Cuando protestantes quemaron vehículos de Waymo en las calles de Los Ángeles, no se trato de una destrucción descontrolada. Fue un mensaje directo de la clase trabajadora contra la oligarquía tecnológica.
When protesters burned Waymo vehicles in the streets of Los Angeles it wasn’t wanton destruction. It was a direct message from the working class.
The LA protests aren’t just about Trump, ICE or the National Guard. They’re the result of decades of dispossession of working-class Angelenos.
Oakland’s downtown Greyhound bus station was a center of working-class life for decades. Now it's owned by the “Uber of buses.”
On the strip of 7th street near West Oakland BART, Viet Nguyen stood waiting for a bus to Fresno on a Saturday morning. There’s no structure or building to sit and wait. He thinks the former Greyhound Station in downtown Oakland was better.
Viet’s younger travel companion Minh Nguyen translated for him. “There was a bathroom, there was a sign,” Viet lamented to Minh. Reginald Blueford, bound for Los Angeles sat by his luggage on the sidewalk nearby. Blueford hadn’t even realized the downtown station had closed. “That’s what I was accustomed to,” he said.
That downtown Greyhound Station, with its sleek marquee sign prominently advertising “Bus,” still stands.
It hasn’t been used for bus service since late 2021. Instead, it now sits vacant, guarded by private security who make sure it stays that way.
The station, which opened in 1926, served the public in grand fashion for nearly a century before it shuttered four years ago. Upon its opening, The Oakland Tribune hailed it as “rank with the best railway rooms in fittings, convenience and general appearance.” Between “1500 and 3000 people”–Oakland natives, visitors, soldiers, and migrant workers alike – circulated each day through its bronze and plate glass doors in its first year.
The station offered an opulent entryway into the city for working-class people who could not afford such grandeur in their homes.
A quick scan of comments on a photo of the station on a local history Facebook page reveals dozens of stories of young people leaving the city for the first time, locals recalling run-ins with pimps and drug dealers, and soldiers returning from tours in Vietnam, all in the terminal.
“Tiny” Gray-Garcia, an activist with POOR Magazine, helped organize an encampment in the station’s ample parking lot this past December after police swiftly suppressed their protest outside City Hall against sweeps and arrests of homeless people. They moved to the Greyhound parking lot for seven days to show how “supposedly public spaces,” as Gray-Garcia described them, languished in disuse. Gray-Garcia said people told her that the week in that parking lot was “the first time that they didn’t have to be afraid about where they would sleep.”
Soon enough, private security and police circled and pressured them to leave the lot.
The terminal on San Pablo Avenue is one uniquely visible structure among many dotting the downtown cityscape that once served an essential service but is now defunct. Why is this distinctive Oakland fixture sitting vacant, policed, but unusable, while people wait outside for their bus?
It began in 2021, when Greyhound’s bus lines – ailing from pandemic ticket collapse – were bought by the German transit company Flix. Flix had already honed a business model that earned its reputation as the "Uber of buses" – that is, they paid for the marketing, booking and route-planning and left local companies to hire the drivers and maintain the infrastructure. That "asset-light" approach, and a whole lot of venture capital, catapulted them above the competition in Germany. When they bought Greyhound’s brand and bus routes, Flix sought to slash the costs of the company that was, in the new CEO’s words, “run like it was built a century ago.”
That meant ditching the century-old San Pablo Avenue station and others like it. Flix bought the routes without the stations, which Greyhound’s parent company FirstGroup held onto. Taking a bus from Oakland now means waiting outside on a public sidewalk. Shedding this infrastructure for passengers, it turns out, has been good for business: Greyhound revenues have risen from $420 to 670 million since Flix’s takeover according to Forbes.
Stations including Oakland’s now serve a different purpose; they are vehicles for real estate speculation. After Flix passed on the properties, the private equity firm Alden Global Capital swept up 33 Greyhound stations from FirstGroup in 2022. The firm is best known for purchasing and gutting local newsrooms, such as the East Bay Times, which saw 40 percent of its newsroom laid off in two years. The company plunged hundreds of millions of dollars from those newspapers into commercial real estate. Alden’s real estate arm, Twenty Lake Holdings, purchased those Greyhound stations with no intention of returning bus service.
Their investment is seeing returns in some cities. In Dallas, Twenty Lake Holdings sold their station to a major real estate mogul who plans to use it as a springboard to develop downtown properties. The bus terminal in Richmond, Virginia is slated for demolition to make way for a mixed-use development. In April, Alden listed for sale its Greyhound station property in Nashville’s downtown, riding a surge in property acquisitions and development in the area.
The reticence of investors elsewhere to develop commercial real estate like office buildings is part of a national trend, but it’s acutely felt in Oakland. The bet that private equity firms like Alden placed on commercial real estate has largely stopped paying off across the country over the past three years as companies leave office space and property values decline.
Tenants from several buildings built during the late 2010s construction boom received notice in the past year that banks and other lenders are seizing their homes after the owners could not turn a sufficient profit through renting units to pay off loans.
Building now comes with a risk, particularly where the station sits.
“San Pablo and Grand is not the direction that any of the office developers are heading in,” said Mitchell Schwarzer, author of Hella Town: Oakland’s History of Development and Disruption.
The San Pablo corridor, which offered easy access to downtown from points north, was an ideal location for the station in the 1920s. After freeways cut through and across the corridor so drivers could bypass San Pablo, it became the “forgotten corridor,” in Schwarzer’s words. For developers, it is “the least desirable corridor leading out of downtown,” a fate it has shared with 7th Street in West Oakland, which also leads from the urban core toward “historically black Oakland.”
What does this property offer to investors like Alden Global Capital, then? It’s a bet that demand for offices or other commercial space might climb back up and reach to where San Pablo meets downtown.
“They’re probably thinking, we’ll hold onto this,” Schwarzer said. Rather than invest in a service for the current residents, they may be waiting for demand from consumers they hope will come years from now.
The story of why the station closed and why it stays derelict converges on this point. It’s not sufficiently profitable to maintain a building – certainly not an impressive historic one – for riders buying cheap tickets to visit family in Fresno or play slots in Reno. Developing the property left behind to serve people who live on the San Pablo corridor doesn’t make sense when the owner can afford to just wait for the neighborhood to change.
The story is the same for Twenty Lake’s other derelict Greyhound stations across the country, and activists like Gray-Garcia are not the only ones to point out how buildings that once served a necessary service lie vacant as corporate assets.
In Chicago, where the station is still open for bus service – but could close any month if Flix and Twenty Lake end their lease – community groups called on the city government to buy the property and guarantee its use for bus commuters. The city of Albany’s economic development arm purchased the Greyhound station from Twenty Lake in December.
The fate of Oakland’s station remains unknown. Its “Bus” sign, a remnant of its days as a noteworthy hub for working-class travelers, points out the contradictions of a city with real estate to sell and people left outside.
As I passed the Greyhound parking lot where people were staying last December, a sign they had placed reading “Sanctuary not Sweeps” stood right beside an advertisement for open leases at The Moran apartments one block away. Around half a dozen people milled around the lot, three talked beside a grill. Two people unloaded supplies from a van. On February 24, two months after these people had left the lot, the City of Oakland posted notice that they would sweep any encampment from that block.
We marched with workers celebrating May Day in San Francisco. The vibes were surprisingly good.
La estación de autobuses Greyhound en el centro de Oakland ha sido un centro de la vida de la clase trabajadora durante décadas. Sus nuevos dueños, capitalistas de riesgo, están felices de dejarla pudrirse.
