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Will Oakland Force Uber to Have a Heart?

Uber is moving its headquarters across the Bay Bridge to Oakland, which has prompted citizen concerns over possible gentrification and a rise in housing prices.

(TNS) -- Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf called Uber’s decision to move 3,000 techies to a renovated downtown department store a “game-changer” for the city. Perhaps it will be for Uber, too.

The San Francisco ride company has emerged as tech’s poster child of disruption, gleefully flouting regulation as it has crushed the taxi industry on its way to a $50 billion valuation. It is running in cities around the world — with and sometimes without the support of local governments — and is growing so fast that it has hired 60 percent of its workforce in the past few months.

When Uber moves in, it won’t just supplant Pandora as Oakland’s largest tech employer; it will be the city’s largest employer that isn’t a government entity or a hospital.

But Oakland isn’t San Francisco — and many won’t welcome the company.

While some city leaders are thrilled to have a major employer in town, they’re worried that its arrival will worsen the city’s skyrocketing housing costs. Oakland is home to an entrenched protest culture and some of the nation’s strongest unions, and has a history of labor strikes. The city’s tech scene, though growing, is still a small player culturally and politically, constituting just 3.1 percent of jobs in the city.

All this could give Uber something it has struggled to find in San Francisco: a heart.

Last week, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick froze at a tech conference when philanthropist and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff asked him, “How do we know Uber has a heart?”

“You know it when you see it,” Kalanick said after a pause. “We’re a company that has tens of thousands of people, so there must be something.”

That’s not going to be good enough in Oakland. The Town doesn’t want tech-led gentrification to strip its soul in the way that it is doing in parts of San Francisco.

Oakland values, ethos

“This has got to be about two parts. The first part is Uber moving into Oakland,” said City Council President Lynette Gibson McElhaney. “The second part is Oakland moving into Uber. And by that, I mean taking in our values and our ethos.”

Oakland is not a corporate mecca. It can’t rustle up enough corporate types to fill the luxury boxes at its sports venues, and is struggling to keep its pro teams in town. Unlike in the tech industry, diversity and social justice are already part of the culture. Disrespect Oakland and Occupy Uber will be outside your front door, along with some of the nation’s most powerful unions.

“Oakland has got to say to them, ‘You have to make sure it’s not just a castle on the hill,’” said Art Pulaski, chief officer of the 2.3 million-member California Labor Federation, which has an office a short cab ride from the new building.

“You’ve got to make sure that you hire people for decent wages and you hire more people of color and you do something about the people who will be displaced by when the neighborhood changes,” Pulaski said.

Policy types are already forecasting what Uber’s arrival will mean in Oakland, when the company sets up shop in 2017 in what’s now the Uptown Station building, most recently occupied by Sears.

Gentrification fears

The move will likely “speed up the gentrification that was already taking place downtown,” said Miriam Zuk, director of the Urban Displacement Project at UC Berkeley, which has mapped gentrification across the Bay Area. City leaders have to act fast or the city’s African American population will continue to dwindle and its poorer residents will “have to move to Antioch or Stockton or wherever,” Zuk said.

“I’m anxious to see what the mayor will say about that,” Zuk said. “I hope Oakland doesn’t make the same mistakes that San Francisco did.”

On Wednesday, the City Council will discuss how it will revamp its housing plan, a conversation that Uber’s pending arrival will make more urgent.

“This city is in an affordability crisis and any shifts like this make us concerned and add to that sense of urgency,” Schaaf said Wednesday.

Though the company will face civic pressure, Uber really doesn’t have to answer much at all to Oakland.

Acquisition of the seven-story building at 20th Street and Broadway, known to old-timers as the Capwell building, was a private deal between Uber and Lane Partners. Uber didn’t need government approval or tax incentives to buy the property — meaning Oakland had no leverage to enact a community benefit agreement, a strategy used in San Francisco’s Mid-Market neighborhood to compel tech companies to give back to the community.

The city is hoping for some promises to hire locally and patronize Oakland businesses. Yet to do that, Schaaf is counting on Uber being “a mission-driven company that wants to do what’s right.”

Oakland’s best chance to preserve its soul — and give Uber a heart — might lie with Uber’s local investors. Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor, technology entrepreneurs and philanthropists who will spend $40 million over the next three years to broaden the pipeline of African Americans and Latinos into the tech industry, were early investors in Uber and have stayed in touch with company leadership.

Klein was recently invited to lead a talk on hidden bias with Uber employees and executives. With the couple’s Oakland office just blocks away from Uber East, their organization could be something of a watchdog for their city’s interests.

Changing the tech sector

“This move is a tremendous opportunity for Oakland and also for the larger goal of bringing new ideas, experiences and perspectives into tech,” Mitch Kapor said Wednesday. “We look forward to working with Uber.”

Like many of her Oaklander friends, leading local progressive activist Aimee Allison had mixed feelings when she heard the news of Uber’s pending arrival. The arrival of the company could be a boon for a city in need of jobs.

“But what makes people in Oakland mad is when people just come here for the cheaper rent,” said Allison, senior vice president of PowerPAC+. “Become part of the community. Reach out to people. Because if the people who made Oakland cool in the first place aren’t around, then it’s not Oakland.”

©2015 the San Francisco Chronicle Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.