Booming Oakland must face crime issue
When Uber said this week that it will open a new global headquarters in Oakland, it was the latest feather in the city’s cap.
Growth in both housing and commercial projects, particularly in the city’s burgeoning Uptown district, is changing the conversation about Oakland, even as age-old problems linger.
Because the reality is that while media outlets and city officials have turned their gaze toward future economic prospects, the city’s crime problems have continued.
According to the most recent FBI crime reports (2013), Oakland was identified as the city with the highest rate of violent crime in the state — and the second highest in the nation. If Oakland ever hopes to get a handle on its biggest liability, things are going to have to change.
This year, through Sept. 20, Oakland had 67 homicides — a 20 percent increase from last year at this time. Assaults, burglaries and armed robberies have held to year-ago figures, according to statistics compiled by the Police Department.
Yet, as the city’s fortunes have been elevated, so too has the official rhetoric around the topic of crime.
These days, city leaders talk about cyclical crime waves and
the ebb and flow of big-city law enforcement. It’s a clever sidestep, an attempt to redirect and steer the conversation in a more general fashion.
Unfortunately, crime in Oakland is very specific and the intractable presence of gun violence and daily reports of gunfire erupting in East and West Oakland neighborhoods is neither ebb nor flow. It’s a steady stream that signals trouble, pain and human misery.
Most recently, an ongoing dispute between rival gangs sparked a series of shootings that claimed several lives.
It’s why I believe Oakland’s best chance to rid itself of the crime albatross it has carried may not be through the city’s community policing efforts or its vaunted Ceasefire program. Oakland’s best chance may be to build its way out of crime, and that effort is already under way. The only question that remains is how Oakland’s leaders will manage growth — and if they’ll do so wisely.
Inevitably, such a statement immediately invokes the wrath of antigentrification activists who demand Oakland provide low-income housing opportunities to residents who risk being displaced by rising housing costs and rents.
There’s already a backlash to Uber’s announcement by some activists who are threatening to protest. I agree that Oakland has a role to play, but so does San Francisco — and every other city in the Bay Area. Providing housing for the poor in any metropolitan area is a regional task, and not the sole responsibility of a single city.
For far too long, Oakland has been one of the places to seek housing of last resort in the Bay Area. The old model of herding large numbers of lowincome residents into government-subsidized housing and removing men from households as a requirement for welfare benefits has torn families asunder and been a social disaster in this country.
At this stage in the game, I don’t know if even a massive crime wave in downtown Oakland — if there was one — would halt the growth that’s taking place there, but what we do know from the city’s history is that when Oakland crime is the No. 1 topic of conversation, it’s not a selling point.
Oakland is enjoying a longawaited economic renaissance complete with new structures and businesses.
Some of that bounty must be used to supplement, finance and renew the push for an adequate-size police force because you simply can’t sweep that level of violence under new construction sites forever.