On Friday evening KPIX-TV led off their news broadcast with a story about our friend Everardo Rodriquez, a business owner in the Fruitvale. His company’s very existence is threatened by brazen crime, garbage dumping, homelessness and intimidation of his employees by wandering sickos. For years, Everardo has been complaining to Oakland city government how horrible and deteriorating the situation is, but no one has done a thing about it. Everardo’s ire is particularly aimed at City Councilman Noel Gallo, who gets a lot of self-generated publicity for his weekly garbage pickups but does absolutely nothing to address the existential problems of his constituents.
Another friend of ours, Carrie Anderson, does a great job reporting on conditions in the neighborhood. This part of Fruitvale is among the hardest hit areas in Oakland, in terms of filth, decrepitude and crime, but it’s hardly the only area suffering from the callous indifference of a City Council that couldn’t care less about the safety and welfare of the people who pay their salaries. No wonder decent working folks are bailing out of California cities like Oakland in droves.
This sad phenomenon has been widely reported in the media. The latest is the Los Angeles Times, whose story, “The California exodus continues,” tells about an Oakland couple who finally had it, after their home was broken into for the fourth time. Now that they’re able to work remotely, they decided to move. “We took a long, hard look and said, ‘Why are we here?’”
Why indeed. Many cities across the U.S. are experiencing population outflows, defined as people leaving to live someplace else. Redfin, a real estate brokerage, reports on the Top 10 Metropolitan Areas by Net Outflow. The list starts with the San Francisco Bay Area (including Oakland) and continues on through Los Angeles, New York, Washington D.C., Seattle, Boston, Detroit, Denver, Chicago and Minneapolis. All ten cities are, of course, afflicted by high real estate costs, but all also are run by Democrats, an interesting phenomenon I’ll get to later.
Where are these outflow people moving? Here are the Top 10 Inflow cities: Miami, Tampa, Phoenix, Sacramento, Las Vegas, Cape Coral Florida, San Diego, North Port Florida, San Antonio and Dallas. These are largely conservative areas; even if they’re not run by Republicans, they’re highly supportive of cops and intolerant of crime.
The sad fact is that cities with liberal or progressive governments suffer from high crime because their mayors and city councils have weakened police departments and empowered criminals, in their maniacal, misguided drive to achieve “social justice.” Cities with more conservative leadership on the other hand invest in their cops and have a low tolerance for lawbreaking.
While the price of housing is obviously one factor in this outflow-inflow phenomenon, another is the loss of quality of life in high-crime cities. Nobody wants to live in places like Fruitvale anymore. It’s just too hard having to cope with the ugliness, the constant threat of becoming a victim, the presence of so many addicts and sociopaths, the noise, the weirdness, the zombies and vagrants, the smell of piss, the piles of excrement, the used needles. People may love the weather in the Bay Area, the beauty of the terrain, the wonderful amenities and so on; but in the end, they have to feel safe and secure in their persons and homes. Sadly, fewer and fewer in Oakland do.
To watch Everardo’s video is to be brought to the point of weeping and rage. All the videotapes or photographs of pillage and theft have been unable to motivate the Oakland Police Department to move against these criminals and throw them in jail where they belong. Crime persists virtually unchecked and unchallenged and, as the video notes, criminals know that nothing will happen to them even in the unlikely event they’re actually arrested. They’ll be back out on the streets within hours, where they can once again rob, steal, assault, plunder and kill.
Don’t blame OPD for this. As I’ve repeatedly written, our cops have their hands tied by a Police Commission that never should have been created and ought to be immediately shut down—a fanatic cult whose obsession with racial politics makes them irrational and dangerous. OPD’s hands also are tied by a City Council, dominated by cop haters like Carroll Fife, Nikki Bas, Sheng Thao, Rebecca Kaplan and Dan Kalb, in cahoots with hate groups like the Anti Police-Terror Project--domestic terrorists, the Proud Boys of the left. If our cops had their way, they’d clear the criminals out of Oakland in a matter of days: neighborhood cops know exactly who the bad guys are and would love to haul their butts to Santa Rita Jail.
But the woke politicians who run Oakland don’t want to end crime. As long as crime remains rampant in Oakland, these radicals can extort “anti-violence” money from a frightened, feckless city, and line their pockets and those of their cronies. This is what I call the homelessness-criminal complex, a happy hunting ground for race-based grifters to profit.
Steve Heimoff