Democrats try to cancel safe and beautiful city next to Oakland.

As Jesse Rosemoore handed out “CANCEL PIEDMONT” stickers at Lake Merritt during a sunny late-July evening, a young jogger smiled, offered her support — “Piedmont shouldn’t be its own city!” — and continued on her light run around the green-tinged waters. 

But when Rosemoore offered a sticker to a middle-aged Black woman a few minutes later, the passerby saw “CANCEL PIEDMONT” and furrowed her brow. “Don’t feel bad if you get some pushback,” she said. “People feel strongly about their small towns.” 

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“It really is ridiculous that a place like Piedmont even exists,” said Rosemoore, a 44-year-old Oakland resident with a graying beard and punk-rock aesthetic. “I felt like someone needed to bring even more attention to it, because what’s going on there says a lot about our society as a whole.” 

It’s not just that Piedmont’s median home price of almost $2.6 million is more than 3½ times that of Oakland’s. Despite being completely surrounded by one of the nation’s most diverse major cities, Piedmont is roughly 70% white and around 1% Black, according to census data — a striking figure compared to Oakland, where around 1 in every 5 residents is Black.

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“Back in the day, segregation tended to look like you having the white neighborhood and the Black neighborhood in the same city,” said Stephen Menendian, assistant director for UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute, a research center focused on inequality and barriers to opportunity. “But now, most segregation is felt between cities, rather than within them.”

Enter “Cancel Piedmont.” Fourteen months ago, Rosemoore started handing out stickers and selling $10 T-shirts bearing that two-word slogan as a sort of tongue-in-cheek stunt mocking a city some call “Oakland’s Doughnut Hole.” Thousands of stickers and hundreds of T-shirts later, the professional transit planner now sees the campaign as a vehicle for challenging the Bay Area’s intertwined systems of race, wealth, housing and local governance.

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By the time Rosemoore’s burgeoning movement arrived in June 2025, Piedmont was well into confronting complex questions: how to build more housing, reckon with its history of racial exclusion, diversify its schools and respond to growing scrutiny over whether a city so different from Oakland should remain that way.

Through it all, some Piedmonters have felt scapegoated — or worse. Even Bay Area housing experts concede that this small city is hardly dissimilar from Hillsborough, Los Altos Hills and the slew of other exclusive suburbs that dot the region. But the more Piedmont has tried to atone for its divisive past through diversity initiatives and public apologies, the louder some of its detractors have become. 

“I know people want to always think that we’re horrible,” said Jean Chen Takazawa, the Piedmont Unified School District’s Director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging. “The reality is, we’re doing good work here. Stop judging us and let us just do the work.”

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According to estimates from the California Department of Finance, only 200 of Piedmont’s 3,947 housing units are in multifamily buildings like duplexes or apartment complexes. Complicating matters, the vast majority of the city’s remaining zoning is for single-family homes, and there isn’t much room for more construction. Piedmont also lacks the large commercial corridors and aging shopping centers that have allowed many neighboring cities to convert underused retail space into housing.

Faced with these constraints, the city has long struggled to translate its stated support for affordable housing into completed projects that enable more teachers, firefighters and other middle-income workers to call it home. Even modest housing proposals can spark public debates about altering a cherished neighborhood character defined by large lot sizes, abundant greenery and quiet streetscapes. 

At times, Piedmonters have been so vexed by the affordable-housing issue that they’ve suggested outsourcing such state requirements to Oakland. 

“The problems Piedmont is grappling with really aren’t unique,” said Richard Rothstein, a Bay Area-based policy researcher. “What’s unique is the amount of backlash it’s getting for them.” 

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By adopting the proposal last fall after more than two years of public meetings and environmental review, city officials began to blunt criticism that their diversity efforts were just talk. But Piedmont must still wrestle with many unknowns: Will it find a private developer willing to build all those homes? And, when the realities of construction costs and political pushback come into clearer focus, will the city’s commitment hold?

Kevin Jackson, who served nearly seven years as Piedmont’s director of planning and building before retiring in May, acknowledged that Moraga Canyon’s terrain presents logistical challenges. But he was heartened that most concerns raised by residents at public meetings had nothing to do, at least on the surface, with who might live in the proposed homes. 

“Most of the opposition we’ve heard has been about fire safety and evacuation routes,” Jackson said. “Making it so people with a greater variety of income levels can be here is always going to be difficult, but this is the right step in that direction.” 

Rosemoore certainly hopes so. He has nothing personally against Piedmonters. For him, Piedmont’s ugly racial history and unusual geography — it’s Northern California’s only incorporated city entirely encircled by another city — just make it the ideal lens through which to examine the Bay Area’s widening income gap. 

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Piedmont’s existence is a testament to its independent spirit. In the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake that nearly destroyed San Francisco, some of the city’s wealthiest families flocked to an unincorporated portion of the wooded foothills overlooking Oakland. 

Months later, as Oakland sought to absorb that community as part of its fast-moving expansion, a coalition of artists, writers and businessmen voted to incorporate their own city. In doing so, Piedmonters preserved their large parcels and ensured control over their municipality’s biggest decisions. 

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After Sidney moved his family there in January 1924, the Dearings were subjected to an onslaught of terror: Repeated bombing attempts. A 500-person mob demanding that they leave. Bricks thrown through the front window. Crosses burned on the lawn. 

In early 1925, Sidney sold the home to city officials. They had told him they needed to knock it down to make way for a new road. No such road was ever built. 

As decades passed, Piedmont’s exclusionary housing practices became far less blatant. But its limited housing options, as well as local real estate agents’ penchant for “off-market” deals with friends and acquaintances, still made it difficult for Black and working-class families to gain entry. 

That hasn’t stopped Piedmonters from confronting their city’s own dark history in new and visible ways. The Dearings’ story, which had largely been forgotten, garnered considerable local interest when Piedmont resident Meghan Bennett launched a website in June 2020 detailing all she’d pieced together about them from old newspaper clippings and public records. 

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Some feel it’s not enough. This past February, the Dearings’ great-granddaughter, Oakland resident Jordana Ackerman, filed a lawsuit against the city of Piedmont seeking compensation, punitive damages and other relief for “a fraudulent use of eminent domain” that forced her family to lose a 2,741-square-foot home now valued at about $3 million. 

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Some Oaklanders, like Rosemoore, felt each instance underscored the racial insensitivity and bias that a homogeneous community can sometimes foster. “Before you can truly be diverse and inclusive, you have to have the housing that supports it,” said Rosemoore, who has a background in city planning. 

It’s a message he returned to repeatedly during that evening passing out “CANCEL PIEDMONT” stickers at Lake Merritt. 

While Rosemoore handed one to a young woman wearing a “Free Palestine” hat, she told him she had just started renting there. After admitting that she thinks it’s “really pretentious” that Piedmont is a separate city from Oakland, the woman shrugged with a smile.

“I’m not going to lie,” she said. “As a Latina who has lived in really bad areas my whole life, it’s pretty sick. And I’m hopeful it’ll only get better. I heard they might be building more apartments.” 

“Yeah,” Rosemoore said. “I just want them to take a hard look at themselves.”