Costco At Oakland Army Base? Probably Not

Live in Oakland long enough and you start to notice a few things are awry in terms of getting access to the kinds of services a typical middle class Bay Area family expects to find.

Let's say you want to go to Costco to buy some food for the next week. Well, your choices are to drive to San Leandro, Walnut Creek or up to Richmond. Strangely, there's no Costco in Oakland, even though it would seem the retailer has a big base of customers right here. Costco even has a store in San Francisco, indicating they're not afraid of urban settings.

For years, the only Wal Mart around was down in San Leandro, alongside the Costco. Now one has opened near the airport, but that still takes you pretty far from the heart of the city.

Suppose instead you want to go to a hardware store to buy some tools. There's Home Depot nearby, which is sort of in Oakland, but really it's pretty much in Emeryville. Recently, another Home Depot opened up alongside the 880 freeway, so that's an improvement. But there's no Lowe's to be found, and the Orchard Supply is in Berkeley.

Everyone knows that Emeryville has managed to snatch away from Oakland virtually all the valuable retail opportunities that have arisen in recent memory. They got the Ikea and the Emery Bay shopping mall -- all this in spite of having zero mass transit accessibility.

The situation with the former Oakland Army Base gives you a glimpse of why this has happened.

In most cities throughout California, a major issue is City Councils putting too much emphasis on retail, because it gives them a way to bloat the government through sales-tax receipts. Because of Proposition 13, property taxes are far less lucrative, so residential development is often less favored.

Not so in Oakland. We spurned the a new downtown stadium for the Oakland A's for a set of foreclosure-ready instaslums. And our fearless leaders are about to do the same thing with the Army Base.

First, the city decided to waste more than a year of planning time fooling around with an idiotic proposal from the Wayans brothers to build a film studio on the property. So far as I can tell, no consideration was given to the fact that the average Oakland resident would receive no benefits whatsoever from such a proposal. The government likely wouldn't have reaped any tax dollars from it either.

Now, according to various sources, the choice is down to two proposals.

The first would focus on the sort of retail that Oakland is sorely lacking. Recent articles have suggested that Costco might be interested in the location, so that would be at least one anchor tenant for the property. The proposal also includes a hotel and conference center, which makes sense given the property's access to the freeway.

Sadly, the second proposal sounds a lot more likely, given Oakland's terrible track record for city planning. That proposal would focus on office space and "industrial" uses which go along with the port of Oakland.

I have no idea why some people are obsessed with retaining industrial land use in Oakland. My only guess is that it's the result of some sort of collusion between the unions and some sort of socialist desire to keep as many blue-collar jobs around as possible.

Office space also seems a bizarre way to use the land. Shouldn't we at least try to cluster office space around mass transit? If so, wouldn't it make sense to put that near the West Oakland Bart station, a neighborhood of burned-out graffiti-covered buildings?

To me it's a no-brainer. Bring in a set of retail businesses which will bring the kind of upper-middle-income shoppers Oakland needs to eliminate its image as a city of poverty. And, it will provide residents one more reasonable destination within the city, so we can stop driving to Walnut Creek to shop.

We'll keep an eye on this as it develops. I am not optimistic.

Oakland's Low Homicide Clearance Rate: A Tactic?

My foray today into the cloudy Oakland afternoon was punctuated by two articles regarding the future of Oakland. So, when I arrived home -- after a brief stint tickling the ivories on my Steinway B -- I sat down to write this entry.

The first article was a column by J. Douglas Allen-Taylor in the Berkeley Daily Planet which spent a significant amount of time dissecting my views on local politics. The second was the cover story regarding Oakland's low homicide clearance rate published in my favorite local publication, East Bay Express.



I couldn't help noticing a striking similarity between the two articles' appraisals of the current situation in Oakland, and it got me wondering whether there is some purpose at work here.

Allen-Taylor's column seemed irritated by my decision in the past two months to highlight the effectiveness of Oakland's regressive parcel taxation and increased police presence in encouraging the poor to leave the city. While he disagreed with my contention that this is a good thing for Oakland, he appears to agree with me that this process of gentrification is well underway.

Before moving on to the crux of the matter here, I want to take a look at two specific points made by Allen-Taylor in discussing my views.  Actually, before doing that, I want to again thank Allen-Taylor for mentioning this blog in his column. While he clearly disagrees with my political perspective, he is doing the community a service by further popularizing this blog and its message. A diversity of viewpoints is important, and the East Bay clearly lacks a sufficient dose of non-Leftism.

Allen-Taylor's first point involves my decision to remain anonymous in writing this blog. Frankly, I'm surprised that he takes issue with this decision. We live in a part of the country that is not particularly friendly to those with views like mine. So, I am simply adopting a tactic frequently employed by the oppressed throughout history.

Allen-Taylor also seems confused by what I mean when I opine that Oakland has more than its reasonable share of the poor. To this, I encourage him to think about the relative function of wealth and poverty in an economy. Obviously, wealth is preferable to poverty. This fact encourages people to enrich themselves -- thereby innovating, working hard and improving society as a whole. Poverty should always be available as a choice in a free society, but it should not be much fun. Wealth should be a choice as well, but it should require work and a bit of luck.

The problem with Oakland is we have inverted this relationship. Through government policies such as rent control and welfare we have permitted what should be prime real estate to remain impoverished. Why should a family earning $100k a year live in Walnut Creek and commute 45 minutes to San Francisco while people languish on food stamps in neighborhoods a mere 10 minutes from those same jobs? It doesn't make sense; it's a misallocation of resources. Oakland should attract those wealthier residents.

Above all, Allen-Taylor agrees with me that Oakland pursues policies which drive out the poor. The odd thing to me is that he seems to think this is a bad idea, but I didn't see him take apart Mayor Dullums' support of Measure NN or any of the other regressive parcel taxes we've seen in the past decade. Perhaps he's like most Leftists in that he wants to get money into government hands, even if the net result is terrible for the poor.

The East Bay Express article discussed the correlation between the percentage of homicides solved in Oakland and the homicide rate itself. The article makes the reasonable argument that failure to solve crime encourages more crime.

But what really caught my eye was the article's implication that this is a direct consequence of deliberate policies by Oakland's police department and city government in general. The Express seems to agree with Allen-Taylor that, rather than solving homicides, the police are content to harry the city's poor residents by chasing around after so-called "hot spots."

Reading this article also reminded me of what I see when the Tribune publishes the pictures of all those murdered in Oakland during the year. By and large, those murdered are non-white, and they live in areas of the city which correlate with lower incomes and home values.

So, we appear to have a city which enacts regressive parcel taxes, fails to stop crime in its impoverished areas and instead tasks the police with making the lives of the poor as difficult as possible. Our policies are therefore perfectly aligned with the goal of gentrification -- something I support strongly.

But how is this possible? Oakland is a bastion of Leftism, voting for such leaders as Barbara Lee and Ron Dullums. Is it possible that this is a deliberate policy? Or is it just a consequence of incompetence and the inherent flaws of Leftism.

While I would like to think that this set of policies is deliberate, I think the latter explanation is by far the more likely one. I have long noticed that government action seems to create more unintended than intended consequences.

I find it hard to imagine that our mayor and police chief set out to increase the homicide rate -- just as I doubt that Leftists in Congress hope to foster government dependency when they implement social programs. For the most part, these people have their hearts in the right place. It's just that the actions they choose tend to have consequences opposite from those they intend.

I believe this in turn is a consequence of government's tendency to view policy from a very static perspective. They do not expect people to react to the programs they implement. So, it never occurs to them that, if they offer money to bail people out of foreclosure, some people will purposely stop paying their mortgages to get government money.

Similarly, Oakland consistently votes to raise taxes on the poor to pay for programs to help the poor. Never mind that all this does is introduce a layer of bureaucracy into the system.

And, Oakland's police department chases "hot spots" around the city, thinking that the homicide rate is the consequence of people being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Never mind that if you are not involved in drug dealing or other gangster-type activities, Oakland is as safe as any other city in the country.

Luckily, we conservatives reap the benefits of this wrongheaded thinking. It's no coincidence that San Francisco -- America's most liberal big city -- has already ejected most of its poor residents. Oakland is close on its heels, and not a moment too soon.

Gentrification is here to stay, and I couldn't be happier.

Housing Affordability Problem? Great!

America is beginning a remarkable transformation involving the re-urbanization of many upper-middle-class households. This trend is driven by a number of factors, including aging baby boomers, traffic jams and environmentalism.

Predictably, cities like Oakland will likely fail to take advantage of this trend because of their bizarre attachment to slums.
As far as I know, I'm the only East Bay blogger who actively opposes so-called "affordable housing" no matter how it's packaged. I categorically oppose it because it runs counter to any sort of optimistic vision of a growing, thriving city.

Affordable housing is designed to entrench those who are unable or unwilling to compete in the economy. It:

• Takes valuable land from those who would be willing to pay more for it and allocates it to others, disrupting the natural economic balance and distorting pricing signals in the marketplace.


• Creates "haves" and "have nots" among the poor by randomly selecting some of them to help. Economic reality makes it impossible to give every poor person a piece of coveted property without adopting full-on socialism. (Incidentally, labor unions do the same thing, but that's for another time.)


• Invites corruption by allowing government officials to distribute benefits to their cronies and their cronies' cronies.


• Discourages mobility. Much like rent control and prop 13, it makes the optimal strategy to never ever move apartments or houses, for fear that costs might rise. Thus, people turn down new job opportunities for fear of losing their government perquisites.


• Fosters mistrust among the potential higher-income residents by signaling that government is "out to get them." This is also the reason why no Oakland high school can attract the best students. Parents won't even give the schools a chance for fear that government officials will find yet another way to stick it to them.


• Carries with it the presumption that certain types of residents are more desirable than others.
  
  
  
  • If anyone's more desirable, wouldn't it usually be the wealthier resident?
  
  
  • Why not let the market decide who is more desirable?
  
  
  
  

V Smoothe writes, "Of course" there's an affordability "problem" in Oakland. What's that even mean? If people couldn't afford the prices charged for housing (whether to rent or to own), they would look elsewhere, and prices would decline. Obviously, outside of the housing bubble fallout, that's not happening. And that's great for Oakland! That means people want to live here. Why would we want to disrupt that?

The answer is simple: Petty selfishness. Governments enact policies like affordable housing because there are a set of people who want to get whatever they want, by whatever means necessary. In this case, they've failed to get what they want through the economy by competing, so now they want the government to change the rules of the game and just declare them the winners.

Now, I can hear people saying that I'm just piling on the "victims" in this situation. Such an argument is pure sophistry. No one is suggesting laws which tilt the scales of government against the poor. The scales should be flat for everyone, rich and poor, black and white. This is the proper function of government.

People like to argue that we need affordable housing so the people who work as low-wage service employees in a given city can also live in that city. The problem with this argument is that, in a supply-constrained environment, it's a zero-sum game. For each service employee who gets a spot, you have to kick out one lawyer, banker or engineer. Instead of the low-wage employee living in a suburb, the higher-income person moves there. So, the suburbs prosper while the cities suffer.

And, of course, the policies don't even have their intended effects. I know a couple who purchased a home using a special "affordable" mortgage by simply having the lower-earning spouse apply for the loan without the other. Everyone is familiar with the stories of well-off retirees living in absurdly cheap rent controlled apartments. The bottom line: Housing responds very well to economic signals, and by harnessing capitalism instead of railing against it, cities like Oakland can attract more affluent residents.

It's always so saddening to me to ride BART along the Highway 24 corridor. Cities like Orinda and Lafayette are the direct beneficiaries of the ridiculous policies on this side of the Caldecott Tunnel. In past generations, cities competed to attract the sorts of coveted residents and businesses which now flock to our eastern neighbors (and, humorously, Emeryville). These days, our cities compete to entrench ghettos and provide excellent housing for parolled felons.

To what end? To make our cities "funky?" I submit that we would do just as well on that score if we abandoned these policies. The Bay Area is full of interesting people with good jobs who would like to live in the sort of urban environment we can provide.

And besides, murder, rape, graffiti and wandering ne'er-do-wells are not "funky." They're symptoms of cultural suicide. We should be fighting against these forces, not inviting them in.

It's time to set aside these "affordable" housing policies, and pursue a rational, competitive drive to attract the best possible residents -- those who have competed in the economy and done well. In other words, we should let the market decide who lives here.