A Bay Area city took her home. Decades later, she’s fighting to return

The empty plot of land on 502 Enterprise Ave. in Richmond was once Beverly Moore's home.

Now 72, Moore moved into the one-story house at the end of a cul-de-sac with her mother and four siblings in 1956. In the backyard, now overgrown with weeds, Moore's mother, Juanita, grew a bounty of produce — squash, watermelons, tomatoes.

We "lived off the land," Moore said, recalling how they would barter with their mostly Black neighbors, trading collard greens or onions for freshly caught fish.

After earning her teaching credential and bachelor's degree at Cal State Fresno, Moore, then 23, did something her mother had always wanted to do. She bought the home her family had been renting. It was July 21, 1980.

"That was one of the happiest days of our life because everybody else in the neighborhood owned their property," Moore said.

But in 1993, the city of Richmond seized the land through eminent domain, the government's constitutional authority to take private property for public use in exchange for "just compensation" based on market value.

Moore had purchased the house for $13,000. Thirteen years later, the city gave the family $27,000 and tore it down to build a highway drainage project connected to the Richmond Bypass. ​​Now known as the Richmond Parkway, this arterial road was constructed in the 1990s to connect Interstates 580 and 80. Theirs was the only house on the street condemned.

"We said no, but we didn't have a choice," Moore said.

The Moores' dispossession and displacement mirror the experiences of many Black Americans in the 20th century.

As millions of Black people moved from the rural South to cities in the North and West, discriminatory housing policies like redlining and racial covenants forced them into underinvested neighborhoods.

These areas would be disproportionately "designated as blight or slums when it came time for urban renewal programs," said Haley Roeser, the research director at Where Is My Land , a for-profit organization advocating for land restitution for Black families. "In California, we still see the aftermath of these policies and racial harms today."

Well-documented uses of eminent domain in West Oakland and Los Angeles in the 1950s and '60s — to build the Bay Area Rapid Transit network and Dodgers Stadium — displaced Black and Mexican American communities.

According to the Institute for Justice , a libertarian legal aid nonprofit based in Virginia, low-income communities of color remain disproportionate targets of such projects.

California voters last had a chance to change the eminent domain process in 2008; they approved an amendment restricting the government's ability to take property for private economic development and rejected a more comprehensive measure.

Earlier this year, a bill to compensate victims of racially motivated eminent domain joined a package of legislation intended to address the state's historical disenfranchisement of Black residents. While several bills passed, the eminent domain bill and other major legislation either never made it to the governor's desk or were vetoed .

The bills were the first test of the state's ability to turn its unprecedented yearslong push for reparations into policy, a test it mostly failed, said Chris Lodgson , a member of the Coalition for a Just and Equitable California , a grassroots organization that campaigned in support of the legislation.

In recent years, Moore and her adult daughter Kadija Phillips have set out to reclaim the land and the community they lost, a journey occurring against the backdrop of California's reparations efforts.

This January, the California Legislative Black Caucus — a 12-member group of Black lawmakers — introduced 14 bills based on more than 100 recommendations by the state's Reparations Task Force.

On Sept. 26, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed five of the bills, including a formal apology from the state for its complicity in slavery and the systemic oppression of Black people.

But, notably, several bills heralded as the biggest steps toward reparations failed. The first blow came at the end of August when caucus members blocked two bills by state Sen. Steven Bradford, D-Gardena, from advancing as the clock wound down on the legislative session.

The bills — SB1331 and SB1403 , which were not part of the caucus's package — would have established a reparations fund and an agency to help Black Californians research their lineage and determine their eligibility for future compensation, including direct cash payments, which the task force recommended.

The legislation successfully cleared the Senate but stalled in the Assembly.

Bradford, who also served on the task force, said the caucus declined to bring the bills to a floor vote out of financial concerns and fears the governor would veto them.

In an Aug. 31 statement , the caucus said it had last-minute concerns with the agency bill and plans to "reintroduce it the next session." The caucus declined to say if it would reintroduce the funding bill.

The next setback came Sept. 25, when Newsom vetoed another of Bradford's bills. SB1050 would have created an office within SB1403's proposed agency to review claims that government land seizures were racially motivated and determine whether the victims were compensated fairly.

SB1050 advanced through the Legislature with overwhelming bipartisan support . Without SB1403, however, it was largely unworkable.

"This bill tasks a nonexistent state agency to carry out its various provisions and requirements, making it impossible to implement," Newsom wrote in his veto statement .

Bradford believes SB1403 would have had the votes to pass the Assembly and that the caucus should have allowed it to advance to the governor's desk.

"You need some kind of oversight agency to implement and deliver on whatever reparations is," he said.

He also noted the importance of dedicated funding for reparations outside of the nearly $300 billion state budget, $12 million of which has been allocated for unspecified reparations legislation this year. According to economists , implementing the task force's reparations proposals could cost up to $800 billion.

Lodgson called the caucus' decision not to bring SB1331 and SB1403 for a vote "a betrayal," adding that in doing so, the caucus "set 1050 up for failure."

Lodgson said that accountability lies with the governor, too, who could have "signed 1050 into law with the expectation of additional legislation in the following year to implement an agency."

Of the bills the Newsom did sign, Lodgson said, "Those other bills are not reparations."

"We don't need a plaque. We don't need an apology," he said. "We need things that impact people's lives right now, yesterday."

While Bradford, who is in his last Senate term, expressed disappointment, he said he has "no doubt that there will be members of the Black caucus who will be willing to carry on because they've already expressed their willingness to reintroduce these bills (even though) they weren't willing to vote for them this year."

"We are committed to getting every single recommendation across the finish line," said Assembly Member Corey Jackson, D-Moreno Valley, a member of the caucus. "This is a long journey."

California became the first state to tackle the issue of reparations in 2020, in response to the racial justice movement sparked by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

That year, Newsom signed a bill into law creating a first-of-its-kind statewide commission that spent two years researching and developing reparations proposals.

HR40 — a bill to create a federal commission to study reparations — has languished in the U.S. House of Representatives for three decades.

As President-elect Donald Trump prepares for a second term, with Republicans also set to lead Congress, the path toward reparations becomes even more doubtful.

Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance have not said anything about reparations recently. But in 2014 , before pivoting to the far right, Vance said in text messages obtained by the New York Times that he had "at least been convinced of the virtue of compensating modern victims who've suffered redlining or denial of federal benefits."

While California is seen as a progressive leader, the failure to pass key reparations legislation — as well as mixed polls on support for reparations — highlight the challenges Black lawmakers face in advancing their agenda.

A 2023 Berkeley IGS poll found that although the majority of Californians believe the legacy of slavery continues to affect Black residents, more than half of respondents (59%) opposed cash payments to the descendants of slaves.

Meanwhile, a survey of nearly 1,300 Black California voters , concluded in March by the California Black Power Network — a coalition of grassroots organizations — found that most Black Californians support reparations and say that the issue would mobilize them to vote.

The Moore family has followed the news from Sacramento but remains wary after years of fighting on its own.

"Gov. Newsom could have made it easier, (but) he vetoed" the eminent domain bill, Moore said. "It seems like the state of California, the country, the nation, they never want to do anything for African Americans.

"When is anybody going to right the wrong?"

When the city sought to obtain her home through eminent domain, Moore had already moved out and was living in San Pablo, raising her young daughters and working for the Postal Service.

But her two brothers and a surviving sister still lived with their mother on Enterprise Avenue. (One sister had died.) The city provided relocation assistance to some family members, helping move Moore's brothers into affordable housing and her mother into a senior living facility.

"Once Mama was no longer living on Enterprise, she was kind of shut off," Moore said, recalling how her mother had a small garden at the facility and occasionally played dominoes with friends, but mostly stayed in her room. She died in 2009 at age 83.

After the house was razed, the Moores became untethered from their community, drifting away from their neighbors and one another. Moore's sister, now deceased, experienced homelessness and struggled to put her life back together, and one brother became estranged, his whereabouts unknown.

Gone were the days of gardening, playing baseball in the backyard and sitting around the living room fireplace, popping popcorn and roasting peanuts.

"Our whole family was destroyed because we didn't have that foundation," Moore said.

From time to time, Moore and her daughter would drive to the end of their old street, where their house used to stand — now an empty, fenced lot, sometimes littered with trash, next to train tracks and the Richmond Parkway.

Then in 2021, a story that garnered national attention gave them hope.

That year, Newsom signed a law enabling Los Angeles County to return Bruce's Beach — a valuable beachfront property — to descendants of Black entrepreneurs who ran a resort in the 1910s before Manhattan Beach seized it in 1924 to build a never-realized park. (Last year, the Bruces sold the property to the county for $20 million.)

The return of Bruce's Beach took place as California began to reckon with its history of dismantling Black communities through eminent domain, a pervasive practice throughout the state and the nation, according to the Reparations Task Force's final report .

Between 1949 and 1973, Black Americans were five times as likely to be displaced by eminent domain as their white counterparts, according to a 2007 Institute of Justice study cited in the report.

"Bruce's Beach was an inspiration," said Phillips, prompting her family to enlist Where Is My Land, founded by an activist who spearheaded the effort to return the land to the Bruce's descendants. The organization researched the family members' case and amplified their story, sharing their petition and flying Moore to speak at a college in Los Angeles.

Years later, the Moores had their first and only meeting with the city of Richmond in May 2023.

Family members are asking for the land to be returned to them, arguing that the amount that they received in the '90s — $27,000 — was insufficient given the loss of generational wealth and the toll that being dispossessed had on them.

The lot on Enterprise Avenue is now valued at $14,086. The average value of a home in the area today is around $524,543, according to Zillow .

While "just compensation" is the legal minimum required by the government, a 2007 Stanford Law Review paper argued the standard falls short of capturing the value of a home.

"When it comes to general wealth-building and things of that nature, there's so much that is lost over generations through eminent domain," Roeser said. "There's so much emotional and additional toil beyond the financial costs as well."

After meeting with the city, Moore brought documents to the county assessor's office to resolve a discrepancy over the home's square footage. Then she waited. The family's calls and emails went unreturned. Unable to afford a lawyer, Moore said its efforts seemed "futile."

City officials did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The family's dream is to turn the vacant lot into a community garden, with a free library.

"That's what it's always been about, is the future," said Phillips, a Pacifica mother of three and founder of Kaliah's Heart, a literacy nonprofit named after her late sister, a former Richmond police officer. "My grandma, she really did love that home, and our family really did suffer because that home was taken."

For her children, she said, "I want them to be left a legacy, and not have to struggle and fight for everything like we have had to."