Oakland lost the Warriors to San Francisco, the Raiders to Las Vegas, and the A's to a parking lot in Las Vegas by way of Sacramento. The one club left standing is a seven-year-old soccer team owned in part by six thousand people who put in a hundred bucks each — and this week it proposed an 8,000-seat modular stadium at the old Raiders training site in Alameda, a three-to-five-year bridge while it chases a permanent home at Howard Terminal. The same Howard Terminal the A's couldn't close before they left. The contrast is the whole story: the franchise that demanded a billion-dollar waterfront palace took its leverage to the desert, and the team with no leverage at all is trying to build something it can actually afford on the exact ground the rich guy abandoned.

Here is the most Oakland sentence I have written all year: the soccer club is negotiating for the waterfront the baseball team couldn't close.

On June 11, Oakland Roots SC sat down with the Port of Oakland for a third round of talks about Howard Terminal — yes, that Howard Terminal, the parcel John Fisher spent years and a reported fortune trying to wrangle into a $12-billion ballpark-and-condos megaproject before he gave up, blamed everyone, and pointed the A's at the Las Vegas Strip. The deal that was too big for a billionaire is now the long-term dream of a club whose ownership round had a minimum buy-in of one hundred dollars.

But the dream isn't the news. The news is the bridge. On June 12 the Roots formally proposed an 8,000-seat modular stadium at 1150–1220 Harbor Bay Parkway in Alameda — the building the Raiders used to train in before they, too, left town. Redco Development bought the 100,000-square-foot facility from Oakland and Alameda County for $24 million last summer; the Roots hold a 15-year lease with options out to 25. The plan in front of the Alameda City Council on June 22 is for a demountable venue — seats that bolt together and come back apart — built in three phases over roughly six months, aiming at the 2027 USL Championship season. Up to 25 big events a year, capped at 8,000 heads. No concerts. BART shuttles from the Coliseum station, valet bike parking, 4,000 shared spaces in the business park next door. It is, deliberately, not a monument. It is a place to play for three to five years.

I want to sit in that word, modular, because it is the entire philosophy.

The economics of not overreaching

A modular stadium at this scale runs, by industry benchmarks, somewhere around $1,600 to $2,100 a seat — call it $13 to $17 million for eight thousand of them, against $20-plus million to pour the same thing in permanent concrete. The Roots haven't released a budget; they've said the build is "principally" private equity with "some infrastructural things that may be eligible for public funding," and I'll flag the obvious — that's vague, and vague is where stadium financing usually hides its sins. We should read the June 22 staff report before anyone throws a parade.

But the design tells you who they are. This is a club that played at Laney College on portable turf laid over a junior-college football field — turf that failed so badly in 2021 it exiled half a season to Livermore, and settled so poorly in 2023 it delayed matches over improper infill. They've since bounced to Cal State East Bay in Hayward and, last year, into the cavernous Coliseum after the A's vacated it. They know exactly what it costs to not have your own building. So the answer isn't to demand a billion-dollar cathedral and threaten to leave if the city won't pay. The answer is: build something we can afford, bolt it together in six months, play in it while we negotiate the real thing. Modular isn't a compromise here. It's a worldview. It is the opposite of the leverage play that emptied this city.

Phoenix Rising did this — expanded to a 10,000-seat modular venue. Eight USL clubs have gone modular since 2021. A French operator threw up an 8,000-seat ground in 82 days for a rugby side in Vénissieux. The technology is boring and proven, which is precisely the point. Nobody is reinventing the stadium. They're just refusing to be held hostage by one.

What "community-owned" actually means

I want to be honest about the romance, because the romance is doing a lot of work and it deserves scrutiny. The Roots ran two equity-crowdfunding rounds: roughly 6,000 investors, $3.5 million-plus, more than 1,200 of them Oakland residents, $100 a share. That is genuinely moving — a city that got told by three franchises that it wasn't worth staying for, buying small pieces of the one that did.

It is also not a co-op. The Class C shares route their votes through a single lead investor rather than letting six thousand people steer the club directly. So "community-owned" is part marketing. Fine. Most civic feeling is part marketing. The Common Goal pledge — 1% of payroll and ticket revenue to social-equity programs, the first U.S. pro club to sign it — is real money out the door, and the hundred-dollar buy-in is a real receipt in a real Oakland drawer. The structure is imperfect and the gesture is still the realest thing in Bay Area sports ownership right now, and both of those things can be true.

The exodus, and the one that didn't go

You know the roll call. Warriors to Chase Center across the bay in 2019, a championship core repackaged as a San Francisco luxury brand. Raiders to Las Vegas in 2020, again, the second time that fan base got left at the altar by the same family. A's playing their last Coliseum game in 2024, headed to a Sacramento minor-league park and an eventual Vegas lot, owned by a man who seemed to resent the city for existing. Three franchises, three departures, each one narrated to Oakland as your fault for not building us a palace.

And then there's a soccer team founded in 2018 by two local guys, currently playing in the same Coliseum the A's abandoned, with "Rooted in Oakland" painted on the side of the building. The phrase should be unbearable. It isn't, quite, because they actually stayed. They're proposing to spend their own money — and we'll watch how much of it is actually their own — to bolt together eight thousand seats in Alameda and keep the lights on while they negotiate the waterfront the last guy fumbled.

I'm not going to oversell the stakes. This is a USL Championship club, second-division soccer, average gates that wouldn't fill a corner of Mount Davis. They might lose the June 22 vote. The Howard Terminal talks might collapse the way every Howard Terminal talk before them has. The financing might turn out to lean on public money in ways the press release is too coy to admit. Put all of that on the record now, so nobody can say I sold you a fairy tale.

But after a decade of watching billionaires use this city as a chip in a leverage game and then cash out in the desert, there is something clarifying about a club whose entire pitch is: we'll build what we can pay for, we'll take it apart if we have to, and we're not going anywhere. The A's wanted a monument and left a hole. The Roots want a stadium you can disassemble. One of those is a metaphor for how you treat a city, and it's not the one with nine figures.

Read the staff report. Watch the vote. But for once, root for the small building.