The California Hotel in Oakland, one of the East Bay’s most recognizable landmarks, has seen better days.
Most know the historic building in West Oakland by its enormous rooftop sign, which looms over Interstate 580 and is passed by 160,000 drivers daily. The century-old hotel is famous for its Spanish colonial revival design, and longtime denizens still proudly reference its history as a mecca of Black music after World War II, when the likes of James Brown and Billie Holiday played its famous club.
But that legacy brings no special treatment for those who now call the hotel home: 135 low-income tenants whose rent is publicly subsidized. Nor does the hotel’s listing on the National Register of Historic Places, or its more impressive features, like the inlaid California golden bears that mark each step of a stairwell and the jade-green ceiling in the lobby. In fact, many tenants hate living there.
“I don’t have any place else to go, but I wish I could move somewhere else,” said Earl Fleming, 84, who lives in a small studio apartment he describes as a “box.”
“Every tenant I’ve talked to wants desperately to leave the property,” said Hannah Flanery, a staff attorney at the Berkeley-based East Bay Community Law Center who works at the hotel representing tenants in eviction proceedings.
After its $43 million renovation in 2014, the California Hotel was designed to keep some of the East Bay’s most vulnerable residents off the streets with close monitoring by case managers and support staff. The hotel is operated by the Oakland-based East Bay Asian Local Development Corp., a large nonprofit that runs a sprawling network of affordable housing facilities.
A jazz band plays as visitors check out the lobby during the remodeling celebration at the California Hotel on San Pablo Avenue in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, May 15, 2014. The hotel is no longer in severe disrepair after a 3-year, $43 million makeover by the East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation with help from federal and local grants. The hotel was once a venue for jazz, blues and mambo stars including Billie Holiday and Ray Charles, and was a beacon for black travelers blocked from lodging elsewhere. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
EBALDC did not directly reply to a list of questions or an interview request. But communications director Emma Falley said in an email response that the nonprofit is “an anchor in developing and managing affordable housing in Oakland and the East Bay.”
“Housing providers are currently challenged with the rising operating costs that are outside the housing provider’s control, such as insurance and utilities,” Falley wrote. “EBALDC works with many different community partners to address the needs of residents and neighbors.”
The Oakland Housing Authority administers the hotel’s subsidies and is charged with inspections. The agency is “planning to send a team to the building ASAP to deal with tenant complaints,” spokesperson Laura Burch said Thursday in response to Bay Area News Group’s questions.
The hotel’s pricey renovation and grand reopening seemed like a new chapter for the hotel, which had fallen into squalor in the 2000s when run by a different nonprofit.
The company and Oakland leaders said the California Hotel would be a beacon for those who are low-income, elderly, ill or addicted and in all likelihood would be homeless without their room there. Many were homeless before they moved in.
The California Hotel is featured on a mural underneath Interstate-580 near the site of the historic structure, Friday, May 23, 2025. Once a vital hub of the African-American community, hosting music greats like B.B. King and Etta James, the five-story structure is now subsidized housing. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)
Optimism is a distant memory for the hotel’s tenants and their advocates, who say the hotel is mismanaged, understaffed, filthy and neglected, and that their constant complaints are ignored.
In interviews, tenants said they subsist on modest monthly sums of government assistance.
The hotel and other facilities like it are “the housing of last resort,” said Jeff Levin, senior policy director at East Bay Housing Organizations, which advocates for EBALDC and other nonprofit housing providers.
Nonetheless, single-room-occupancy facilities like the California Hotel “are a really important piece of the housing infrastructure for that population,” he said.
Levin and other advocates for nonprofits like EBALDC said the hotel’s population makes it hard to run safe and clean facilities — as does the layout in the huge former hotel.
Yolanda Washington, 56, was homeless, addicted or incarcerated for most of her life before she moved into the California Hotel in 2018. In that sense, the place is a godsend, said Tonika Allen, her daughter.
“She doesn’t have anywhere else,” Allen said. “If this does not pan out for her, she will end up homeless.”
Yolanda Washington, 56, was unhoused or incarcerated for most of her life until she landed at the subsidized California Hotel in Oakland, Calif. with the help of her daughter Tonika Allen. Allen says tenants aren’t receiving support services they were promised, while the hotel falls into disrepair and disfunction. The pair are locked into a dispute with management over rent payments, Friday, May 27, 2025. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)
But the trash collection room for tenants on Washington’s floor is regularly overflowing with refuse and human waste, which breeds rats and cockroaches, Allen said. Washington said she herself cleaned the room for months because management shirked that responsibility.
Bay Area News Group asked EBALDC about the trash issue but received no response.
The elevators are regularly out of service, stranding residents — many of whom have disabilities — in the six-floor hotel. When the main elevator is running, people treat it like a bathroom, several tenants said.
And Washington needs to work closely with an on-site case manager, Allen said. In the fall, she accidentally started a fire with the stove in her apartment and had to sleep in the hallway for two weeks because no other units were available. Oakland Fire Department firefighters are familiar with the property and respond often, said spokesperson Michael Hunt. Last year, another tenant started a fire at 4 a.m. and was found engulfed in flames by hotel staff.
Kind-hearted tenants with friends still on the street are known to let them bunk over, which isn’t allowed but not enforced. Others sneak into the lobby, slip past the manager’s desk, which is often empty, and sleep in the halls or stairwells.
Intricate terrazzo work greets visitors to Oakland’s historic California Hotel in Oakland, Calif., Friday, May 27, 2025. Originally a whites-only hotel and then a hub for African-American travelers and musicians — including Billie Holiday and James Brown — the building was renovated for a second time in 2014 and provides subsidized housing. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)
On-site support is sorely lacking at the California Hotel, Allen said, leaving tenants to fend for themselves.
Oakland Police Department authorities said that officers respond often to the hotel as well, mostly for nonviolent crimes and mental health crises. A rape was reported there in January, then an assault with a deadly weapon in February.
Flanery, the attorney, said the lack of on-site support and chronic mismanagement at the hotel may cost some residents their housing.
Hotel management recently notified at least 40 residents that they owe uncollected rent payments. Washington and the elderly Fleming both received written notice of arrears on May 22.
Both are adamant that they paid on time.
Last Friday, Fleming sorted through a box of paper receipts in the historic hotel’s lobby, collecting evidence that he’d paid his rent. He’d been told he owed $1,056, which he can’t afford.
“I’m 84 years old, but all my faculties is intact — believe me,” Fleming said. “I’m just not going to let any person do me any kind of way.”
Two pianos — a nod to happier times at the California Hotel — sat unplayed.
Earl Fleming, 84, sorts through his rent payment receipts in the California Hotel lobby on Friday, May 27, 2025, in Oakland, Calif. He is one of at least 40 tenants whom management has notified of owed rent payments and is anxious that he’ll be evicted. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)
–Bay Area News Group crime reporter Harry Harris contributed to this story.
