Headline, S.F. Chronicle, May 11: “Oakland tops list for home value loss”
Is anyone surprised? They shouldn’t be. People are leaving Oakland, not moving here. Consequently, prices for houses and condos are collapsing. While the rest of the Bay Area is enjoying a surge in home prices, poor old Oakland is witnessing a real estate implosion rivaled only by the Great Recession of 2008-2009.
Why would any self-respecting person want to live in Oakland? This city is dirty, hollowed-out and dangerous. Downtown is a mile-long slum. The parks are crawling with homeless addicts and overflowing with garbage. Along the streets, the morning sun reveals overturned garbage bins, the charred remains of campfires, litter and trash blowing in the wind, bipped cars, broken bottles, feces (not all of which is from dogs), the unmistakeable stench of stale urine, and, in every other abandoned storefront, a dirty homeless person sleeping on a greasy piece of cardboard.
The government is corrupt, tired and cynical. One might add “incompetent” to the list. They are entirely unable or unwilling to rise to the occasion and course-correct, because they’re so afraid of offending the unions.
Property and business taxes are disintegrating, leaving the city unable to meet payrolls and fund schools and other essential services. Illegal activity is everywhere: cars blasting noise at 125 decibels, people setting up tables to sell stolen goods, open-air drug dealing, prostitution, sideshows, and of course Oakland’s favorite recreational activity, shoplifting. Insane, glassy-eyed zombies roam the streets at all hours of the day and night, holding up traffic, annoying if not threatening innocent pedestrians. Employment has fallen off the cliff as companies flee town; in fact the only occupation that is growing is signature-gathering for petitions to put SEIU-authored initiatives on the ballot. Many people I know—longtime residents of a city they used to love—say they would move if they could afford to.
Count me among them.
When people think of living in the Bay Area they imagine the clean, bright, orderly cities of the Peninsula, or San Francisco itself, always dramatic and alluring, or the cities of the Tri-Valley, spick and span with low crime and good schools and policing. Or their thoughts take them through the Caldecott Tunnel to well-off Lamorinda, or further inland to Brentwood and Tracy, where people can actually afford an entire house with a yard. Or even to Marin, Santa Rosa and the North Bay, where the streets are clean and safe and the weather is as nice as here in Oakland. But when people think of where they wish to live, Oakland never occurs to them. The mere mention of the word causes shudders and the darkest, most negative images.
There’s one reason, and one reason only, for this situation: the governments that have run Oakland for the last forty years, with the exception of the Jerry Brown era. They’re of a peculiar genre, called “woke,” that has deliberately caused the wreckage. Why would they do that? Because their politics are racialized. They have one specific political goal, and that is to make Oakland accessible to people of color. Because people of color tend to be poor, these woke politicians believe that making Oakland “affordable” will enable people of color to stay in town, instead of fleeing to more affordable places. How to make that happen? Make Oakland so unpleasant, so disagreeable for the middle class that they voluntarily leave town. As a consequence, rents plunge, obviously, and so do home and condo prices. Then, to add insult to injury, the wokes defund or underfund the police, who can no longer do the job they’re well-trained to do. Crime of every sort increases, Oakland’s reputation around the world is that of a war zone, and that, too, drives the middle class away.
Make no mistake, this is a very conscious, deliberate attempt by woke politicians. They know exactly what they’re doing. Carroll Fife, whose district has the most homeless camps of all, and is degradingly filthy, has done her best to lower the standard of living in District 3, but all the council members share responsibility. They do not believe in personal responsibility. If their constituents are poor, it must be due to structural racism. If their constituents are in jail, it must be due to White supremacy and its carceral culture. If their constituents are murdering each other, it must be because they’re suffering from internalized racism, foisted on them by an arrogant, prejudiced White majority.
Well, this is bullshit of the highest order. You know it in your heart. These woke politicians are trying to impose a communist-style regime on us, in which they take the money of hard-working taxpayers and hand it over to the corrupt public employee unions, who then bankroll all those petition gatherers to accost voters at supermarkets and BART stations, where the petitioners lie to people telling them if only they sign petition “X” or “Y,” everyone will have healthcare, public transit will be saved, billionaires will pay their fair share (who could be against that?), homelessness will magically end, and Oakland will become nirvana.
It’s a lie. One big, bold, base lie, crafted by SEIU’s apparatchiks, refined by their consultants to be more appealing to low-information voters, carried forth by Fife and the more craven of the City Council members—and enabled by the California Supreme Court justices who violated their oaths when they ruled that “public-sponsored” initiatives need pass by only 50% plus 1 vote. That was the equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” ruling. Both legitimized corruption in elections, and both have undermined the average citizen’s perception of the courts, which large swaths of the American public now recognize as out-of-touch.
If you live here, you ought to care that Oakland is the outlier of the Bay Area, financially, ethically, politically and practically. If you don’t care, well, you’re part of the problem.
Steve Heimoff