Oaklandside published an informative article revealing whom the major donors are of both the Recall and anti-Recall, or pro-Price, forces. In an analysis, Darwin BondGraham, who wrote the article, noted “Some of the biggest supporters of the recall are real estate companies and individuals who work in real estate development and management...”.
It’s important to realize that the Left generally regards “real estate companies” with loathing. Their preferred term is “landlords,” a class they deem morally repugnant. If you remember the battle in Oakland over the rent moratorium, it was said to pit “landlords” against renters; the former were portrayed as evil capitalists while the letter were law-abiding people struggling against an unfair economic system. Never mind that many of the landlords who were suffering from not receiving rent for years happened to be struggling people of color, who had woeful tales to tell. According to the Left, all landlords are evil and must be crushed.
So, yes, it may be true that some of the Recall’s biggest supporters are real estate interests. But so what? There’s a very good reason real estate interests want to see the back of Pamela Price’s wig: she’s bad for business. “Rents for one-bedroom units in Oakland were down 7.2% in September from a year earlier, the biggest drop among the United States’ 100 largest cities,” the Chronicle reported last month. The cause for that isn’t oversupply, as you might surmise; it’s because Oakland’s reputation has become so horrible that people don’t want to live here anymore.
This goes along with my hypothesis, which I’ve described before, that the woke forces in Oakland actually want real estate prices (rents and sales) to plunge, the more the better. They’d like to see Oakland become the working class city it was in the 1970s, so that the poor people, especially people of color, they purport to represent can stay here. There are many ways for a cynical City Council to drive down real estate prices: you can increase crime and garbage, flood the streets with drug addicts and weirdos, force businesses to shutter their doors, defund the police, and in general make Oakland frightening and uninhabitable. That will assuredly drive down rents and sales prices, but at the cost of making Oakland a place nobody wants to live in.
It’s not my job to defend landlords or to portray them as a sanctified class. But we do live in a country that protects private property, and if it weren’t for landlords renting out their units, renters would have no place to live. You’d think that would be obvious, but the Left always needs an enemy, and for them, anyone with property is a target. The Left seems not to understand that what they’re doing isn’t only making rents cheaper, it’s driving out businesses that renters depend on. Every time a drug store shuts down, poor people have to travel further to pick up a prescription. Every time a restaurant closes, dishwashers and waiters lose their jobs. As these things reoccur, the city’s tax base falls even further, meaning that services such as police, fire and garbage collection are diminished. But this, too, is what the wokes want: a city that doesn’t work.
There is, I suppose, a bit of truth in the Left’s thinking. But the glaring fact is that Oakland doesn’t exist in a bubble. It’s surrounded by bedroom communities of wealth; across the bridge is San Francisco and, southward, Silicon Valley, one of the richest regions in America. All these areas are getting richer and developing the sorts of cultures that only affluent communities can afford to nurture: playhouses and theaters, galleries, music performance venues and so on. The wokes love to claim they support the arts but, in fact, they’re doing their best to kill them off in Oakland. Oakland can’t be a dirt-poor ghetto in the midst of a thriving, booming Bay Area. You can’t build a wall around Oakland and say “Gentrification stops here.” That’s not how the real world works. But the wokes don’t live in the real world. They live in a fantasyland that cannot be, can never be, because it runs afoul of the rules of economics, of human nature, of common sense. In woke world, success is deemed failure, and failure success. The woke rush to the bottom is really what’s at stake here.
Steve Heimoff