HOME: Oakland Equity Indicators | Neighborhood and Civic Life | Built Environment

The Built Environment Topic includes three Indicators that measure the safety, resilience, and quality of Oakland neighborhoods. All three of these Indicators measure geographic disparities based on the majority race/ethnicity of census tracts. The first Indicator in this Topic measures disparities in the location of streets where there have been a high number of pedestrian injuries. The second Indicator measures disparities in the location of soft story buildings, which are prone to collapse in the event of an earthquake. The third Indicator measures disparities in the location of residential addresses that have been vacant for two years or more.

Built Environment was the lowest scoring Topic in the Neighborhood and Civic Life Theme, with a Topic score of 33.3. This low score was partially due to the pedestrian safety Indicator, which received the lowest possible score of 1. The soft story buildings Indicator received the highest score in this Topic (67), and the score for long-term residential vacancy fell in the middle (32).

We found that majority Asian census tracts had the highest percent of streets in the High Injury Network for pedestrians (30.0%), while majority Latino census tracts had the second highest percent (11.4%). Majority White census tracts had the lowest percent of High Injury Network streets (2.3%), and 5.6% of streets in majority African American census tracts were in the High Injury Network. The percent for non-White/mixed census tracts (6.5%) was similar to the percent of all streets citywide (6.1%). The percent of streets with pedestrian safety concerns in majority Asian census tracts was 13.16 times the percent in majority White census tracts.

Non-White/mixed census tracts were the most likely to have soft story buildings on their residential parcels (0.85%), followed by majority White census tracts (0.62%). Due to the fact that only certain types of buildings can be designated as soft story, and that these types of buildings are concentrated in certain areas of Oakland, we chose non-White/mixed and White as the comparison groups for this indicator. Majority African American census tracts (0.22%) and majority Latino census tracts (0.27%) had much lower percents of parcels with soft story buildings, while the two majority Asian census tracts had no soft story buildings. The percent of residential parcels that are soft story in majority non-White/mixed census tracts was 1.37 times the percent in White census tracts.

Long-term residential vacancy was highest in majority African American census tracts (0.88%), followed by majority Asian census tracts (0.66%). Majority Latino census tracts had the lowest long-term residential vacancy (0.27%), followed closely by majority White census tracts (0.39%). Citywide, 0.47% of residential addresses in Oakland had been vacant for at least two years. The percent of vacant addresses in majority African American census tracts was 3.21 times the percent in majority Latino census tracts.