I don’t think there’s been a politician in American history who promised so much and then failed to deliver so thoroughly as has Carroll Fife. Maybe Herbert Hoover, whose 1928 campaign promised “continued prosperity,” and then gave America the Great Depression.
Fife, who’s running for re-election, just sent out a campaign mailer in which she touts four “first term results for the people.” Amazingly, not a single one of her claims is remotely true; the facts thoroughly debunk each of them. Here they are—in Fife’s words, followed by my comments:
1. Housing as a human right: Expand affordability, reduce homelessness
My comment: Homelessness in Oakland has risen every year since Fife’s been in office. The 2024 count was 5,490 homeless people, up 9% from the previous count, in 2022. This increase occurred even as Oakland’s near neighbors, Emeryville and Berkeley, saw decreases in homelessness of, respectively, 59% and 20%.
Fife’s only accomplishment in “housing as a human right” was when she illegally squatted in someone else’s house and got away with it. She has not expanded affordability or reduced homelessness by a single person.
2. Neighborhood safety
My comment: Fife brags about everything she’s done to reduce crime. Unfortunately, OPD’s weekly crime report testifies to a far different truth. Their latest weekly report (as of Sept. 1, 2024) shows a total of 282 violent crimes (rape, robbery, homicide, etc.). By contrast, in Dec. 2022 (by which time Fife had been in office for nearly two years and put her stamp on the City Council), there was a total of 243 violent crimes as of the end of December. That’s a 16 percent increase. So much for Fife’s “proven strategy for reducing violence in Oakland”!
3. Economic resilience and community vibrancy
My comment: Under this important category, Fife brags about her “Small Business Care-o-Van” to boost business (Toot toot! Here comes the Care-o-Van!) and her establishment of an LGBTQ District (which seems to consist of a flag on Lakeshore Avenue). On behalf of all the queers in Oakland, I thank Fife for whatever small part she played in this new “district,” but really, it’s meaningless. Everybody, and I do mean everybody, knows that our communities are in a depression, with restaurants and clubs shutting, retail going out of business, new high rise apartments and condos no one wants to live in, and residents fleeing to safer places. What chutzpah for Fife to brag about how “resilient” she’s made our communities!
4. Environmental justice
My comment: If you know what this banal cliché means, please tell me because I don’t. As for specifics, Fife touts her “creation” of the West Oakland Farmer’s Market (one of about ten in the city), bike-friendly streets, a plan to plant 1,000 trees in West Oakland (about which there is not a mention on “Trees For Oakland,” the official webpage of the Oakland Parks and Rec Foundation), and her fight to ban the transport of coal through West Oakland—a fight she lost this past winter, when two courts (a federal court and a Superior Court) both ruled that Fife’s objections to shipping coal were invalid.
In other words, the four principles upon which Fife is running for re-election have all turned out to be abject failures. She boasts about stuff that never happened—typical Fife ridiculousness. Either Fife is stupid, or she thinks we voters are, or both. She believes, like Trump, that if she tells Big Lies about stuff, voters will be too lazy to seek out the truth. And here’s the truth: Fife has accomplished nothing in Oakland over the last four years. Oh, she did get a few things done in her “first term results”: She killed the Oakland A’s Howard Terminal project, which drove the A’s out of town. Go Ballers! And she has reignited racial tensions in Oakland by her pathological hatred of White people. Way to go, Carroll Fife!
Steve Heimoff