Would folks be less upset if everyone just kept calling it Kimchi Row? BTW, Koryu is the best restaurant there. I hear good things about Smokey's though.

great article, that darnelle person is quite a character. seems to be a good amount of bitter folks but that is certainly to be expected. but will koreans begin settling in oakland? I doubt it. although I guess there are more koreans actually living in K-town in LA than there were 10-15 years ago. (along with a bunch of white hipsters) Time will tell...

I own a 100 year old house in Nancy Nadel's district near Koreana Plaza and currently live in South Korea. I puchased this home (my first) in 2002 from the children of African Americans who relocated to Oakland via the deep south and who's parents purchased the home in late 1940s. Those original immigrants from the south of the US did major remodels in the 1950s, pulling city permits and doing reasonable quality work. Their children (who I bought the house from) however, essentially raped the house with subsequent remodels (I guess in the late 70s and into the 80s, maybe early 90s): hacking into support beams, excavating the basement below the very old and crumbling foundation and tossing the dirt in the backyard so as to put the foundation of the rear of the house below grade, building a nasty bathroom with inadequate ventilation and sewer connection, a tacked on addition that looked like it existed since the nineteenth century (after the decade or two it existed before I tore it down), converting the basement into an illegal living space with ridiculously dangerous electrial wiring and hacking into the foundation to make more floor space. All of which was done without permits or common sense. When the parents passed, their adult children (who now had grandchildren) didn't pay garbage or property taxes and eventually got foreclosed. They abandoned their family history in the house and fled after closing. I had the drug customers of one of the prior residents showing up for weeks after they left. A house that had 5 African American people from three generations living in it suddenly had one white male... cleaning up their mess. I grew up in the Bay Area and I'm basically a leftist. I'm culturally very aware, having lived in Europe, Asia, and Manhattan. I felt sad and guilty about the situation at first. I was still in the early stage of (excavating) sorting through the mountains of stuff the family abandoned, which definitely had a layered deposition by date. I found a box full of newspaper clipping and photos a girl had left... her middle school graduation, etc. I though "how could someone just abandon this?" I started to make a pile of the photos for them to keep if they returned. As I reached into the bottom of the box I found the newspaper was all torn up. It was a rat's nest. Something in me snapped and I realized "If these people don't care about their own belongings and personal history, why should I?" After weeks of sorting and cleaning (the bottom layer of stuff was put there probably in the 1970s and included beat up old steamer trunks and tons of 78s from the '40s), Salvation Army brought a tractor trailer and I filled half of it with their stuff. The volume of paper and aluminum recycling for Waste Management was enormous. It took three years of all my spare time and tens of thousands of dollars to fix the place up. I lived there more than 5 years. During that time strange and sometime terrible things happened. The worse was an African American man was shot an killed right infront of my house... presumably in a botched attempt to hijack his van (worth about $1500) and he didn't give it up.
I know first hand how screwed up the community in Dowtown Oakland/Northgate/Koreatown or whatever developers want to call it this week. There is rot at the core of the culture and it needs a change. I became (and remain) so sick of the ghetto churches, liquor stores, crap BBQ/fried chicken places, prostitues, hooptie chop shops, etc. The ghetto churches may be the worst as they pretend to be a solution when some of them are definitely part of the problem. The one next door to my house includes residential property that has been home to a drug dealer, a recycling business and the good lord knows what else. The pastor has done nothing to improve the dilapitated structures and has the residents piping grey water out the kitchen window.

The black community in Oakland could learn alot to improve their lives from Korean immigrants. They could probably learn alot from Kenyan immigrants if they were coming to Oakland. The people who turned Oakland into a slum cannot stop the changes that are happening. Immigrants will come to live. And the affluent will return to the inner cities as a result of the massive economic changes we are witnessing now. And thankfully, some of them will be African American.

As far as concerns about the ethnic make up of Koreana Plaza, I vividly recall being impressed by the numerous central americans there who can speak functional Korean.

Oakland doesn't need a "African American Town" because it is, and will remain for decades or longer, a Chocolate City. What it does need is a black community willing to embrace opportunities to improve, welcome newcomers (like Koreans), and develop a stronger sense of ethics. When I removed the self dissassembling chimney of that 100 year old house during my renovation efforts, at the very bottom I found hebrew text from what looked like a song book. This house was probably originally owned by jews, decades before African Americans arrived in the 1940s. Oakland still represents a promised land for immigrant people from around the world. When the residents of Oakland who have lived there for many generations, wake up to this and appreciate what they have and the opportunities right in front of them, Oakland will have a chance to be a best place to live rather than the marginal place it is now.