Making the unincorporated Southside neighborhood a part of Oroville was debated for more than 50 years. Last summer that conversation was officially put to rest as it was annexed into the city. Now just more than a year after the decision, NSPR's Kacey Gardner looks into questions and challenges that remain.
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"They want to change the name."
"To what?"
"South Oroville. They want to change it to South Oroville."
"Nah...This is Southside Oroville..."
"It's been Southside Oroville...for decades."
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A name is an identity. And if you want to change something's identity, changing the name might be the first step.
It's an idea that’s surfaced more than once following Oroville's annexation of Southside — a diverse, mostly residential neighborhood that’s home to nearly 2,000 people.
To some city and county residents, the name "Southside" is weighed down by baggage. It calls to mind the challenges associated with the community – poverty, crime, and drug abuse to name a few. Many see the annexation as an opportunity for a new chapter.
But to some residents of the neighborhood, like those you heard earlier at Martin Luther King Jr. Park, the suggestion of a name change is silly, if not disrespectful. Post-annexation, it represents a kind of ironic disregard for the families of Southside, whose problems, until now, have always been their own.
“I don’t know what the annexation’s going to do for this part of town,” said resident Corey Wright. “I feel like it’s kind of pushing out the old people, and bringing in new people.”
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Before the conversation about what to call the community, the question regarding Southside, for decades, was a different one: to annex or not to annex.
Even if you’re not familiar with Southside, the neighborhood is easy to spot on a map. A square grid of streets in South Oroville, it stands out for its regular shape and nearly uniform blocks.
Walking around there in person, however, you notice a bit more disarray. Homes, many enclosed by chain-link fences, sit closely together. While some are neat and tidy, others seem to sag among unkempt yards. In the past couple weeks, the neighborhood has made the news for a series of potentially gang-related shootings.
It’s seen brighter days, says Pastor Kevin Thompson, head of Southside’s Number One Church of God in Christ, a historically black, century-year-old church right around the corner from MLK Park.
“I just reminisce on the families, how well kept the lawns were, you had homeowners who took pride in their community,” he said.
Many of the families who have lived in Southside the longest, including Thompson’s, moved there from the Deep South in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s to find work at one of the area lumber mills, and later building the Oroville Dam. When the dam was finished and business at the mills slowed, the community saw a decline.
The city of Oroville, meanwhile, continued to grow around it — leaving Southside a little unincorporated island, without simple urban amenities like sidewalks, curbs, and gutters, or a say in city politics. This despite the fact that it’s located right near the heart of the city — where many of the residents work and spend their money.
In the eyes of community leaders like Thompson, County Supervisor Bill Connelly, local NAACP Vice President Bill Bynum and other members of the group Friends of Southside —which was behind the final push for annexation — the city’s ongoing avoidance was economically and racially discriminatory.
“To me, it’s almost reprehensible to do people like that,” Thompson said.
When the annexation became official last year, it was viewed by many as a long-awaited victory — an overdue acceptance of responsibility by the city.
“The majority of the people were ecstatic, you know,” Thompson said. “Some of us, we were just dancing in the street.”
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Change since hasn’t been dramatic. The city has gradually begun forming relationships with the neighborhood. Over the past year, they’ve come together at community clean-ups and police meet and greets.
But currently saddled with over a million-dollar budget deficit, the city acknowledges that improvements to Southside will come slowly.
And while residents are hopeful for a new era, skepticism lingers.
Among priorities like road improvements and better lighting, residents I spoke with would like to see progress that is just as much about preservation as it is about change. One recurring example would be a homebuyer program that helps longtime residents keep their homes, instead of losing them to outsiders.
“We see it every day, you know, a home burned down, someone come in and offered a person just pennies on the dollar for it,” Pastor Thompson said. “And they rehab it and they put their family or whoever they’re going to put there, and they forget the people that has been a part and invested in this community for so many years.”
Thompson says those in power are being held to a higher standard than ever before, but the real test will be whether the people feel secure.
“Having an opportunity for our seniors to once again be able to walk out in the evening, in the cool air of the night, and sit out on their porches without being afraid,” he said. “Being able to walk if they desire a few blocks to the drug store to purchase something and come back home, without being afraid.”
"Having an opportunity for our seniors to once again be able to walk out in the evening, in the cool air of the night, and sit out on their porches without being afraid. Being able to walk if they desire a few blocks to the drug store to purchase something and come back home, without being afraid." -Pastor Kevin Thompson
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In July, the Oroville Police Department took over a first portion of the annexed area from the Butte County Sheriff’s Department, and that transition will continue in phases over the next three years.
While the department is feeling a financial strain due to the annexation, Public Safety Director Bill LaGrone said in an Aug. 4 interview it’s not because Southside is any more dangerous than any other part of Oroville with similar socioeconomic issues.
“As far as violent crime or regular calls for service, we really don’t have anything more in this area that we’ve picked up than we have in other areas of Oroville that are similar to that,” he said.
LaGrone said the annexation provides an opportunity to leave any negative stereotypes associated with the neighborhood behind, along with any past tensions — racial or otherwise — between law enforcement and Southside residents.
“I think there has been some tension in the past — I’m talking 20 years or more ago — between law enforcement and some residents of South Oroville,” he said. “It has not been my experience since I’ve been working in Oroville that we’ve had that. It’s a new day. It’s a new era. And whatever the tensions were of the past, we don’t carry with us.”
Resident Corey Wright says creating trust between Southside and the city, including law enforcement, is something that will take time.
“Because of what’s going on nationally, I don’t think there’s a good relationship with police officers and racially mixed communities across the country,” he said. “Here, Oroville police are OK. They’re not out here beating people’s heads in or shooting people with no guns, so far. It’s kinda like we gotta wait and see.”
Wright, for one, would like to see the diversity of Southside better reflected in city leadership.
“This is my hometown, I gotta remain optimistic,” he said. “I just think at the top, some changes need to be make to reflect what everybody wants.”
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This November will be the first time Southside residents will have the chance to run and vote in city elections.
One person taking advantage of the opportunity is Southside resident Janet Goodson, co-founder of Southside Vanguard, a community group aimed at improving the quality of life in Southside.
Goodson, who is running for one of the city’s three open City Council seats on a platform of public safety and economic development, said the idea of referring to her community as simply “South Oroville” stems from people’s perceptions of Southside not lining up with the reality.
“When people think of Southside, I have heard from residents who have lived in the city for a number of years, they will not set foot — they never have come to Southside,” she said. “They relate it to a high crime area, a high homeless and transient and a drug area. And those are the negative connotations. See you have not come into our neighborhood. And until you do, I think those are judgments and negatives that have been surmised by other people. That’s not how I see my community at all.”
She said she has a vision of Southside that bridges the past and the future — a revitalization of what it used to be and still can be, “a community that not only the current generation but future generations can be proud of.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by Pastor Thompson.
“We want to know that we’ve done all that we can here in Southside,” Thompson said. “And we are set apart. We’re a very unique community. And we want to make sure that our seniors in their latter days will be even greater than their former. That’s the story I would like to see. And if we see that, what happens from there, it causes the young people to be ignited and get on fire to just push this community higher than it’s ever been pushed before.”