We hear all the time how London Breed is working to pump some new life into downtown San Francisco. Pop-up stores, a new U.C. campus, an HBCU, switching offices to housing, maybe even a soccer stadium—you’ve got to hand it to Breed and her team for using their imaginations to do something that’s never been done before: reimagine downtown.
What about Oakland? I took a long walk along Broadway and it’s so sad: shuttered shop after shuttered shop. It’s disaster row. You know what I’m talking about. The latest place to close is IB’s restaurant, on 21st Street. It’s been there for years. It’s so shocking for it to be open one day, then the next—boom! A for rent sign. There’s probably more shuttered shops along Broadway and adjacent streets than there are functioning ones.
But tell me this: Have you heard a word from City Hall—either the Mayor’s office or the City Council—about reimagining downtown? I thought they love reimagining stuff. They love reimagining public safety, which means less of it. They love reimagining the police, which means defunding them. But not a word about what to do with downtown or uptown.
I suspect they’re hoping that somehow the clock will run backwards and all those empty office towers will be filled again with well-paid workers and the shuttered shops will miraculously spring back to life and downtown will be the way it was in, say, 2017. Happy days are here again!
Well, welcome to fantasyland. That’s magical thinking and it’s not gonna happen. On some level, I have to think our woke “leaders” understand that downtown is not coming back, and that in fact it will get worse: once the rot sets in, it spreads. Why then don’t these “leaders” take substantive steps to actually reimagine downtown? Here’s my theory, which I’ve expressed here plenty of times, and I’ve never heard anyone deny or disprove it. Their plan is to make downtown so decrepit, so run-down, so devoid of human activity other than panhandling and crime, as to make it into such a slum that property values plummet. Not just downtown, but throughout the city, starting with the flatlands and spreading up into the hills (which by the way we’re already seeing). The purpose of our woke leaders in destroying Oakland is to make the city so cheap, so undesirable to the middle class, so awful, dangerous and slovenly that nobody wants to live or work here anymore. And when that happens, obviously the value of everything will plunge: commercial real estate, residential real estate. There will be no more income from property taxes, payroll taxes or sales taxes. Everything will hit rock bottom. And then—and this is the plan from Fife and Bas and the rest of the wokes—their constituents, who tend to be unemployed or very poor people who exist on the margins of society, will be able to afford to live downtown. That $2,400 a month one bedroom apartment will then fall to $800 a month. Oakland will become a destination for the least capable of our citizens: not for creative working people who make cities thrive, but those who have proven unable to compete in our society at large and depend on government largesse to survive.
Now I admit they need a place to live too, and we certainly don’t want them in tents on our streets and in our parks. But once the planned degradation of Oakland succeeds, our city will attract deadenders the way cheese attracts mice. Oakland will become a gigantic Wood Street slum. Am I exaggerating? Cities have died before. Ask Detroit.
You’ve heard of throwing the baby out with the bathwater? This would be throwing civilized culture out along with our long-inculcated values. It would literally decapitalize Oakland, in the sense that capital is money or value. Of course, when socialists like Fife, Thao and Bas say that “capitalism” is the cause of “racism,” they’re giving us clues to their real aims: economic chaos and destruction on a wide scale, with subsequent reinvention controlled by—you guessed it—them. Would you like that, dear Readers?
So I’m demanding that this city come up with a plan to reimagine downtown. No city, as former Mayor Jerry Brown understood, can thrive without a vibrant, economically successful downtown. But—and this is important—the current City Council shouldn’t be allowed to have anything to do with it. They’re not competent for so vital a task. Let them farm the job out to a responsible task force, who will study what San Francisco is doing and come up with new ideas. This task force would include architects, urban planners, engineers, business leaders and lawyers. There should be no racial component: don’t include anyone solely due to their skin color or ethnicity. Let’s get some really smart people in and let them develop a workable plan that we, the People, can get behind. I’d support that, and I know you would too.
Steve Heimoff