The oak Park redeVeloPmenT Plan: housing Policy imPlicaTions

With the reemerging discussion of gentrification in the urban landscape, an exploratory case study of the Oak Park Redevelopment Plan in Sacramento, California, was conducted to better understand the community’s gentrifying characteristics and the implications once the redevelopment goals are met. In addition, a conceptual framework (CF) was formulated in order to examine the components and processes of gentrification. The findings suggest that the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency’s redevelopment polices act as a catalyst for gentrification that exclusively favors the in-migration of middleand upper-income owner-occupiers into the area at the expense of lower-income residents. These implications include the displacement of low-income renter-residents, changes to a neighborhood’s socioeconomic and cultural characteristics, and compromising the neighborhood’s ethnic diversity and affordability. Oak Park, the first suburb of Sacramento, California established in 1889, was granted annexation by the city of Sacramento in 1911 (Simpson, 2004). Oak Park was the most prosperous when inhabited by northern Europeans and continued with the influx of southern Europeans during the 1920s, until the turn of the 20th century. The neighborhood’s prosperity was highlighted by Oak Park’s historic amusement park, Joyland, the trolley system that connected Joyland to the downtown area, and the California State Fair Grounds that were originally located in Oak Park. Though the community experienced significant development until the 1920s, an abrupt decline in the 1930s was initiated by a national economic depression from which Oak Park never recovered. Oak Park was economically devastated by the Great Depression, which caused many businesses to leave the area, including the city’s amusement park, Joyland, in 1927, and the abandonment of the trolley system (Simpson, 2004). The community’s inability to recover from the Great Depression, coupled with the growing suburban sprawl of inexpensive post-World War II track housing, created conditions for ‘white flight’ which gradually diminished Oak Park’s tax base and political infrastructure as property values plummeted (Simpson, 2004). Furthermore, Simpson (2004) highlights the construction of Highway 99 in the 1950s “split [the adjacent communities of Land Park and Oak Park] (see appendix A) which virtually guaranteed [Oak Park’s] urban blight that would follow in the 1960s and 1970s,” (p. 7) while with the construction of Highway 50 to the north further isolated Oak Park from downtown. Oak Park’s economic decline escalated in 1968 when the