Oakland- Past, present, and future (optimism welcome) (San Jose, San Francisco: crime, new home)
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Oakland needs to change in its mentality. It is a high crime city due to the anti-cop, anti-law, "I do whatever the f.... I want" thug mentality along with the "everybody owes me something" mentality and other, similar mentalities that cause Oakland to be too much like it was in the past.
Oakland could be a great middle class counterpart to SF; whereas the latter is douchebaggified and overrun with "professionals", the former could be a place with less pretense, more authenticity and could simply be a city in its own right- not a suburb or extension of SF.
Maybe Oakland could offer an alternative to the plethora of the stupid socialist laws of SF, too.
All of this would have to come with a change of mentality, though, and that (conceivably) could happen even if there was no population change at all. After all, working class and industrial don't have to = high crime. However, generations of Oaklanders have had a chance to see the error of their mentalities and to change them. Thus, Oakland hasn't changed for the better, and so a demographic change is the only way.
I think that with the slowly changing demography of Oakland caused in part by the the influx of the middle class and middle class values, the city has a better future now than before.
Oakland needs to change in its mentality. It is a high crime city due to the anti-cop, anti-law, "I do whatever the f.... I want" thug mentality along with the "everybody owes me something" mentality and other, similar mentalities that cause Oakland to be too much like it was in the past.
Oakland could be a great middle class counterpart to SF; whereas the latter is douchebaggified and overrun with "professionals", the former could be a place with less pretense, more authenticity and could simply be a city in its own right- not a suburb or extension of SF.
Maybe Oakland could offer an alternative to the plethora of the stupid socialist laws of SF, too.
All of this would have to come with a change of mentality, though, and that (conceivably) could happen even if there was no population change at all. After all, working class and industrial don't have to = high crime. However, generations of Oaklanders have had a chance to see the error of their mentalities and to change them. Thus, Oakland hasn't changed for the better, and so a demographic change is the only way.
I think that with the slowly changing demography of Oakland caused in part by the the influx of the middle class and middle class values, the city has a better future now than before.
Uh... Oakland is no more lawless than San Francisco. Most of the particularly ****ed up incidents - molotov cocktail murders, stabbing 11 year old kids on MUNI for nothing, luring tourists into the projects and executing them - occur in San Francisco. And what specific demographic would you be talking about removing? poor native Oaklanders? So in other words, you want to do exactly what was done to San Francisco. If that's your idea of progress, then no thanks.
Uh... Oakland is no more lawless than San Francisco.
Just look at the "most dangerous cities" stats.
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Originally Posted by Nineties Flava
Most of the particularly ****ed up incidents - molotov cocktail murders, stabbing 11 year old kids on MUNI for nothing, luring tourists into the projects and executing them - occur in San Francisco.
Bayview/Hunters Point?
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Originally Posted by Nineties Flava
And what specific demographic would you be talking about removing? poor native Oaklanders? So in other words, you want to do exactly what was done to San Francisco. If that's your idea of progress, then no thanks.
Poor native Oaklanders are the ones who have made Oakland as dangerous and prohibitive as it is now. You can't really think that their mentality doesn't need to change or that the past of Oakland should be its future.
Those statistics are just that: Statistics. They don't tell you about social climate of the city. In New Orleans, for example, they release you after 6 months for murder if they haven't provided a case yet. Consequentially, New Orleans has a ridiculously high murder rate rivaling the worst cities in Mexico and Brazil; its been the murder capital of America for about 5 years running. However, its crime rate does not put it in the top 10 most dangerous cities. The lists are as meaningful (or meaningless) as you make them. The most that can be deduced from them is that Oakland indeed has a bad crime problem, but to call it lawless based on the crime rate is not accurate.
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Bayview/Hunters Point?
The stabbing occurred two years ago in the Mission by 19th & Mission, the tourist execution occurred two years ago in Double Rock (BVHP) and the molotov cocktail occurred last year but I forget where it happened.
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Poor native Oaklanders are the ones who have made Oakland as dangerous and prohibitive as it is now. You can't really think that their mentality doesn't need to change or that the past of Oakland should be its future.
Wrong. A small percentage of the impoverished population has done that. There was a controversial TV program a couple years back that the Discovery Channel ran called Gangs in Oakland that claimed that there were 11,000 gang members in Oakland, which is actually a little more than how many there are in the entirety of Alameda County. If we were to pretend that this were true, though, that would make up a full 2.6% of Oakland's population. Oakland's impoverished population makes up 18% of the population. Are you going to advocate gentrifying the 18% out of the city because of the 2.6%? In reality, that number is closer to less than a single percentage point of the Oakland population.
I have a question for you... what specific areas of Oakland do you see as "prohibitive"? If you're using this word to mean that you wouldn't be anywhere near there at night, then that's not unique to Oakland. You could never find me wandering the streets of San Francisco at night, and i don't just mean the Tenderloin or Bayview or the Mission. Cities are by nature not particularly safe... the monsters come out at night everywhere, and San Francisco has more than enough of them - along with crackheads and other various and sundry nighttime apparitions - to make me think twice about putting myself at risk there. Its not limited to Bayview or The Mission either... you can find these same people wandering North Beach or Embarcadero or Fisherman's Warf. You know why? It pays to be an equal opportunist.
I wouldn't wander around the flatlands of East, West and North Oakland at night either, but common sense told me that anyway. Since I stay in my neighborhood after dark, I can say with a straight face that I've never heard a single gun shot anywhere in Oakland the entire time I've lived here, and I'm less than four blocks away from 580 and three blocks from Fruitvale & MacArthur Blvd. At the same time, I'm not stupid enough to take the above as reassurance and put myself where the monsters are when they come out... human beings weren't born with instincts to simply ignore them. And besides, everything closes in my area after 9:00 other than the liquor stores... what are you really out there for in the first place? Common sense tells you what to and what not to do.
Oakland needs to change in its mentality. It is a high crime city due to the anti-cop, anti-law, "I do whatever the f.... I want" thug mentality along with the "everybody owes me something" mentality and other, similar mentalities that cause Oakland to be too much like it was in the past.
Places like Rockridge aren't like this at all. Probably 50% of Oakland is middle class or upper class areas, but everyone thinks it's all like certain parts of East Oakland.
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Oakland could be a great middle class counterpart to SF; whereas the latter is douchebaggified and overrun with "professionals", the former could be a place with less pretense, more authenticity and could simply be a city in its own right- not a suburb or extension of SF.
They're calculated on a per-capita basis. The reason cities like Oakland, New Orleans, and Cleveland are routinely on the list is because they have relatively small populations in comparison with similar crime statistics.
Oakland with just over 400,000 residents, will always have more per-capita crime than San Francisco because in part, San Francisco would need more than twice the murders of Oakland to account for having more than double the population.
But, do you know that they have a very similar amount of crime while in land size, Oakland is actually larger by 7 square miles? Is one really marketability more dangerous than the other? It's far more prudent to calculate this by neighborhood-to-neighborhood comparisons. Certain neighborhoods of Oakland are FAR safer than certain neighborhoods of San Francisco (and vice versa).
Moral of the story: statistics can be extraordinarily mis-leading. It's better to actually know the cities and neighborhoods in question.
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Originally Posted by sjnative
Oakland could be a great middle class counterpart to SF; whereas the latter is douchebaggified and overrun with "professionals", the former could be a place with less pretense, more authenticity and could simply be a city in its own right- not a suburb or extension of SF.
You just described many Oakland neighborhoods in their current state.
Paul D. Spreiregen, FAIA, has called a skyline "a physical representation [of a city's] facts of life ... a potential work of art ... its collective vista
The skyline of a city can be seen as symbolic of the city's influence and economy
These towers would add height, length, density, and architecture to Oakland's skyline. Encinal Tower would be the most interesting building out of them all, and would rival San Francisco's Transamerica Tower.
Yeah that would be great and all, but it's never going to happen
Usually I would agree with your skepticism.
But this time around Im very confident about Oak-to-Ninth, Kaiser I and Kaiser II and the 2 Chinatown highrises(both crowns are weird but I'll take 'em).
Im cautiously optimistic about 601 City Center, 1100 Broadway and Emerald Views.
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