The Cancel Piedmont campaign has pushed one of California’s most exclusive communities into the middle of a fierce Bay Area debate over race, housing and wealth. Oakland activist Jesse Rosemoore is leading the push against Piedmont, a small and affluent city surrounded by Oakland that has become a flashpoint for critics who say its prosperity depends on barriers many families cannot cross.
Rosemoore, who is 44 and works as a professional transit planner, began distributing Cancel Piedmont stickers and selling T-shirts with the slogan 14 months ago. He says the effort is meant to draw attention to the gap between Piedmont and its neighbor, not simply to provoke. Piedmont covers 1.7 square miles, has about 11,000 residents, and maintains its own schools, police, parks and tax base. Rosemoore argued that the city’s existence says something larger about American society and the way opportunity is sorted by geography.
The numbers help explain why the campaign has caught attention. The median home price in Piedmont is nearly $2.6 million, more than three-and-a-half times the figure in Oakland. Census data cited in the report shows Piedmont is about 70% white and roughly 1% black, while about one in five Oakland residents is black. In some cases, the divide is drawn by a property line, with nearby households ending up in different school districts and under different police departments depending on which side of the boundary they fall on.
Supporters of the campaign say Piedmont has not gone far enough in confronting its history of racial exclusion. They point to efforts already underway there, including the hiring of a consulting firm to address implicit bias and community discussions on racial equity, but argue those steps do not solve the deeper economic barriers that keep many people from living in the city. Their criticism frames Piedmont not just as a wealthy suburb, but as a symbol of how segregation can persist even when local leaders say they are working on inclusion.
Not everyone in Piedmont sees it that way. Jean Chen Takazawa, the Piedmont Unified School District’s director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, said some residents feel they are being painted unfairly. She said the community is doing good work and asked critics to stop judging and let that work continue. Mayor Betsy Smegal Andersen also pushed back, saying Piedmont appears to be the only Bay Area town facing a campaign to have it canceled.
