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North Oakland Organizing Space Omni Commons
Rescued from Foreclosure by Black-led Real Estate Cooperative
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 9/10/2024
CONTACT: Noni Session, Executive Director. noni@ebprec.org
Oakland, CA —The East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative (EB PREC) has plucked the community arts and organizing hub known as Omni Commons from the jaws of foreclosure after a series of challenges left the community hub vulnerable to being auctioned off for real estate development. EB PREC has sponsored its nonprofit affiliate, the Collective Action and Land Liberation Institute (CALLI), to acquire the embattled building.
Omni Commons, the radical community organizing space developed in the wake of the Occupy Movement in 2014, faced foreclosure due to financial difficulties exacerbated by the pandemic. CALLI is leveraging EB PREC’s unique cooperative real estate model to prevent the displacement of its tenants while ensuring the building remains permanently affordable and under community control.
“Omni Commons is the exact kind of property we aim to keep in the hands of our community—a neighborhood asset that North Oaklanders want to see succeed,” says Noni Session, Executive Director at EB PREC. “By removing Omni Commons from the speculative capitalist market, we’re keeping our organizing ecosystems alive and protecting cultural spaces where artists, activists, and culture-bearers build upon and preserve Oakland's legacy.”
In just five years, EB PREC has liberated a portfolio of six residential and commercial properties in Oakland and the East Bay. EB PREC plans on working with CALLI and Omni Commons delegates in a similar community-led fashion as their other major commercial real estate project, Esther's Orbit Room–where residents and local merchants are organizing to rejuvenate 7th street as a Black Arts, business, & cultural district. EB PREC and CALLI plan on activating the 22,000+ square foot building for community benefit by welcoming new member organizations into the space in the coming months.
“Historically, the collectives who have found the most stability and safety organizing in Omni Commons have been predominantly white, a dynamic that was also reflected in the collective’s leadership,” says Ojan Mobedshahi, Finance Director at EB PREC. “So we’re especially excited to bring the historic space under BIPOC-led management and look forward to folding a racial justice element into the Omni Common’s next chapter.”
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Learn more about CALLI: thecalli.org
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The East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative (EB PREC) is a people-of-color-led, multi-stakeholder cooperative that supports Black, brown, and allied communities to cooperatively organize, finance, and co-steward land and housing in Oakland and the East Bay, taking land & property off the speculative market for good.
EB PREC is widely credited with being the first organization to apply a community-owned, cooperative approach to real estate and neighborhood revitalization through their trailblazing Permanent Real Estate Cooperative model, which creates permanently affordable, community-controlled housing and assets. The PREC model combines the most innovative elements of community land trusts and member-benefit cooperative corporations to solve for the ever-increasing problems of housing affordability and racialized displacement we see in cities across the country, turning a classist housing market into a tool that can build collective wealth for communities who have been excluded and disenfranchised by it for generations.
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The Omni Commons Collective emerged out of the Occupy movement. Two groups, Bay Area Public School and Sudo Room, had already formed a collectively-run space in downtown Oakland that was made freely available to local organizers who shared their vision of placing human need over private interest and corporate profit. After two years and the addition of new member-collectives, an opportunity to expand their vision presented itself. Financed completely by the community through modest donations and long-term, no-interest loans, the Omni Commons Collective purchased the current Omni Commons building, to provide Oaklanders with diverse resources and multiple meeting spaces. The Omni Commons currently consists of multiple member collectives ranging from activist groups to hackerspaces, each of which have a representative that contributes to the decision-making of the larger collective. Counter Culture Labs, Sudo Room, Sudo Mesh, Food Not Bombs, Wood Street Commons, Sacred Makers and the Free Store will continue to work with CALLI to stay in the building post-acquisition.
The Omni Commons building is located at 4799 Shattuck Ave., Oakland, CA 94609 was constructed in 1933 at 4799 Shattuck Ave in Oakland and was conceived as the meeting hall for The Ligure Club, an Italian garbagemen's social club. The 22,000 sq. ft. building hosts a 4,000 sq. ft. ballroom, a large foyer, a disco room with formerly-illuminated floors, a children's play room, a large industrial kitchen under renovation, and many more spaces of varying sizes.
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The Collective Action and Land Liberation Institute (CALLI) is confronting wealth inequality and racism by re-envisioning ownership and stewardship of land and housing, as well as the role of capital and extractive investment practices. Rather than watching the fate of our communities be determined by wealthy speculators, large companies, and absentee landlords, CALLI is building collective power, pools of capital, skills, and organized communities that can take action to shape the future of local land and buildings.
CALLI is actively piloting, learning from, and educating our communities about models that actively spread wealth and power in property acquisition, financing, management, and stewardship, particularly through community-led cooperative and collective ownership and governance models.