this hotel is near one called "bay street" which not only is like a weird pastiche of a walkable downtown but with oddly homogenous archetecture and ONLY mall-ass shops (like literally a claires), but also they rent out APARTMENTS? so you can, live in a mall i guess? who tf is this for ??????? who's out here wanting to live right above a spirit halloween and a urban outfitters??
like just everything about it feels so Wrong. its unsettling, its uncanny. its unnerving. it feels like the creeping dread of everything becoming globalized and homogenized and privatized, distilled into a weird stepford wives dystopic private "street"
The mall is built on an Ohlone burial ground and shellmound[1] and former toxic waste site.[1] Since 2001 there has been a "don't buy anything day" hosted at the site by descendants of the Ohlones that believe the site has desecrated the resting place of their ancestors.[5][6]
So I live in Emeryville (walking distance to Bay Street, actually) AND I did census enumeration in 2020! Which means I knocked on people's doors and pestered them to do the thing lol. This meant that I got to go into EVERY apartment building in Emeryville!
Well, almost all of them. You see, there are actually two different apartment complexes in/on? Bay Street. There's the one on the eastern side (the "mall" runs north/south on a single street) and it was mostly students. There's a lot of already furnished apartments, which is great if you're an international student (there is a bus line with a stop right there that goes all the way up to UC Berkeley and another bus line that goes to the heart of downtown San Francisco). Or for corporate things? Like if you gotta send a guy to go live in a location for a few months, the company rents the apartment so you don't have to worry about housing (and it's cheaper than a hotel).
Anyways, the leasing office people there were very nice and there was a cool waterfall thing. The layout is really confusing, because this is on top of several buildings and there's walkway things and, like, a playground?
Now, for the western side of the mall. There are apartment buildings on top of THOSE buildings, too. And I was never able to get into them. I was able to find the door, but the call buttons didn't work, and I obviously didn't know the code to get in (and legally you can't ask the mail person to get you in) and so few people must have lived there I couldn't follow anyone in.
And, unlike the eastern apartments, these western apartments had....no leasing office. Okay, well, lots of tiny apartment buildings (especially in Oakland) don't. They have a landlord somewhere else. Or maybe a website, or something. So I used all of my powers from my journalism degree to google the shit out of those addresses to try to find a landlord or a listing or SOMETHING.
And there was fucking nothing, man. The leasing office people for the eastern apartments had no idea who owned the western apartments. There were no listings on craiglist or anything. And they weren't condos, either? Like they weren't on Zillow, either.
People CLEARLY live there but NO ONE KNOWS. Except for the federal government but they wanted me to double check or whatever but I couldn't get in!!!!!!
The other "building" I couldn't get into were the people who lived on their boats on the marina (or as I call it, "reverse cape cod")(it looks like a cape code flipped around, but on a much smaller scale)(can you tell I'm from new england). There were walkways to the little dock thingies but they had big ol' gates you can't get around. And boats also don't have a leasing office or anything. And obviously I can't go knocking on the neighbor's doors like "hey do you know how many people live on that boat" 'cause I can't get to those. And they weren't paying me enough to, like, swim or rent a kayak or whatever.
Anyways the moral of the story is DO YOUR FUCKIGN CENSUS THING then I don't have to jump through all these hoops to hunt you down.
