Pittsburg, Ca

Pittsburg, California: The Town That Held Us in Pockets

I grew up in Pittsburg, California in the 80s and 90s. A small town. A small ghetto. A place controlled by white people who decided where the rest of us could live.

That’s how it worked. There were pockets. Certain streets, certain blocks where Black and Brown families were allowed to be. Outside those lines? You felt it. Realtors, landlords, looks from neighbors. Housing didn’t just segregate classes — it drew maps around our bodies. You could live here, but not there. You could rent this, but you couldn’t buy that.

Pittsburg has a lot of history. Steel mills. Canneries. Men with hard hands and lunch pails. It was a working town. A hurting town. Our hospital closed. Not because people weren’t sick. Because of embezzlement. Money walked out the front door while patients got sent to other cities. When a town loses its hospital, it loses part of its heartbeat. We felt it.

I remember a white officer telling my mother, straight up: “One day Pittsburg is going to change.” He meant urban development. He meant getting rid of the “riff raff.” We knew what that meant. We were the riff raff to them. The families in the pockets. The ones they tolerated until the land got valuable.

And it did. Growing costs changed everything. What used to be affordable for Black and Brown families started slipping away. Developers came. Promises of “revitalization” showed up. That’s code. Revitalization always means someone gets moved.

Pittsburg sat next to Concord. But they weren’t the same. BART didn’t really connect Concord until later, and that was on purpose. Keep the cities separate. Keep Oakland and San Francisco problems out. But problems travel. People were escaping violence, escaping rent hikes, escaping systems that chewed them up. So they came to Concord. And Concord didn’t know what to do with them.

I saw how Black families got discriminated against in Concord. Housing applications denied. Cops called for being on the wrong block. Stores following you. Schools suspending you first. Concord wanted to be a suburb. Not a refuge. But people needed refuge.

Then the demographics shifted again. A new wave of Mexican families entered Pittsburg, entered Concord. The town changed faces, changed languages, changed stores on the corner. Some white families left. Some stayed and complained. The pockets moved, but the rules didn’t. Power still decided who was “in” and who was “riff raff.”

That’s why I tell people now: before you move anywhere, know the history of a place. Especially the politics. Don’t just look at the rent. Look at who got pushed out to make that rent possible. Look at why the hospital closed. Look at why BART stopped where it did. Look at who the officer was warning my mother about when he said “change.”

I loved Pittsburg. It raised me. It taught me resilience. It taught me how to spot a line you’re not supposed to cross, and how to cross it anyway. But I don’t romanticize it. It was a small town that held us in pockets. It was a ghetto that got gutted by greed. It was a place where “urban development” meant erasing us.

The 80s and 90s there taught me this: towns have memories. Buildings remember. Policies remember. And if you don’t know the history, you’ll think what’s happening now is new. It’s not. It’s just the next version of the same old map.

So know the map. Before you unpack, learn who had to pack up so you could.