This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. For over a decade now, listeners of this show have heard me say that we're headquartered in beautiful downtown, or now uptown, Oakland, California. These days, the 99% invisible team is spread all across the U.S. in Canada. Hey, Chris.

But a few of us still live and work in Oakland.

And despite how far flung the 9-I-I-Team is, there's just something about the city that feels like the spiritual home of our show.

I think what makes Oakland home for me is this incredible diversity of like peoples and places that are all sort of contained within it.

This is Alexis Magical, an Oakland resident himself and one of the hosts of the local public radio call-in show forum on KQED.

He also happens to be a long time in front of mine.

When I first moved here, you know, 12, 13 years ago,

it was kind of like a quarter of the population was white,

a quarter of the population was black, a quarter was Latino,

and like a quarter was Asian.

You know, there's tons of working class people,

there's tons of non-working class people,

and they're all kind of shoved into the same place

right in view of this kind of glittering future city of San Francisco.

And we're kind of like the back lot, you know, and I love that part of it always made me feel

quite at home. And also, it really helped me, like, fall in love with the city.

When you cross the Bay Bridge from San Francisco to Oakland, you don't see some flashy skyline.

Instead, your eye is either drawn up to the densely forested hills or down towards the port,

where a series of rail lines, shipping containers, and massive industrial cranes lie in the shore.

The cranes have become the, like, official and unofficial symbol of the city.

People spray paint them around. Like people have them on shirts. Like it does represent us in some

crucial way. And in part it's because any route into the city basically you end up seeing them.

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