Why We're Liberating Esther's Orbit Room

You may know that we’ve been building toward this project for more than two years. We are now mobilizing to close the gap and finalize the historic purchase of Esther's Orbit Room to develop a mixed use Black cultural space at the head of West Oakland’s historic 7th street corridor!!

By the projects’ completion in 2023, we will have fully galvanized a partner community of legacy & emerging Black artists, culture keepers and entrepreneurs to cooperatively plan and steward this project setting the arc of West Oakland’s future for generations to come. The time has come for us to reclaim 7th street as the home of Black futures in West Oakland.

Now that we’ve pinned down first rights to purchase, we are in our due diligence phase. Over the next six weeks, we’re conducting site tests and testing feasibility for the scope and site of the project. If all goes as planned, we are closing escrow on June 15. AND...please join us on Juneteenth for our open member meeting and celebration of the very first commercial property liberated by the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative!!!

In the meantime, we are learning as much as we can about the property, its history and its current state and we plan to share what we learn with you here on our blog, and weekly on Instagram Live, Thursdays at 2:00 pm. Tune in for all the gritty details of developing your own community based project! For updates, details, to share with your friends and family, or to access our live content, follow us @theebprec.

Learning & Evolving

Last year was extremely challenging for our collective, as it was for so many others. We were not able to take action in all the ways we would have liked to--especially in terms of in-person engagement. Challenging as it was, it gave us ample time to sit with our thoughts and make room for new staff, systems, and an expanded vision for our work.

New people bring new perspectives to our work. With these new perspectives in house, we’ve collectively discovered that the magic of EB PREC’s vision of collective ownership is its commitment to cultural sovereignty. Ownership, as a legal designation, is the thing we think we need within our current extractive paradigm to act in the ways we wish.

Within the current legal and financial frameworks that exist to facilitate a transfer of property, permanence is inextricably intertwined with legal ownership. But ownership--a core catalyst for extraction and displacement in frontline communities--is not the thing that we ultimately want to use EB PREC to build.

In its classic sense, the energy that ownership cultivates is rooted in power hoarding and scarcity. It’s what powers the feeling of having the “right” to cause harm--to call the police on a group of young black men gathering in leisure on the neighborhood corner, for example, or to hunt down a teenage boy walking home on the phone with his girlfriend.

Without a critical revisioning of ownership, it is too easily harnessed as a dominance relationship to any noun (person, place, or thing) and rooted in white supremacy founded with the entitlement to enact physical and social violence on black bodies using the rights of stolen land. If we seek to liberate Black and Indigenous people of color--emulating the forces that oppressed them won’t help us realize that vision.

What we ultimately desire is the autonomy to determine our own futures without harming anyone, agency for our community and liberation from wage labor and feelings of scarcity.

We at EB PREC are working diligently to see this vision realized on our streets and in our communities right now. It’s why we’re embarking on this journey to revive Esther’s Orbit Room and the 7th Street Corridor; to transform these cultural assets into a resource collectively owned, designed and managed by the people who use it. For us, collective ownership of Esther’s Orbit Room is synonymous with the revival of a resource created by and for those who live, work and serve Oakland. It’s also synonymous with the ownership and collective future of our community.

A New Phase

After two residential projects to get our feet wet, this project is our first mixed-use property, with both residential and commercial components. When complete, the Esther’s Orbit Room Cultural Revival Project will be a model for abundance and autonomy of the kind we seek: a holding place for Black culture, food and art and a model for other cooperatives that will also choose to make 7th Street their home, all operating in right relation with one another and the deep histories of the land on which they sit. Our vision for the Esther’s Orbit Room project emerged from the Black Economics Salon series we hosted in 2019, but the vision is not complete. We look forward to filling out the details and contours of our future together on 7th street with you!

Tap In

We invite continued input from our West Oakland neighbors, anyone with roots in this cultural landmark and West Oakland in general, as well as anyone invested in the success of West Oakland and the future of our Black community; here and across the city. In the short term we’re partnering with the ritual arts and community engagement project House/Full of BlackWomen to gather more input from culture keepers rooted here in Oakland.

Next month, in June, Community Organizer Miliaku Nwabueze will host weekly Friday events we’re calling Space Jams. It's a chance to meet up with Miliaku, Noni and the rest of the team right in front of Esther’s and hang out, eat food, share your thoughts and tell us what it is you believe our community needs. We need and want to hear from you.

We are two years out from being able to open the doors, but make no mistake--there is movement. In meantime expect pop-ups, celebrations, and activations. When the work to rehabilitate the property is complete, we envision it will hold--below market rate-- space for commercial residents and 8-10 new resident owners. Through our unique resident owner relationship we are disrupting ownership as it is currently exercised. We are providing space to practice care and stewardship over land that BIPOC people were either stolen from or enslaved on. We are establishing the right relationship within our little slice of the world; and that is beyond how much money you can get by living with us.

To realize this radical vision of our Black future together we've had to galvanize deep resources to complete this project. We’re in the final stretch and we’re kicking off our campaign to raise awareness of the Esther’s Orbit Room Cultural Revival Project and the funds needed to complete it. We need to close a funding gap of $1.8M dollars to purchase and rehab Esther’s. Please read the offering circular, prior to making the decision to invest. We’re actively recruiting champions if you want to help spread the word.

Reopening Esther’s can be the spark that sets in motion a series of grand openings up and down 7th Street. We believe the arrival of an anchor institution on the west end of 7th Street will permanently shift the landscape to resemble the ebullient Black business corridor it once was.