Oakland is now spending millions of dollars to haul away thousands of cars dumped on its streets every month, but a recent visit to hard hit areas shows wrecks continue to line the streets, railroad tracks and vacant lots.
“Right behind me you'll see over 20 abandoned cars, vans, trucks stacked on top of each other -- and they've been here for the last let's say 20, 25 days,” Preston Turner, an aide to Oakland Councilmember Noel Gallo, said during a recent tour of the Fruitvale area in Gallo’s district. “Once we clear it, it comes right back.”
Environmental justice advocate Margaret Gordon, a third generation West Oakland resident, says her neighborhood has been hit hard as well.
“We were the original garbage dump for the city of Oakland, for many, many years,” she said.
“Anything where there’s a railroad track…there’s always something unsightly,” Gordon said.
But after the pandemic, she said, the problem got worse. More people started living in cars — and other vehicles were simply dumped or set on fire, adding even more pollutants to the air and clogging storm drains with melted, toxic debris.
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Gordon blames the city for allowing the problem to get out of hand in her neighborhood.
“They don’t do the same thing … when you get to Jack London Square … those people have disposable money, and if they get five, six, seven people to make the telephone call, it’s eliminated,” she told us in a recent interview.
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An analysis by NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit of Oakland’s 311 data confirms that poorer and industrial neighborhoods along Interstate 880 are being hit the hardest. Tracking data shows pockets of West Oakland, Fruitvale and East Oakland have three times the rate of abandoned cars being dumped than other areas in the city.
Oakland abandoned car reports in 2024, by neighborhood
An NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit analysis found that some areas of Oakland experienced more than three times the number of abandoned cars in the first half of 2024, according to 311 data.
Source: Oakland Department of Transportation 311 data
Credit: Sean Myers / NBC Bay Area
Scores of those abandoned cars pile up in Gallo’s district. Gallo and aide Preston Turner recently took us to see trouble spots in the Fruitvale area. Here, the streets are lined with stolen and abandoned cars, which other pile up along railroad tracks and vacant lots.
And new ones show up daily — including one evidently stolen rental car parked outside a neighborhood school.
“This vehicle was not here yesterday,” Gallo said, sadly. “You see they stole the car, they brought it here in front of the school and they stole the tires.”
The car was left precariously balanced on chunks of concrete by thieves who left the lug nuts strewn on the street.
“For me to see this in front of my school – we’re out of control.”
For the first half of this year, Oakland has been hauling away an average of more than 2,000 vehicles per month, according to city tracking data. The city pays to tow and then store thousands of stolen cars and burned wrecks – sometimes stacked on top of each other.
This operation is not cheap. Oakland recently awarded $15 million in contracts to three towing companies and recently hired 15 transportation workers to help make a dent in the growing problem.
Gallo said the city simply needs to enforce existing laws.
“The laws are very clear, the rules are here. But it's the enforcement that we need to bring back,” Gallo said.
But for Gordon, the stepped up work is not happening fast enough in her neighborhood.
“They take their time,” she said with a faint laugh. “They take their time.’’
