it really resonated with me as somebody who worked in Oakland for a really long time, that this is a place that people are introduced to many times through their, connection, looking out a window instead of being in it.

Which is some of a microcosm of kind of some of the stuff you explore in the book.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, I, I. Think specifically the story they ended up telling in this book about the interrelationship between the sort of containerization of Oakland’s port, the way that Silicon Valley technology was used to control that production.

And then the area of the city that’s directly adjacent to the port like that might have been. Somewhat born on Bart. Just looking out at, left [00:06:00] side, say going into San Francisco, you’ve got the port right side, you’ve got the city. And I just really started to wonder, like what happened to this place?

Because one of the first things you learn about Oakland history, in general, is that seventh Street used to be the major commercial corridor for the black population of not just Oakland, but the Holy Bay, which of course massively grew. After World War ii, thanks to the great migration and the war work that was available in the Bay Area, and it is fascinating to look at where black people from the sort of Western and southwestern parts of the South ended up.

Because it really is all the places where there was war work available. Marin City, which is like the one black part of Marin, was where Marin ship used to be. Richmond had massive Richmond shipyards. Oakland had shipyards as well as a variety of other kinds of work. East Palo Alto Hunters Point, like all these places, shared this kind of maritime history.

And so the maritime history of the Bay is really deeply interwoven, not just with the urban [00:07:00] history, but also the black history of the Bay as well.

Jeff Wood: I connected with that too. We had John King on to talk about his book portal about the ferry building and the dock workers and longshoremen and the shape up and all the stuff that happened before containers.

And I was talking to my mom and basically my grandfather was a longshoreman in San Francisco and he was part of the Bloody Thursday riots and thought bridges was two communist and all these other things, which is really fascinating going through your book and I’m like, I’m connected to this again.

But I just feel like that story is really interesting to start telling before containerization, the longshoremen the way that union operated and differently from many other union. Sin the end of the book where you talk about the, world Trade Organization meeting in Seattle and the stuff that happened there.

There is just like all these connections to capitalism and the connections to the Asia Pacific and stuff that go through that. But it all starts with San Francisco and it all starts in the ports and on the docks of all these longshoremen.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, I think people really forget because we don’t really have the same kind of connection to the maritime that we used to, even in places that are highly connected to it.

And our histories are [00:08:00] dependent on it. If people you know who are listening, pull up a map of San Francisco and just look at it. Now, you can see almost like a crown surrounding San Francisco. All these piers. Those piers, what used to be the most important port on the entire, this side of the Pacific, and ships came from all over.

And the way that this shipping industry used to work was that the ship itself was the container. So there were different holds. Longshoremen worked in gangs, they worked in partners. Let’s say it was like a coffee ship. They’d go down into the coffee hold, there’d be somebody with a winch. I. On the deck of the ship, they would drop a pallet down into the hold and the longshoreman would throw coffee onto it.

They would, have a hook that would go into the burlap, they’d swing it onto the thing. They work in this kind of rhythm, and they’d clear out all the coffee bags from that hold and move on, so ships took a long time to load and unload. And they also required large amount of pulsed labor.

You wouldn’t need any longshoremen when there weren’t any ships in, and then you needed a bunch when the ships were in because you, the [00:09:00] ships wanted to get moving again. The longshoremen had some leverage because it required skill, it required the ability to muster a lot of people to get out there, but they didn’t really have.

A true level of organization that allowed them in control over their working conditions until this massive strike in 1934, in which the longshoremen, along with a bunch of other unions and other people in the city kind of battle the commercial class of San Francisco and eventually win a series of reforms on the waterfront that make the job much better.

There’s a hiring hall that’s co-managed between the people who are doing the shipping and the longshoremen. The union itself develops this strong kind of rank and file sensibility in part driven by, its quite far left politics, as you noted around Harry Bridges very much on the left, and a strong union leader.

Also, an important part of the way they organize too, is that they want a coast wise contract, which means like all the. Ports on this side of the Pacific are all under ILWU, which is the Long Shore Union out here. It’s funny. There is a [00:10:00] joke in the, in this world that the Pacific Union, ILW is managed by the communists and the East Coast Union.

The ILA is managed by the mafia and I was in Baltimore a couple weeks ago and made this joke and one of the guys was like there’s some to it. Something to it. But don’t talk too loud. Yeah. And so it’s a really, it is a really interesting history. LW ends up becoming, one of the most powerful unions in the country and to this day has maintained really high wages.

One interesting thing of note is that in 1960, they did agree to mechanization and modernization. Harry Bridges did, which kind of set the stage for containerization to proceed on the West Coast when it eventually starts to catch on in the late 1960s.

Jeff Wood: Which was forward thinking, right?

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, I think so.

To a certain extent. I think so. Sometimes the story of containerization is told as this great innovation by a guy named Malcolm McClain who founded a company called Sea Land. They’re like, ah, this trucker figures out hey, you could like. Make containers, but actually he like owned a trucking company.

He was not [00:11:00] like a trucker. And also there were many other entities who had seen that yes, if you put everything in boxes and then stack them on a ship that would be, and lifted them out with a crane, that would be more efficient then having longshore labor go down into the holds of ships. But there were so many questions about how to actually make that system work and make that system run that even though the agreement.

With the Longshore Union comes in 1960, doesn’t really take on until the Vietnam War, when you get a guaranteed government contract to run stuff to Karon Bay and Vietnam. That sort of enables the growth of Sea Land. Matson, which from a variety of sort of federal regulatory reasons, has protected trade with Hawaii is able to make a system work as well, but it wasn’t like an immediate.

Win like in the way that sometimes people imagine it was a long-term transformation that really was a form of automation and that mostly what it did was decrease the amount of long short labor and then in the much longer term lead to the [00:12:00] sort of

Jeff Wood: explosion of global trade. That brings us back to West Oakland and talking about, how it was formed and why it became a port and, what happened to the communities that were there and, the second World War was a big part of that.

But I’m curious about that too. And you explore this in the book, but the connections between that and like the Chicago School of Sociology was really fascinating to me as a former GIS mapper and stuff like that.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. I think going back to that. Concept of, either walking around the streets or riding your bike on the streets of West Oakland, or sitting on the BART and looking out over it.

There is this question of like why did this happen? Like how was this done? And in particular, it leads back to this concept of blight, which was used. In the times of urban renewals, so we’re talking about the mid fifties here, to use eminent domain to bulldoze lots of homes and neighborhoods.

It was done all over the country. It was done very specifically in West Oakland. And so I started working my way back through these kind of government documents. There’s one from 1956 called the Residential Area Analysis in Oakland, in which. [00:13:00] Essentially like a quarter of the city is found to be blighted, but what was blight?

So then I go look into the sort of algorithms and because it really is like an algorithm that’s laid out in this report for how they assigned what they called a penalty score to an area to declare it blighted. And it’s really like an index of environmental racism. It’s really things that are like done to the neighborhood.

It’s like people being hit by cars. It’s the age of the housing. It’s all these things that. It’s not like people were doing anything in that way. The residents are not causing these problems and yet they’re counted against that neighborhood. So I, that just felt like a very odd thing to me, especially when I started to find contemporary thinkers like a guy named Anthony Downt, who was a real estate analyst.

In the 20th century who was already delineating dozens of uncompensated costs to communities that had urban renewal enacted upon them. It seems obvious that if you bulldoze a bunch of stuff, run a bunch of infrastructure through it, do all these things, it would be bad for the neighborhood.

And so I started to wonder like why did people think it was good for the neighborhood? So now I’m [00:14:00] moving back through documents and eventually if you follow the train of thought to how we ended up with blight and this kind of thinking, you end back literally with this Chicago School of Sociology.

In which a series of thinkers, park and Burgess are this kind of combo that are very associated with this world. They basically thought they had developed a set of rules that governed the city, like all cities, and that those rules were very predictive. And the key rule in this world was that growth moved outwards from the center and that.

Outward growth of the city led to the infiltration by different racial and ethnic groups into each other’s territory. Keep in mind, they’re in Chicago. They’re looking at the city that’s fractured along racial, ethnic, religious country of origin kind of lines. And they’re saying, this is how this all works.

It’s one ethnicity moves a little bit further out from the City Corps and they throw off the group that was already there, and then it degrades, and then that group gets pushed out further [00:15:00] out, and that degrades. The system that they developed led to the somewhat inevitable conclusion that cities were going to degrade.

There was no such thing as like mixed, integrated, thriving neighborhoods that like rebuilt themselves in a chill and great way and continued to live on. It was in fact, in their way of thinking, like an inevitable result of city growth was that the urban core would decay and that way of thinking might have just stayed in the academy.

But for the New Deal and the New Deal programs took on not just the ideas, but the actual people who had been involved in this University of Chicago research, and they actually designed the programs at the FHA, at the Homeowners Loan Corporation in local regions. All of these people have all been trained in kind of the same ways of thinking about city growth, about race, about risk, and they both.

Succeed in one of the great achievements of the 20th century, which is creating the American [00:16:00] mortgage, squeezing out a lot of the weird ways that people used to finance their homes. So you get a 30 year mortgage, you pay a thing, and that’s how it works. But in the meantime, they also deeply bound up race and risk together in a way that.

Really eviscerated the urban core by making it very difficult to make loans in those places. And eventually leading to the idea that the only way that you could save a city was to bulldoze it and start over again, which is what Urban Renewal has at its like sort of logical core. I.

Jeff Wood: It felt like kind of the equal and opposite take on any number of city ranking systems we have today that talk about like the happiest city or the most productive city, or the best city for families or whatever it is.

But it’s like the total reverse evil end of that, ranking system. And I’m not a fan of ranking systems altogether, putting numbers together. We had. Michael Batty on the show talking about his book, the Computable City, and he basically gets to the point where it’s we use computers to try to jam all of these things into like nice little containers, but they end up, people have multitudes and they’re unpredictable and it’s hard to say that we can actually predict this stuff [00:17:00] in the future.

Alexis Madrigal: I totally agree. I think like they obviously were seeing things that were real, but they also didn’t know what they couldn’t see. Yeah, and it’s interesting because park in particular is a sociologist dedicated to the sort of texture of things, but the second they took it to this kind of quantitative spatial realm, they lost a lot of that texture, which I think is quite sad.

And I think it’s also quite predictable. Like the reference here, of course would be like. James Scott’s seeing like a state, this incredible work of theory that basically says like states try to manage themselves by amassing quantitative information about themselves their residents, and what’s happening inside of them.

But pretty soon. They start to actually try and make the city be the numbers, as opposed to just having those numbers be some kind of measure of some more complex phenomenon that lies beyond the spreadsheet. And I think you see that kind of thinking all over the place now. In fact it’s probably the dominant way of thinking.

I don’t [00:18:00] think there’s anything wrong with numbers. I just think, anybody who’s ever had a goal at work should know that there’s like a pretty big difference between the number that’s written down. Like the real texture of this experience, of trying to hit a goal or missing a goal or all the things that go along with that.

Jeff Wood: So West Oakland basically then is rated as a blight, and so all of these things are then done to it because it is the place where the blight is. So we need to renew it. We need to put a highway through. There’s a port there. In the future, there may be like a coal terminal. There’s just like a whole bunch of stuff that comes down the pipe for West Oakland.

Then.

Alexis Madrigal: Absolutely. Yeah. I think that blight designation opens the door to a lot of things, in part because it destroys so much of the community that would have had quite amount of substantial social and political power in that place. That it makes it much easier for the authorities in Oakland who are really committed to capturing the trade from Asia, which they do quite accurately foresee coming in their late [00:19:00] 1950s, so that when a guy named Ben Nutter.

Who’s like the Robert Moses of the Port of Oakland begins to put together a plan to steal San Francisco’s trade and route it into containers. There’s not really a lot of anybody to stop him. There’s an amazing oral history at the Bancroft Library with him where both he and also his successor in the port sort of wax wrapped Sodic about the time before community groups could do anything about what they wanted to do.

And they do basically begin to. Put in a container port, which requires hundreds of acres of storage for containers because it’s not like the thing comes right off the boat and like onto the semi-truck that like takes it to the target distribution center. It has to go to a place, and then trucks come pick it up and it moves on.

And so you need all this storage. And along with the storage, you also need the trucks. To take it places, and that really becomes this very central feature of life in West Oakland. I was doing an event with Noni session, who’s also in the book, but grew up in West Oakland, and she was just recalling from her childhood in the 1980s that just [00:20:00] like the trucks were everywhere, they’re idling everywhere, they’re up on sidewalks, particulate matter.

We know it was very bad for people, and these are old trucks that have largely formerly been like long distance trucking and they’ve moved over to this kind of drainage thing, so you’ve got. Old, dirty trucks all over your neighborhood. They’re loud. It gives the kids asthma. It is like a whole series of things, environmental problems that come from this.

It’s worth not noting one other component of what happened to West Oakland too, which is just that the city has long wanted this for industrial development and the fact that people happen to live there wasn’t something that the city took for granted. As early as the mid 1930s, the city is trying to like explicitly says, we want to crowd people out of here by putting more industrial uses around, even though that is going to degrade the quality of housing in West Oakland.

So you basically have the city saying, all the way from the thirties, we’re gonna pollute the people who live here. So they leave. And they also said, we’re gonna segregate them with a freeway, which they also did. [00:21:00] And so this neighborhood has had such a wide variety of things done to it. And yet. In the post renewal era, post urban renewal era, like into the eighties and nineties.

Of course now the government is this is just, I’m not sure we’re gonna clean all this stuff up. I’m not sure we’re gonna be able to change these things. And I think that’s always been a major frustration of residents is that, in this era of Great American state capacity with.

Fully brought to bear on West Oakland and in, what people call like the neoliberal era, et cetera. Now the government goes the market does these things, not us. And neighborhood activists and other people have really had to work to find the kind of handles on power such as they exist in a place like West Oakland.

Jeff Wood: Anything can happen, but nothing can be done. From the book. Yeah.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. That is a Polish theorist named Zigmund Bauman. It’s this kind of theory of liquid modernity, and I think for me, that just struck me, all theory, I feel like it’s how it matches up against your own experience of the world.

It’s the first check on it, and I man, as anything over the last 10 years felt more true than that. Anything can happen, but nothing can be done. Ho hosting [00:22:00] forum day after day, it’s can we do anything about homelessness? Not really. How about fentanyl? Nope. Can we build more housing?

Nope. Can we change the way that our city transportation infrastructure works? It can only fail. We can’t actually make it better. And yet at the same time, all this crazy stuff is happening all the time. Maybe there’s artificial general intelligence on the horizon. Maybe there’s gonna be a pandemic, former reality TV show host, won the presidency and now may or may not be setting up, an authoritarian state inside the United States.

Like the amount of things that. Can happen now seem just tremendous. And yet the governmental resources and things at the local level where it feels like you could actually do something about that feel more or less non-existent. And I think there’s actually a reality to that.

Jeff Wood: We can connect that to the containerization too.

We basically put our tentacles out into the Pacific and into Japan and Vietnam and Korea, and started pushing those buttons. Vietnam War was part of that. And then we started this big trade loop and the book is [00:23:00] titled The Pacific Circuit. That’s what we did. And so we’ve done that as well.

We’ve done that to ourselves.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, absolutely. And I think what I wanted to make sure to connect up for people is that this system of production does in fact change the sort of like power relations that exist even at the very local level, right? When companies essentially don’t need sets of workers in the United States, they have a different relationship to that place.

And a key finding in this research, thanks to a lot of other researchers before me, most prominently Lenny Siegel. Who’s like a longtime compiler of information about Silicon Valley. An old Stanford radical is that, the Silicon Valley companies starting with Fairchild, which is really the company that put the silicon in Silicon Valley, they began to do assembly and later other types of production in Asia as really as 1963.

That’s when Fairchild goes for their Fairchild. Begets what are known as the fair children. The next generation of these chip companies. Nvidia is basically a fair grandchild coming a little bit later down the line. [00:24:00] So this is like the true, like Fountain head of Silicon Valley is a company that in the very early going, was a part of the United States early imperial ambitions to control the Pacific by binding.

Asian countries closer to the United States by supporting right wing governments that made sure there were large numbers of laborers there to work with American companies. We set up free trade zones and export zones for maybe we didn’t, they set up on our behalf. These types of things. And you end up with this industry that has this massive workforce in Asia from the very beginning so that activists in the early 1980s, labor activists estimated that half of the people working in these free trade and export zones were working for electronics companies.

But I. Try and find that in the official documents of Silicon Valley. Like it’s not, this is not how they narrate their own history, not even the people who were doing this work on the other end of the production line in Silicon Valley who were largely women. I. Often coming from countries in which the US had [00:25:00] been involved in the politics, domestic politics of those countries like say Latin America and Central America, as well as a bunch of the Asian countries.

And so you have this workforce, which is mobilized to then do this work in Silicon Valley. And be written entirely outta the history by anyone who works for Silicon Valley. And it’s, find it amazing. ’cause if you think about how Detroit has dealt with their history of workers, it’s like totally celebratory.

There’s like Henry Ford, but then there’s like the American worker, and what about these people? And I think there’s both a racial and gender components to why these women are not celebrated in the same way.

Jeff Wood: You talk in the book about the women with tiny hands, they’re the ones can, that’s what they do.

That stuff what, and then the only way that they could push back was by feigning. Hysteria. Fantas could go. Yeah.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. There’s this incredible article written by a journalist named Rachel Grossman, I believe that’s the right name, during this time in the 1970s where she goes to Penang, which is an island off the coast of Malaysia that was known regionally over there as Silicon Island.

And she goes there in part because [00:26:00] she wants to understand what’s happening inside these factories. And one of the things that’s happening is that people are claiming that they’re being possessed by demons. And when they’re possessed by the demons, they say things like, I hate it here and I don’t like working here.

And so there’s even like a whole kind of literature, like human resources literature about how to deal with women who are having this problem. The way that people at the time interpreted this was largely that it was one of the few socially acceptable ways that people had to protest the labor conditions that they were under, which I think are worth saying.

There were things like the miss free trade zone competition in which different semiconductor companies had like a bikini competition in which they sent like the winner to like the miss free trade zone broader competition. And I think we can say it’s. Pretty gross, and that’s just one of the things that was exploitative about this particular set of labor relations.

Jeff Wood: I’m just also thinking about how we invested in a lot of the, we talked about that since a second ago, but the army invested in sea land and Totally. And, made this happen. We’re capitalizing on the empty containers that came back from [00:27:00] Japan and other places. And so this made that loop run.

Totally.

Alexis Madrigal: I think the ways that. Just everyday people benefited from this stuff are many, and even, a thinker like Huey Newton, one of the co-founders of the Black Panthers and quite complex figure read the footnotes in the book about him. It’s complicated. But I think he was a quite prescient political theorist.

And in the early 1970s, he is seeing a couple of different things. One. That the system that the US had built, which he called reactionary Intercomm. Communalism, was really good at generating technologies that people loved. So he tells this story about Alex Haley going to Africa, author Alex Haley, and finding a guy who’s like listening to the BBC on a transistor radio.

So you have the B, B, C, the colonial output of the uk and you’ve got this transistor radio where a transistor producer produced in Silicon Valley, right? This technological machine is good at just like creating things that people love. It’s still true to this. Every day. Like people, maybe [00:28:00] talk trash about tech companies, but they’ve all got iPhones and they’ve all got, new computers.

They’ve upgraded their TVs all along the way. This system’s really good and I think he really, he didn’t really, is one of the first people to really struggle with how do you take on a system of power and production that isn’t. Strictly national. That is really spread out in this kind of across the Pacific circuit, as I would say, and that also benefits people.

He never really gets to a real answer. He proposes essentially that the right form, at least of that resistance, would be what he calls revolutionary Intercomm Communalism, which would be a series of communities that are connected largely by their relationship. To these imperial systems. So he says I see black communities here and I see black communities elsewhere that are living under these same conditions.

And the way that Panthers interpreted what was going on around them in West Oakland was that West Oakland and other ghetto residents, as they would’ve said, were essentially like the early adopters of the future economy. That they had been knocked into [00:29:00] unemployability, which made them have to deal in informal work arrangements, deal with precarity, take on bad forms of debt.

And I think if you think about how the world has changed from 1980 or the 1970s to now, they were right. That is exactly what has happened to the workforce. It’s increasing pressure from. Automation and different kinds of technologies, as well as the worsening of labor’s position in American society has forced a lot of people into taking terrible loans, precarious jobs, gig work, being in the informal economy, all these kinds of things.

And I think that’s really like quite intimately related to the changes in production that the Pacific Circle really enabled.

Jeff Wood: When I was reading the book and thinking about all these back and forth, one day on Blue Sky last week, I saw basically an animation of the African slave trade and the number of boats that were going across.

And coming back and circling around the West Indies and all that stuff. And I know it’s not directly connected, but it feels like a contemporary kind of postscript to this African [00:30:00] slave trade to a certain extent.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. Yeah. In calling it the Pacific Circuit, it’s like a kind of oblique callback to, the scholars have talked about like the Black Atlantic, which was an attempt to describe that kind of circuitry of the slave trade and the way that moving people that were used as capital and labor, both.

The way that enabled and underpinned so many other types of economic activity. There’s been a lot of great research in recent times about how people borrowed against the enslaved people that they had on their plantations, enabling financial engineering of a sort that it feels very familiar from the 21st century and.

Also, you see all these kind of interrelationships, which I think scholars have also begun to reveal between, say, the westward movement of the United States in the form of taking land from Mexico, for example during these kind of manifest destiny years, and obviously the expulsion of indigenous people from all kinds of.

Places being really tied up with the sort of the needs of these kind of [00:31:00] cotton planners as they moved along this financial frontline running from their debts that they had racked up in these different places. And so it’s I think once you start to see the links between the different kinds of trade and the financial arrangements that are built over the top of it, it becomes possible to see types of interconnections that aren’t totally apparent, like on the street level in my

Jeff Wood: mind.

You used the term borrowing against and it made me think of the idea that you put forth in the book about sacrifice zones. And the circuit requires sacrifice zones. You need a place to put the containers and where best to put them. Next to West Oakland where it’s an open space.

And so that feels like we’re borrowing against West Oakland’s livelihood to advance everything else.

Alexis Madrigal: Absolutely, and it’s like land and human potential and all those things. I think the other thing to be said about that is the financial arrangements of the mid 20th century that led to the disinvestment in West Oakland and led to redlining also don’t like immediately go away.

I think when we think about borrowing money, 1968 is like a huge thing because legislations [00:32:00] get passed. It allows supposedly fair housing to play out, and I think. One of the things that I’ve really come to believe is that layering on of borrowing against these particular pieces of land and the way that gets structured in different places, the suburbs versus like the inner city or a gentrifying neighborhood versus some other place.

These things have these title action on the daily lives of people. And it’s just really tough because it’s hard to reveal like on a day-to-day basis, like how that stuff is really pressing. It’s much easier to point to a coffee shop and say this is gentrification than it is to point to a couple decades of not giving loans to black people in a given area.

Jeff Wood: There have been a number of texts lately coming down on the pendulum swing initiated by Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Ralph Nader, including your colleague at the Atlanta Yoni Applebaum, who we recently chatted with about his book Stuck. You follow the same path. I’m wondering, why are we starting to reassess some [00:33:00] of the movements of the sixties and seventies in the context of what we know now?

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, I think it’s that essentially this housing didn’t get built and that the reality of that meant black displacement. That essentially if you didn’t build housing for people who’d been structurally advantaged in one way or another, they were going to displace people who’d been structurally disadvantaged in places like West Oakland, and at least for me.

Thinking about the things that I care about, which remain like equity and inclusion regardless of what other people think. It just went hugely wrong. And I think that opposition to urban renewal has two main sources. One is on the ground, people. The stories I tell in the book, the other source, if you look up a book called The Federal Bulldozer, it’s like pretty hardcore libertarians.

It’s like Milton Friedman. It’s a anti communitarian kind of ethic. It says like the government should never do anything, and that’s not exactly what most people on the ground were saying. But that particular political [00:34:00] configuration in places like the Bay Area, it’s just totally fascinating because you end up with this very strange politics that essentially enforces segregation by economic means.

And people are, people have been saying this for 40 years, like you can find documents in Lenny Siegel’s archive in Mountain View. You know this activist guy that we’re talking about for a long time who are saying Palo Alto this is the 1980s, are saying Palo Alto is excluding everyone from living here by not building any multifamily housing.

Yet it’s done under this guise of we’re protecting the city, we’re protecting the character of life here, we’re protecting all this stuff. And I think there’s just, sometimes through time politics that initially had a really good point to, it can be reconfigured into arrangements that have really negative outcomes for particular groups.

And I think, like to me, there’s almost nothing more indicative of that than the sort of mass displacement of black people from Oakland.

Jeff Wood: Another thing that struck me was how the containerization brought a lot of [00:35:00] wealth adjacent to the city and it passed through the city. But it didn’t necessarily hit the city.

And it reminds me of today, and I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, is like the kind of the transfer of wealth that’s been happening. You have Facebook hoovering up money from small businesses all over the country and then giving, billions of dollars of it to one person to buy Instagram.

And that feels like the same kind of thing that’s happening with this story that you’re telling. And you talk about this in the book, the containerization and the movement of goods, and it’s missing everybody because of the globalization of it all.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, that’s right. I think the reality of our economy now, and it’s like something we don’t wanna reckon with fully, is essentially there’s two types of people in this world now.

One. You’re able to tap into this global circuitry, whether that is the Pacific Circuit and the kind of trade in goods, and you work for a huge corporation that does its production in Asia and sells stuff around here. Or you’re someone who has to sell a coffee that costs you $2 to make for $4 and then take that $2 [00:36:00] and try and make a lot of sales and make it work.

And I just think. We really need to reckon with that reality because those scales are totally different. Those lives are different and I don’t exactly know how to fix that, but until we recognize that, that is like maybe the key dynamic going on in our cities that. All of the goods and services that we would like to have in a thriving city are fundamentally being opposed by these global economic forces that allow people to, tap every small business in the world and drop some money into their bank account.

Or get subsidized in one way or another by venture investors or private equity or whatever it is. Those things are like, they’re just, they’re wildly different and I think a lot of scholars of like sort of financialization have pointed to like pieces of this, but I think it’s an even more widespread phenomenon now than it has ever been.

Jeff Wood: In the space that [00:37:00] we talk about transportation, urban planning. We’ve been talking about this for last month with different folks that have come on the show. But it’s been interesting to look at like why we have food deserts and why, Walmarts and the Kmarts took off and why the small mom and pops disappeared.

And a lot of it is regulation that was dropped during the Reagan administration. And even before that. A lot of it is, the suburban sprawl of it all. It feels like this is very connected to that and understanding how things move back and forth within our urban space and the growth of cities and things like that.

And so I’m wondering what your thoughts are on some of those interconnections between transportation, urban planning, and the space that you’re discussing in the book.

Alexis Madrigal: I think a lot of logistics scholars have started to look at these things. There’s different people who’ve been trying to study what does a Walmart do to a place, because they’ve got this scale, they’ve got this flow.

They can just wipe out a main street, and it changes the nature of jobs in these places. It had seemed like our urban environments were somewhat insulated from this. The big box era has coincided or did coincide with a pre pandemic like [00:38:00] boom and kind of return to cities and all these things.

I wondered if we were just like a little too early with seeing that in cities, it wasn’t gonna be a Walmart that was gonna take out our local places. It was gonna be everyone buying everything from Instagram and getting it drop, shipped to their door direct. I think it’s almost like there’s like these two layers of infrastructure there.

There’s like the roads that would connect you to a store somewhere, but then there’s also this like internet infrastructure that like directs you almost as easily, maybe as easily, directly to a factory in China or to a seller in China that delivers things right to your door and. Good for that seller in China, and this is like the way the US wanted this system.

We set it up just like this. And Amazon is taking its cut and people up in, Seattle are very happy about this happening. But it makes for a really difficult thing, the mapping or internet enabled geography to the like physical geography and figuring out like how do you plan a city in which people think of [00:39:00] themselves more as like nodes in a logistical network than as like residents of that city feels very.

Complicated to me. And I was at a store buying a shirt for an event I have tonight, and the guy was saying something along the lines of, it used to feel like the internet was an extension of real life. And now it feels like real life is an extension of the online world. People come in and try the pants on in his store and then say, I’m gonna go buy this online.

And he’s you’re in my store with the pants on, right? Why wouldn’t you just buy it here? I don’t know. It’s tough when you write a book like this because you can sometimes get to some of the big problems, but it’s hard to, this is almost a cultural shift as much as anything else though.

So I guess, maybe buy local is quite milk toast solution to this, but it’s what needs to happen, if you want a city to continue to exist. I

Jeff Wood: was also thinking about the containerization of things, and then it brought me back to Louis Mumford’s, the city in history. And a lot of the stuff in his book and where he starts out from is talking about the city as a container, and I was thinking about that and all these sprawling houses as [00:40:00] containers and connecting those together and how I.

We went from these messy, vibrant cities to all of these like containers that were just spread out about the landscape. And I made that connection and I thought that was interesting. I wanted to share it with you.

Alexis Madrigal: That’s a cool connection. That’s very cool. Yeah, I think like thinking about the porosity of our houses as containers, and also thinking about.

Their various types of isolation is also interesting. I think if you ask a historian of technology like David and ii, what made the suburbs work? It was actually their porosity to radio signals and television signals, that it, it gave you something to do. Out in the suburbs, people used to come to the city ’cause it was exciting.

And I think as our homes have become ever more threaded through with other entertainments and information, they’re ever more porous to these other internet systems, maybe they’re actually a little bit more closed off as containers to the city around them. And that’d be good to change that ratio in my mind as someone who loves Oakland and loves cities.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. Yeah. One of the things [00:41:00] also about the book is that you talk about these characters and the interesting people as Margaret Phil Tig. And I feel like he gave Phil Tagami a fair shake, but I don’t know if he deserved it.

Alexis Madrigal: I, it’s an interesting thing, the fundamental story here, that kind of narrative that I wove a lot of this stuff around, is this kind of protagonist. Ms. Margaret Gordon, it’s Environmental justice leader in West Oakland and the sort of antagonist this guy Phil Tig, who is a Oakland born and bred real estate developer who has been in charge of a major army based redevelopment operation.

If you’ve been to the Fox Theater in Oakland, that’s Phil Tagami. If you’ve been to the Rotunda building that’s Phil. And if you’ve seen the army base change, which you may not know exactly where that is, but if you’ve seen changes out at the port that also was a Phil TIG enterprise, I think here’s what I hope people take away from that story.

I think the details of them are fascinating. How someone becomes a community leader, how somebody becomes a real estate developer, and the sort of changes that attend to their life through everything. I think [00:42:00] that a lot of the time in the environmental justice movement and also in all kinds of community action, the kind of key route to change that is open to people is to stop things from getting done.

You can put the brakes on stuff. You might lose legal battles. You might always, but you, there’s like a lot of ways to slow something down. But we also know that like in our world, we’re gonna have to rebuild like all of industrial society. People can ignore climate change at the national level.

All they want call it a hoax, whatever, like other countries are doing it, we’re gonna have to do it. This is just gonna be a thing that’s gonna happen. And that means building like a lot of stuff. And I do think that Tami has a piece of the puzzle here. Like in terms of being able to put together development deals that satisfy a really wild set of requirements, say out at the Army base to do a ton of local hire with people.

All the union and community groups were involved in setting the conditions for rebuilding the Oakland Army base into its sort of current [00:43:00] configuration. And I think that’s really important that there was somebody who was actually able to get that stuff done. With having banned the box and doing local hire and all these other things.

That said there was a kind of poison pill in it, which is that there was a bulk export terminal built into that deal that would, quite substantially increase coal exports from the United States to Asia, another loop in the Pacific Circuit if you were able to get it built. And that’s one reason why he became a persona non grata in Oakland.

I guess I wanted to make sure that we took the measure of Phil Tagami as like a whole person over time, while also recognizing like, yeah, we should keep the coal in the ground and we shouldn’t export it. I think that, just as someone who believes climate change is a real thing, it’s really important to keep coal in the ground, and I think the No Coal and Oakland activists have the better argument there.

Jeff Wood: Another thing about Margaret, she bounced around San Francisco and Hunters Point Ingleside and West Oakland as well. I’ve been on that bar track too, where you turn that corner and because I looked it up on a map, I was like, where is that? Where is that address? I, where I know that place. It was only a [00:44:00] mile from where my mom grew up in Outer Mission and I’ve ridden that train so many times.

The airport to Daley City to go visit Manni when she lived there. I just connected with that. What happens? If that house doesn’t sell or Bart doesn’t need that property what happens if they don’t get kicked outta that place or originally get kicked out of their base housing, early on.

Yeah. And so there’s these little twists of history that are really fascinating.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah. And I think one of the things that’s really, I. Difficult for people whose families you know did not come up from the South during The great migration to this area is to really recognize how extreme the intervention of the state was in the lives of black Americans in the Bay Area in the 20th century.

If you look at. Miss Margaret’s like first places, right? She’s born in war housing in Richmond, which, lots of black Americans were invited to come up and work in those places and did and lived on this housing. And the second the war was winding down, the city of Richmond was trying to expel them, bulldozing all this war housing so that in hopes that people would go back home to the south.

That was the hopes of city planners. So that place for shoes [00:45:00] born. Bulldozed Sheik bounced around to Baby Hunter’s Point. Of course, baby Hunter’s Point is also like a environmental justice community, a place that’s been sacrificed and polluted by the US Navy itself, and also a variety of other polluting industries, also segregated by freeway.

All these kind of problems that exist in West Oakland. There’s like a version of almost all of them and Baby Hunter’s Point set for the port itself. And then she goes out to Ingleside, which was in the midst of a racial transformation to becoming a multiracial neighborhood. And. In Ingleside, a piece of our family’s property is taken first by highway, and then the rest of it is taken by Bart as they complete the daily City station.

The first place she’s able to live outside her parents’ house was a new public housing project that had already fallen into disrepair, just a few years after it was built. We know that thanks to this newspaper that was run there at the time called the Spokesman, so by the time she was 18. She’s had two of her parents’ homes bulldozed, and she also herself was caught in this incredibly difficult situation of being a young woman in rat infested public housing.

You know when people are like, oh, there was this riot and it caused white flight. That’s probably not true, first of all. But also like, why was that happening? All of these things were going on and again, I’ll just note that even white elite real estate appraiser types understood that.

Urban renewal and a lot of these other interventions in the city by governments did have uncompensated costs to people not just buying out the houses. And many people had a lot of beef with how those appraisals were done, but also all the other things that happened to a neighborhood when big chunks of it are being bulldozed at a time.

Root shock.

Jeff Wood: This is a term for that.

Alexis Madrigal: Yep, totally.

Jeff Wood: It’s just so fascinating. I had family members that lived on hospital curve and they got kicked out and then they found houses nearby and it didn’t seem to be a big deal. Some of those houses that they found are still, [00:47:00] in the family. And so it’s interesting to see that juxtaposition.

And it’s, I,

Alexis Madrigal: That’s such an interesting point too because, research, contemporaneous research at the time back then found that like black families had a much more difficult time finding housing. A, there was still a racial corridor. There’s amazing old documentary. I want every Single Bay Area resident to watch, which is called Segregation Western Style.

It was a major TV documentary that was done in the 1960s. A lot of it is about a failed fair housing measure in Berkeley, but it shows there was intense and real racial animus. There was a racial cordon in. Almost every Bay Area city, black people really could only live in a specific number of places. So all of our kind of like ybi, supply and demand, people can do the math on this, right?

It’s okay, you bulldozed a bunch of black people’s houses and they cannot move to another place. What’s that gonna do to the rents in the remaining homes where black people can live? They’re gonna go up. And that’s exactly what happened. And so black people had a much harder time finding new housing after urban renewal efforts, and they tended to pay a lot more money.

And that’s just one of so many of these things. [00:48:00] And of course, if people wanna read more about this too, the Color of Law by Richard Rothstein is like a really fantastic resource. Yeah, you probably got it right there. Yeah,

Jeff Wood: I’m talking to Leah next week actually.

Alexis Madrigal: Oh, cool. Great. I feel like that book was along with a lot of other great work that’s been done by other people, but that one has such a fascinating Bay Area focus, and it makes a case so authoritatively and comprehensively about how the state essentially enforced segregation in these areas.

Jeff Wood: A couple more questions and I’ll let you go. What did you learn through this process? This is a nine year process. This is a lot of research, a lot of digging. A lot of tough times. And I don’t want to, dismiss the tough times that other people were feeling that you’re reading through.

You’re the person that’s the kind of the archivist of this, but reading about Ms. Margaret and some of the stuff that she went through and you said you, stopped working on the book for a month. I’m just curious about that process, that nine year process and where you were when you began and where you are now that you’re finished with it.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, I mean I think in the early days, I started really thinking about these issues a lot, working with Taha cos The Atlantic, and working on the sort of digital components of a big essay he [00:49:00] wrote called The Case for Reparations. I think that the first realization I had was really about, I think I’ve been sold the story of progress, like most elder millennials for this country, still in the Obama era when I started working on this book.

And it felt oh, okay things might not be perfect, but things are getting better. And I think it was around that time when I began to realize that specifically around the black, white racial gap that. Things were not getting better. And in fact things were getting a lot worse for some people particularly in the years after the global financial crisis.

So I think that was one major component, was to realize that my own sense of this country’s particularly progress on racial issues was almost certainly overblown. And that on a deep structural level, there were just so many things remaining to address. So that would probably be one.

Two I on a just really personal level, I came to just really appreciate all the different people and places of Oakland in a totally new way too. This book sent me all over West Oakland in different times and [00:50:00] places and meeting the different people who are involved in all different kinds of community meetings.

Just. Thinking about the people who’ve just spent hundreds of hours of their lives going to community meetings in different places with the hopes that they would improve their own lives, but also the lives of everyone around them. This community mindedness of a lot of folks. And I think maybe the most important thing is it does feel like there’s this really long-term battle, like within the American soul about are we a place of rugged individualism or are we a place that sort of takes care of everyone?

And I feel like right now everything about the way your phone works. Everything about the way the Pacific Circuit works, it’s really trying to blast people apart into just being little market particles, like staring at a screen, little containers.

Jeff Wood: Their own little containers.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, little containers. It’s like libertarian dream.

What has happened, like Milton Friedman could not even imagine what Uber would do for people and what Amazon would do, and this idea that we would have a society that people cared about feels like endangered. And one of the things that I absolutely feel like is a [00:51:00] native Oakland immune response to that is to build all these sort of collective enterprises, build these collective things and try and hang onto that.

Hang onto the idea of being like a community of people bonded to each other, both because of where we live, but also because we’re people who should be bonded to each other. This is how it works. We’re a society, we’re a place, and that is the world I wanna live in. One where people feel that responsibility for each other across racial lines, across class lines, across all the

Jeff Wood: things.

I’m sure you’ve talked about this book a bit. I’m wondering if there’s anything that you haven’t been asked about that you wish you would’ve been.

Alexis Madrigal: Oh, that’s interesting. That’s an interesting one. I guess the thing that is where the ratio of my interest to the world interest is the most diversion is over the existence of this home Mortgage Disclosure Act data.

I really think it’s important that people know that we like know the race and ethnicity attached to mortgage loans. [00:52:00] Going like way back, it was put in by housing activists so that we could know what was happening. And I think if you look at areas using that lens, you can see the material underpinnings of gentrification.

I think that’s really important because, I’ve said this a couple times out in the world. I think anti-gentrification politics failed on its own terms. Like I don’t think it actually stopped gentrification, but gentrification also failed on its own terms. Like gentrification did not make crime go away in Oakland gentrification did not lead to a thriving downtown.

And I think it’s really worth us thinking about we need a different version of thinking about urban change. One that is historically minded and that takes into account like all that has been done to these neighborhoods, but also one that recognizes that urban change is gonna happen. Like you can’t actually freeze a neighborhood.

There’s no mechanism for doing it. And even if there was. That’s just not what a city is. Cities need to change and grow and become new things. People have asked about it in [00:53:00] not quite direct ways. But yeah, that, that would be my interest, that study of that data and really getting like material and real about why gentrification happened has led me to really feel like we need a new way of talking about this stuff.

It’s been too long that has really been the kind of governing principle of how we talk about these things in cities.

Jeff Wood: The book is the Pacific Circuit a globalized account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City? Where can folks find it if they should pick it up? Actually, I, I wanna tell you something real quick.

I think this is more important the book than the abundance discussion that’s going on right now. And I am very serious about that, and I haven’t read that book specifically, but I go through 1500 news items every day, and I have read numerous articles by Ezra and Derek and I appreciate what they’re doing and the discussion that they’re having and that they’re starting, but.

This book tells a larger, more in depth intertwined story about those issues than the discussion starter that abundance is. And so I just wanted to tell you that because as I was reading this, and I’ve been reading a lot of books lately I just feel like this is the [00:54:00] discussion that we should be having about this stuff.

Alexis Madrigal: Oh, thank you so much. I really appreciate

Jeff Wood: that. And it’s not to, and Derek is and not to put you against, no. Derek’s a

Alexis Madrigal: dear old friend of mine, and I,

Jeff Wood: I’m not trying to pit anybody against each other. That’s not what I’m trying to do. But I’m just saying like at this moment the discussion is going in that direction and I feel like this discussion is very important.

And so I just wanted to share that.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, no, I appreciate that. So folks should go

Jeff Wood: So folks should go pick it up at a bookstore and read it.

Alexis Madrigal: Go to a local bookstore, obviously. Yeah. They should have it. Yeah.

Jeff Wood: Alexis, thanks so much for joining us. I know that people can find you every morning on KQED with Forum. They can reach out to you there, I’m sure.

Alexis Madrigal: Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Hey, thank you so much for having me.

Jeff Wood: Yeah, thanks for being here.