The Oakland Hills Fire and the Question of Who Rebuilds

On the morning of October twentieth, nineteen ninety-one, the Oakland and Berkeley hills were on fire. The firestorm killed twenty-five people and destroyed three thousand seven hundred sixty-three housing units. KQED San Francisco, the California History journal, and the California State Library all document the disaster. The burned area included some of the most expensive residential real estate in the Bay Area, Mediterranean Revival and Craftsman houses on oak-studded hillside lots with views of the Bay.

The story that followed the fire was largely told as a natural disaster narrative: the dry wind, the fire weather, the failure of a hotspot from a previous day that was thought to be out. Those things were all true. The fire was also, in ways that the official commemorations have tended not to examine, a story about resources.

The recovery in the hills was well-funded. Insurance payouts were significant. Rebuilding followed, and many of the structures that replaced the originals were built larger than what had burned. The neighborhoods came back.

The Oakland flatlands below those hills, the West Oakland communities that had watched the smoke from below, had a different relationship to the event. Those communities carried older housing stock, lower insurance rates, and no comparable recovery infrastructure. The flat neighborhoods had been absorbing disinvestment for decades through the same mechanisms documented elsewhere in this region's history. The fire's relationship to that geography is the part of the story that the annual October commemorations tend to omit.

Twenty-five people died in one of the wealthiest residential zones in the Bay Area. They deserve to be remembered. So does the landscape that surrounds the place they died, and the fact that recovery is not distributed evenly.