Neighborhood Change and Residential Instability in Oakland

Affordable housing is critical to ensuring healthy and resilient communities and broad access to economic opportunity. In this report, we examine neighborhood change and residential instability in the City of Oakland over the past two decades. We employ multiple data sources, including individual-level data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Consumer Credit Panel/Equifax data. We analyze historical and contemporary data to understand patterns of residential instability, and we identify which residents and areas are most likely to experience heightened challenges in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results show that lower-SES residents experience residential instability in different ways in different parts of Oakland, suggesting the need for more geographically targeted strategies that focus on stabilizing lower-SES residents and address the multiple ways in which lower-SES residents navigate limited affordable housing.