San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Schaaf ’s legacy seen as mixed
Oakland leader tackled tough issues but also saw rise in violent crime
“People are pretty unhappy at the moment.”
Dan Lindheim, former city administrator
Before the sun rose on a brisk February morning, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf looked around Lake Merritt and counted the number of people sleeping on the street for the biennial point-in-time count. While making the rounds, she shooed a rat away from a blanket covering someone sleeping in the pergola. Every so often, she’d pause and point to the building where her mother lived or the white Victorian home where she got married.
As an Oakland native, the town is a road map of Schaaf ’s life history: It’s where she grew up as the daughter of a shoe salesman and a flight attendant, where she graduated from Skyline High School and where she raised her two kids. It also lays out her political achievements and failures as the city’s 50th mayor for the past eight years.
As the town awakened that February morning and more people flocked to the lake for their daily jog or walk, a woman approached Schaaf.
“This is the gem of Oakland and it’s completely trashed,” the woman said, pointing to the people sleeping on the street. “This is out of control.”
Schaaf nodded her head and told the woman that the city has nearly quadrupled its shelter bed capacity over the last eight years. Still, she acknowledged, it’s not enough.
“It’s a humanitarian crisis,” Schaaf said.
As Schaaf prepares to leave office on Jan. 2, still keeping her next move quiet, political experts say her tenure and her success as the city’s leader is mostly mixed.
Schaaf presided over a city
that has gone through a complete transformation, from a housing boom to exploding homelessness. Major companies, including Credit Karma, Blue Shield and PG&E, expanded to Oakland, further boosting the city’s economy.
She oversaw the city as it dealt with tragedy when the Ghost Ship fire killed 36 people at a warehouse party. Two sports teams left the city, and a third, the Oakland A’s, has threatened to leave if their proposed multibillion-dollar waterfront ballpark and surrounding development doesn’t move forward.
While nearly 20,000 housing units have been built in her time, homelessness also grew by 131% since 2015. She repaved 161 miles of the city’s crumbling roadways, but residents complain about the amount of trash on city streets — in the span of one year, enough garbage landed on city streets to cover the length of 13 football fields. And while crime in Oakland dipped to some of its lowest levels early in Schaaf’s tenure, the spike in violent crime is at an all-time high for the first time in nearly a decade.
Political experts say that while Oakland is grappling with major issues — the housing and homelessness crises and violent crime — Schaaf deserves credit for leading the city through some of its toughest times, including the pandemic.
“The outcomes and conditions in the city aren’t as positive as anybody would like. At best, her tenure has been mixed,” said Jim Ross, a political consultant based in Oakland. But, he said, “She should get real credit. She led Oakland through not easy times.”
Those times also include overseeing a police department plagued with a sex scandal and that once cycled through three police chiefs in just nine days in 2016. The department is tantalizing close to ending nearly 20 years under federal oversight in May, if it can continue to comply with court-mandated reforms. Most famously, she sparred with former President Trump after alerting residents that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
could conduct a raid.
Residents are mostly split in their opinions of Schaaf. An Oakland Chamber of Commerce poll released in October shows that voters are largely dissatisfied with the city — 64% of the poll’s respondents said they felt the city was headed in the wrong direction. That dissatisfaction also extended to the city’s leadership — 42% of the poll’s respondents rated Schaaf’s performance poorly.
The chamber’s poll also found that 97% of respondents said homelessness is either an extreme or very serious problem. And respondents were overwhelmingly concerned with gun violence — 97% said it’s an extremely or very serious problem, and 88% said the same about crime.
Some political experts say Oakland is a tough city to be in charge of — balancing the different interests of residents.
“Oakland is a challenging city to govern,” said Doug Linney, a political consultant in the East Bay. “My general sense is if Libby can’t do it, boy, it’s going to be hard for anybody because she really had the experience, the skills and the general chops to be able to do it.”
Before winning the mayor’s seat, Schaaf served on the City Council for one term, representing part of the Oakland hills.
During her administration, Schaaf capitalized on “public private partnerships,” using fundraising to launch city programs. She equipped an entire generation of children with college savings accounts and universal preschool. She instituted one of the nation’s largest guaranteed income programs for low-income residents and launched a widely lauded program called Keep Oakland Housed, which provides rent checks and legal representation for residents at risk of homelessness.
But, some say, the last few years of her administration, particularly throughout the pandemic, were less successful.
“People tend to be remembered by the end of their administration and if that Oakland Chamber of Commerce poll is any indication, she’s not being well remembered,” said Dan Lindheim, a former city administrator and current professor at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. “Is that fair for an overall eight year period? I don’t know what’s fair, but my sense is that people are pretty unhappy at the moment with the state of issues in Oakland.”
“If I’m looking at (her) legacy, I don’t think she left her successor in a particularly great spot,” Lindheim added.
He pointed out the city’s facing the highest levels of crime and violence in a decade, a huge increase in homelessness, a potential financial collapse and the loss of more than a third of Oakland’s Black population. While Schaaf ushered in a building boom, Lindheim said the housing crisis in Oakland is “worse than ever.”
“They grossly underperformed targets of moderate housing and they greatly overperformed targets of market rate housing,” Lindheim said. “That is understandable because that is what developers want to build, but that’s not necessarily what Oakland needs.”
In the city’s housing element from 2015 to 2023, which lays out how a city will plan for new homes, Oakland reached 174% of its goal for above-moderate-rate housing. But the city reached 43% of its very-low-income housing goals, 26% of it’s low-income housing and 3% of its moderate-income housing goals.
Schaaf said building housing at all income levels is key — if the city hadn’t, high-income workers would have taken over the existing naturally affordable units.
“All housing helps the homeless crisis and all housing at all income levels has helped slow gentrification and displacement of Oaklanders,” Schaaf said in a recent interview with The Chronicle.
She added that the city has 2,200 affordable homes ready to be built. And with the passage of Measure U, an $850 million bond measure that Schaaf co-wrote with council President Nikki Fortunato Bas, the city will have more money to put toward creating affordable housing.
Schaaf said if she could go back in time to 2015, when she first took office, she would give herself one piece of advice: “That homelessness would explode the way that it did and that it’s not just the county’s responsibility, it’s everyone’s responsibility,” Schaaf said.
“When I became the mayor, it wasn’t a top concern. We did not have a structure in place to deal with it. We’ve had to respond to the crisis while building a whole new system that did not exist in City Hall just six years ago.”
A key component of Schaaf ’s strategy to addressing homelessness is the community cabin program, which moves unhoused people into temporary structures. The program’s success is mixed. A city audit found that nearly half of the participants returned to homelessness.
But homelessness experts say it’s a quick and cost-effective way to get people indoors. Schaaf’s model is now used in other cities, said Tomiquia Moss, the CEO of All Home, a nonprofit that focuses on addressing homelessness as a regional issue.
“The cabin community idea was really unheard of at the time,” said Moss, who also served as Schaaf’s chief of staff for the first two years of her mayoralty. “There was a lot of criticism around the type of cabin, but the fact of the matter is she was thinking about interim housing before most jurisdictions in the region were thinking about it.”
She added that Schaaf’s administration also changed zoning codes to allow for different types of interim housing.
Despite those advances, some city leaders criticized Schaaf’s administration for failing to deliver basic city services. Bas said council members regularly hear from residents about their frustration with the lack of services — trash, illegal dumping and sanitation — and said it’s been a “significant” problem.
Oakland is grappling with a high vacancy rate, with nearly one-fifth of governments jobs currently vacant. Some of the highest vacancy rates are in key city functions — about 30% of jobs in the building department and nearly a third of positions in the transportation department are open.
Some leaders have pointed to Schaaf’s tenuous relationships with city unions, which have protested long hours and understaffing during tense contract negotiations, as a reason for the vacancies.
“The persistent level of vacancies that Oakland has had in key departments, like public works, planning and building, has really impacted Oakland’s ability to provide the basic services,” Bas said.
Schaaf acknowledged her relationships with unions, calling herself a “hard ass” about the city’s financial health and saying she prioritized paying down the city’s pension obligations and creating a rainy-day fund in hopes of avoiding future layoffs.
Moss said she’s eager to see how Schaaf ’s legacy will live on — from her investments in education for Oakland children to implementing Ceasefire, the city’s flagship anti-violence program. “It’s the kind of foundational investments that she did in her tenure that will bear fruit for the city of Oakland in the long-term,” Moss said.
Schaaf said the biggest challenges from her time in office are the problems she inherited from previous administrations — from deteriorating roads with no plans to fix them to a non-existent response to homelessness. In 2016, Schaaf wrote a voter-approved $600 million bond measure that helped fund street improvements. In addition to repaving, Schaaf created a Department of Transportation and a 311 system that residents can call to report potholes and damaged roads.
As Schaaf, a moderate, leaves office, the progressive Sheng Thao is preparing to take over. For the first time in recent history, Oakland will have a progressive mayor and a progressive majority City Council—the outcome of the November election, which Ross called a “repudiation” of Schaaf ’s time in office.
Despite voters suggesting a different form of leadership, Schaaf said she hopes residents will remember her as a fighter.
“I hope I’m remembered as someone who fought for Oakland ... as we experienced this huge moment of growth,” Schaaf said.