Oakland was on track for an economic resurgence in the 2000s. The dot.com crash of the early decade was bad, but barely impacted home prices, which continued their decades-long rise. The housing bubble of 2008-2009 was more serious, and homes lost much of their value; but by 2012 home values had begun another rebound. Around 2015, when Libby Schaaf came to power, “progressives” on the City Council secretly communicated in closed session. Their constituents were getting priced out of the city. Gentrification was everywhere. Pretty soon Oakland would be all White and Asian. They progressives had to do something for BIPOCs! But what?
The answer was obvious: they had to keep housing prices from rising further—in fact, they had to cause them to drop, the more rapidly, the better. San Francisco, San Jose, Livermore, Fremont, Silicon Valley, Concord, Vallejo, San Rafael might soon be too costly for anyone not earning a six-figure income. Here in Oakland, there were certain things electeds could do to reverse the process. From 2017-2020, the Council tried their damnedest to lower the rate of increase of housing prices, with only limited success. Then, in 2021, everything changed, with the arrival of Carroll Fife to the City Council.
Fife, fresh off her illegal seizure of that West Oakland house, taught the rest of them how to play hardball. Prices could be lowered dramatically, she patiently explained, by making Oakland such a wasteland that demand for homes would crumble and therefore home prices would collapse.
How can we do that, asked Noel Gallo. Yeah, echoed Dan Kalb, it sounds amazing! Rebecca Kaplan, with her face mask, was furiously taking notes. Simple, Fife explained. Make crime explode so that every neighborhood, especially in the Flatlands, becomes a war zone. Then depend on our friends at the San Francisco Chronicle and Oaklandside to report how bad Oakland is. Meanwhile, defund the Oakland Police Department. We all hate the cops anyway—they’re a bunch of blood sucking racist homophobic pigs, right, Rebecca? Get the number of officers down into the 500s, even lower if possible. And spread the word through our neighborhood gang affiliates that crime will no longer be prosecuted. I guarantee you’ll see a historic collapse in housing prices.
Nikki Bas had been listening carefully. She signaled that she wanted to speak. (This had all been pre-rehearsed.) “Madame Council President Bas, what do you think?” Fife enquired. Bas smiled, and said, “I agree with Comrade Fife. I think it’s a brilliant idea. Let’s form working groups and come up with the necessary legislation so we can get real equity in Oakland.”
And with that, the City Council began the process of deconstructing Oakland. OPD’s budget was a prime target, as was its morale: Fife & Co.—known as The Group--counted on their ally Robert Warshaw and his ambulance chasing terriers, Chanin and Burris, to make cops’ lives miserable. The election of Democratic-Socialists like Pamela Price, whom the Group and the unions that own them supported, thereby ensuring their election, meant that arrests would trickle to a halt, sentences would be reduced, and parole granted generously, thus returning thugs to the streets, where they would reoffend. Everything worked just as Fife had promised. Up, up, up went crime. Down, down, down came real estate prices, dragging rents down with them.
And now we see the results in cold, hard statistics. Oakland home prices falling by an historic 25%. Middle class residents fleeing, taking jobs with them and leaving behind empty storefronts. In the entire East Bay, there’s only one area where home values over the last five years have dropped as high as 20%-30%: Oakland. It’s “the largest drop west of the Mississippi”, declares the S.F. Chronicle, citing Zillow data. And the worst of the worst is the 94612 zip code—Uptown/Downtown--where all those shiny new condo buildings have been built—buildings that now sit largely vacant and unsellable, a silent tragedy at the hands of woke politicians.
Do I expect The Group to express regret or shame for killing a city? Hardly. Most likely they’re popping the corks on Champagne, or whatever it is they celebrate with (paid for by us, the taxpayers). Because this is exactly what they wanted: to make Oakland the cheapest, poorest, dirtiest, most undesirable city in the Bay Area. Why? So their “people” can afford to live here. Well, they’ve achieved what they wanted. Welcome to Fife Land, the affordable city, where the woke people live: broke, unemployed, homeless, drug dealers, psychos, slackers, revolutionaries, criminals, losers, demented. A Democratic-Socialist dream!
(Certain conversations in the above account have been creatively reimagined.)
Steve Heimoff