Sixty years after Alameda County bulldozed the Black waterfront town of Russell City, Hayward has locked in a joint agreement to run a $1.3 million redress fund — but its first round of payments is written so narrowly that former residents themselves warn it may reach almost none of the people it was meant for.

This week the Hayward City Council formalized the city's half of a memorandum of understanding — first reported by Bay City News — to jointly administer the Russell City Redress Fund with Alameda County, the compensation arm of a reparative-justice effort Hayward launched in 2022. The county's Aug. 4 vote had already cleared a first tranche of payments — up to $25,000 per household. But the qualifying rules for that first phase are so restrictive, and the surviving pool so old, that the fund's own arithmetic has become the story: roughly 52 households at most, limited to people still alive who owned and lived in a Russell City home during a four-year stretch in the early 1960s.

Russell City was founded in 1853 on the Hayward shoreline and, by the mid-20th century, had become one of the few East Bay places where Black and Latino families locked out by redlining and racial covenants could actually buy land. Roughly 1,400 residents built homes, churches and businesses there. Then, in the 1960s, Alameda County declared the unincorporated community blighted, seized roughly 700 parcels through eminent domain, displaced everyone, and cleared the way for an industrial park that Hayward annexed in 1964. The payouts at the time were a fraction of any real value: by the city's own accounting, some families got only a few thousand dollars for a house, and in the worst cases as little as $250.

The redress fund is the tangible end of a slow apology. Hayward formally apologized in 2021; the county followed in 2023. The city then seeded a fund that, per a July 2025 City of Hayward announcement (external source, opens in a new tab), began at $900,000 — $250,000 from Hayward and $650,000 from Supervisors Elisa Márquez and Nate Miley. It later climbed to the $1.3 million the county approved (external source, opens in a new tab) on Aug. 4, padded by money from all five supervisors and the county education office.

The catch is who qualifies. A first-phase payment goes only to someone who, during the four years starting Jan. 1, 1961, both held title to a Russell City home and lived in it, lost that property to eminent domain, and is alive to file today. Payments are set per household and split evenly among a home's qualifying residents. Márquez told the board the county is "not anticipating a large number this first round."

At the meeting, residents did the division out loud. Priscilla Figueroa, a Hayward resident whose late husband's family lived in Russell City, noted that $1.3 million at $25,000 a household covers only about 52 households — and asked how the county would decide who gets a full share. Deborah Harris, who grew up in Russell City, put the harder question plainly: how will the county handle homes where the original owner has died, given that "probably all of the original landowners are deceased at this point."

That is the tension the celebratory vote papered over. In KQED's account (external source, opens in a new tab) of the meeting, Márquez said the working group will release criteria for a second phase that includes descendants once the first payments go out, though that phase will require another board vote. For now, the people most likely to still be alive to file a claim are those who were children in Russell City, not the parents whose names were on the deeds.

Hayward Councilmember Angela Andrews, speaking for the city, framed the stakes bluntly. "An apology is nothing without action," she said, urging the real estate industry, philanthropists and businesses that benefited from the displacement to add to the fund. The memorandum Hayward just ratified is the machinery to move whatever money arrives. Whether it arrives in time for the generation actually owed remains the open question.