The neighborhood in Oakland where I live, Lower Rockridge—or Baja Rockridge, as I like to call it—is shifting from a community rooted in relationships to one increasingly defined by transactions. Its cozy interplay between interior and exterior spaces, homes, landscapes, and community life once inspired national movements like New Urbanism and the push for walkable communities. This delicate balance grew out of a unique mix of geography, climate, architecture, and urban development history.

Today, that balance is under threat. Real estate brokers are buying up modestly sized homes and enlarging their square footage, often at the expense of gardens and open space. In the process, they’re erasing the architectural details and landscapes that once gave the neighborhood its soul. The fragile relationship between people, nature, and architecture so carefully built over time is being steadily eroded in the name of real estate speculation. 

To preserve Rockridge’s architectural character and fine-grained urban design, we need to unpack its “secret sauce.” I think that essence lies in four intertwined elements: its physical bones, architecture, landscape, and culture.

Built in a rush after the 1906 earthquake, Rockridge’s streets were never laid out in a perfect Berkeley-style grid. Instead, the pattern emerged from a hodgepodge of rail lines designed to move working-class residents quickly in and out of San Francisco via ferries crossing the bay. The result is a community marked by five-point intersections and diagonal streets that shift in length and width, sometimes wide, sometimes narrow, lending the neighborhood its irregular, almost improvised character.

This uneven street network and rapid growth also produced substandard lot sizes, often far smaller than the typical 5,000–10,000 square foot parcel. Lower Rockridge houses ended up packed together like sardines. Front and back yards vary in size, and setbacks from the street are inconsistent, creating a patchwork rhythm along the blocks.

The historic architecture and landscapes add the third dimension, setting the stage for community life. As a teenager, I first discovered the beauty of California bungalows, many of which grace Rockridge, when my mother spent years searching Los Angeles for a home with a fireplace, French doors, and a formal dining room. In the late seventies, many families began rejecting suburban sprawl and cookie-cutter houses, instead seeking older homes with character, where quirks and details carried history and meaning.

Once a month, I attend Boyd Street’s soup night as a welcome guest, even though I don’t live on the block. These evenings give me the chance to wander into some of the older homes that have been lovingly preserved. Their layouts are remarkably consistent: a living room, dining room, and kitchen, with small bedrooms tucked off to the side. The modest scale and arrangement speak to another era, one where gathering around a fireplace and dining on fine china were everyday aspirations.

What I enjoy most are the modestly sized living and dining rooms, sometimes adorned with coffered ceilings of sunken panels framed by beams, wainscoting, and a rich array of finely crafted wood built-ins such as hutches, bookcases, and fireplace mantels. Each piece is carefully detailed, made from fine woods or tiles, and stands as a testament to a lifestyle long past. Many of these homes embody what the Danish call hygge, a sense of warmth, intimacy, and coziness that makes them feel both timeless and deeply human.

Walking down the streets of Rockridge, I can’t help but think of people like my mother or of the TV show Thirtysomething. Its main characters lived in an old house they were always trying, but never quite succeeding, to fix up. That show captured a generation’s longing for homes with history and soul. In many ways, Rockridge’s old housing stock carried the same promise: people sought out these homes and lovingly restored them, valuing their imperfections as part of their charm.

However these interiors are gutted by house flippers, original lathe-and-plaster walls replaced with sheetrock, and partitions removed to create oversized, hotel-lobby-like spaces that feel more about spectacle than living. The formula is predictable: paint everything white, add a few Instagrammable graphics, and flip the house. But relationships don’t sell on social media, and neither does soul.

Landscape as Self-Expression in Rockridge

The small Rockridge bungalows were designed to embrace nature with their generously sized front porches, offering space for true indoor-outdoor living. These porches create a visual invitation, welcoming neighbors and passersby into the life of the home while framing Rockridge’s distinctive front-yard gardens.

Thanks to our Mediterranean climate, plants from across the globe French lavender, agaves, and aloes thrive side by side, mingling with natives like California poppies to create new and unexpected expressions of nature. The limitless palette of plants, paired with the manageable yard sizes, gives residents a canvas for self-expression.

The front gardens themselves are living canvases. Every day I catch myself studying my neighbors’ yards, wondering what will change next. One is always being tinkered with, another is carefully maintained by master gardeners, while yet another is nothing more than dirt and a few scattered boulders. Our own garden carries a Midwest prairie feel. Together, these varied approaches from meticulous design to improvisation to restraint add a vibrant texture to the neighborhood. Each garden tells its own story while enriching the collective character of Rockridge. These landscapes help people forge deep sensory based relationship to the land and neighborhood. 

Growing up in LA’s barrios, I felt that places were enacted by people—their energy, stories, and daily life gave neighborhoods their character. But, with the Covid lockdowns, Rockridge has taught me that plants enact and engage people as well. A smiling agave, a delicate fuchsia, a scented rose each stirs the senses, inviting us into a dialogue with the landscape itself.

Again and again, Rockridge’s front yards are being ripped out and replaced with wide driveways to accommodate oversized SUVs. Many of the older homes predate driveways altogether or share narrow lanes carved between houses. But with bigger cars and more driving, new residents increasingly experience the neighborhood through their windshields, unlike Native Americans who once walked the land, or early settlers who saw it from the vantage of streetcars.

The transactional nature of social media and the automobile now takes precedence over people, place, and the subtle details that once defined Rockridge. Today’s “LA Creep” homes offer only characterless comfort. Buyers move in not for community or architectural charm, but for prestige, convenience, and the hollow currency of modern living. In the process, landscapes are erased, driveways widened, and the neighborhood’s fragile balance between people, nature, and architecture is steadily sacrificed.

As Rockridge residents, we need to protect our relationship to the neighborhood by codifying our “secret sauce.” This means developing a “Cozy Specific Plan,” a framework that safeguards the community from purely transactional development. People will always want to live here, and we need to encourage new housing development, but they must respect our relationship to place: the balance between homes, gardens, streets, and culture that gives Rockridge its soul.

All photos by the author.