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 US and Canada.
Hey, Chris.
But a few of us still live and work in Oakland.
And despite how far flung the 99 PI 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 Madrigal,
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 longtime friend of mine.
When I first moved here, you know, 12, 13 years ago, yeah,
it was kind of like a quarter of the population was white,
a quarter of the population was black, a quarter and like a quarter was Asian.
You know, there's tons of working class people, there's tons of non working class people,