If Dickens were to rise from the grave tomorrow, I bet he’d head straight to the East Bay.

Because we are watching a tale of two Oaklands.

One Oakland is advancing on this country’s greatest political prize. The other Oakland is circling the urban drain. The two Oaklands demonstrate just how little space there is between top and bottom, between power and powerlessness.

Read the headlines, and in Oakland it is the best of times, the epoch of belief, the late summer of light.

A proud daughter of Oakland has emerged unexpectedly as a close contender in the race for president.

She has made history, in California and everywhere. She’s the first Democrat from the Golden State to win the party’s nomination, the first Black woman, the first Indian American woman, even the first major party presidential nominee to have worked at McDonald’s.

And if she can win—hold your breath—she’d be the first Northern Californian ever elected president. Oh, yes, and the first woman president too.

Oakland would be on top—of government, of American politics, of the free world. And that wouldn’t be its only conquest. Oakland is a democratic innovator, adopting a novel way of funding campaigns and allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to vote for school board.  “O-Town” has also become a cultural capital, a citadel of Black excellence to rival Harlem or Chicago’s South Side. Hollywood luminaries Zendaya, Black Panther director Ryan Coogler, two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali, all hail, proudly, from Oakland.

And yet, if you go to Oakland today, it is the worst of times, the epoch of foolishness, the season of darkness and despair.

Oakland and its government have hit rock bottom.

Downtown is dead. East Oakland’s streets are a mess of trash, busted cars, and broken glass. Homelessness, that never-ending California pandemic, is rising faster in Oakland than just about anywhere else.

And while violent crime falls across most of the rest of America, it increases in Oakland. Property crimes are commonplace. Last year, one car was stolen for every 30 Oakland residents, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The police department, in constant turmoil, lacks the leadership and personnel to do much about it. Cops all but ignore robberies and burglaries.

The city budget is in crisis. Political leadership is paralyzed, with Mayor Sheng Thao consumed by a corruption investigation that included an FBI raid. Thao maintains her innocence but in November faces a recall vote, brought before the raid, because of crime and other governance failures.

There’s also a recall against Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price, who runs the office where Kamala Harris started her own career as a prosecutor. Price is a parody of a progressive prosecutor, lashing out at critics and journalists and offering rationalizations for not pursuing offenders. Her former spokeswoman, now a whistleblower, claims that Price ignored laws on public records and disclosure.

With law enforcement on the sidelines during a public safety crisis, the state has tried to fill the void. The state took over Oakland’s schools in the first decade of the century; today, the city is a protectorate in matters of policing. Gov. Gavin Newsom has sent in the California Highway Patrol to try to get a handle on car thefts and other property crimes, making arrests where Oakland police have failed to act. The governor also dispatched California National Guard prosecutors to handle Oakland cases.

The population is declining, as housing prices stay high even as conditions deteriorate. Businesses are fleeing, including businesses that never flee. In-N-Out permanently closed its restaurant in Oakland—the first such closure in company history—because of robberies of customers and staff. Denny’s closed its one restaurant in Oakland, too, citing similar safety concerns. Kaiser Permanente warned employees to stop leaving their Oakland offices to eat lunch. All three of Oakland’s major pro sports teams—basketball’s Golden State Warriors, football’s Raiders, and now baseball’s A’s—have left the city in the past five years.

“I’ve been in Oakland 58 years. I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Ken Chambers, a West Oakland pastor, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

In Oakland residents you’ll find despair and resignation, mixed with a hope that the city’s tough people and resilient communities will climb out of this hole. You’ll also find conspiracy-mongering—a sense that Oakland is being targeted by larger forces that would discredit its progressive politicians and policies.

There’s some truth behind this conspiracy. It’s not fair for Trumpians to point to Oakland’s failures to discredit Harris, who left town decades ago. But it is fair to criticize her for not doing more for her hometown now. Harris’ meager campaign policy proposals offer some benefits for children and small businesses, but nothing to empower cities to fix their governments and finances.

What Harris offers Oakland is the promise of symbolic triumph, of a bit of representation. Those are nice, but will they make the cops come when you call?

In borrowing Oakland’s reputation for toughness and the underdog credibility it provides—she doesn’t much mention Berkeley, where she lived as a child—Harris is giving the American mainstream the sort of story it cherishes. We love to celebrate winners who escape rough places, but we don’t much care about supporting such places, and changing the systems that make living there so hard.

Instead, we try to take heart from the hard places and hard times we left behind.

In his book Wandering Stars, the indigenous author and Oaklander Tommy Orange writes, “You get a light behind you when what feels like the worst that can happen to you happens to you. It never goes away. It lives behind you. It’s there whenever you need it. The light shoots through, bright and wide and says: At least I’m not there. Back there when we thought the lights went out forever. At least this is not that.”

The post It’s the Best and Worst of Times in Oakland appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’ve never much cared for San Francisco International Airport—until SFO decided to take a courageous stand for truth and accuracy in airport names.

Last month, SFO’s leaders filed a lawsuit to stop the Port of Oakland from changing Oakland International Airport’s name to “San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport.”

Author and Oakland native Gertrude Stein famously said “There is no there there” of her hometown. Which is perhaps why the Oakland Port Commission justified the name change by saying it wanted to educate travelers unfamiliar with California that Oakland is an actual place that sits on the bay. I also believe that Oakland may have been combating a widespread misperception among Star Wars fans that it’s on Planet Tatooine; after all, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) was a native Oaklander.

Fortunately, SFO saw through the Oakland’s airport Jedi mind trick. The lawsuit accuses its East Bay competitor of trademark infringement as part of a grab for more air traffic. SFO also alleges that the name change creates the impression that Oakland is in San Francisco, which it is not.

I admire SFO’s bold commitment to defending geographic integrity. Which is why I’m so excited to see the airport take the next logical step in advancing the same principle, by changing its own inaccurate name.

I can hear it now: My Southwest Airlines pilot asks me to return my seat back to its full upright position—and then welcomes me to San Mateo County International Airport.

Because SFO, just like Oakland, isn’t in the City or County of San Francisco. It’s in an unincorporated corner of northeast San Mateo County, south of San Francisco.

As a lifelong SFO passenger, I can testify that taking San Francisco out of SFO’s name would be a service to the flying public.

Because it’s actually quite difficult to get into or out of San Francisco via the airport with San Francisco in its name.

SFO’s problems start with flight delays. For years, it’s had among the highest rates of delayed flights in the United States. Other badly delayed airports typically have snow or severe winter weather. Of course, SFO has fog, but fog alone doesn’t make so many flights late. It’s the poor organization of the airport itself. Its two main, parallel runways are too close together to permit landings at the same time. So, when visibility is low, there are delays. This year, a construction project has been creating still more backups.

And if fog and poor organization don’t trap you at SFO, the airport’s design will. Today’s SFO was largely created 20 years ago, via an expansion that was hundreds of millions of dollars over budget. The project left the airport feeling overbuilt and bloated, with too much distance between ground transportation and gates.

Today, getting to your flight at SFO requires taking slow rides on an internal Air Train (whose construction was dogged by corruption allegations) and taking long walks through large, glassy, and often empty halls. Even when security lines are short, walking alone can add 20 minutes to your trip. Travel websites routinely advise SFO passengers to arrive at the airport two or more hours early.

And the transportation options outside the airport are no picnic, either. SFO sits at a traffic chokehold point, with crammed freeways and dead-end streets. Public buses stop at the terminals, but the main line, SamTrans 292, only shows up every 30 minutes or so. And Caltrain, the peninsula commuter line, doesn’t stop at the airport.

BART trains have a station inside the airport, which is nice. But many trains on that line don’t go into the airport, ending their routes four stops earlier at Daly City instead. And there are so many BART stops along the 13 miles between SFO and downtown San Francisco that the trip can take nearly an hour.

When I need to go to downtown San Francisco, I fly into Oakland. It’s faster, less likely to experience delays, and more reliable. And the airport’s two terminals are small and efficient, so that it’s just two minutes from my gate to ground transportation. The airport also has a connector train to BART that can take you into San Francisco in just five stops, or down to Fremont and San Jose with ease.

You might even say that Oakland is a better San Francisco airport than San Francisco’s airport.

Of course, I would never say that. No way. Because your truth-telling columnist is 100 percent behind SFO’s righteous defense of geographic accuracy in airport names.

But I will say this: Until this cross-bay airport dispute is over, and until SFO follows its own principle and changes its name to San Mateo County International, I am changing my own name to honor the Bay Area airport I actually enjoy flying into.

So, for the time being, you can call me San Francisco Bay Joe.

The post Can the Real San Francisco Airport Please Stand Up? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Oakland A’s are baseball’s biggest losers. But their new temporary home—West Sacramento—is one of California’s greatest winners.

No California city has had a better 21st century than West Sacramento. The municipality of 54,000 people has grown in population and prosperity with striking speed, even as California has stagnated on both fronts.

The A’s will spend three years, 2025 through 2027, in West Sacramento’s minor league ballpark as the team waits for a new stadium to be built in their future home, Las Vegas. Perhaps their relocation will bring West Sac, as it’s often called, more of the notice it merits, both in California’s city halls and among state policymakers.

The city’s success is attributable to smart local governance, and to three paradoxes best explained in light of California peculiarities.

The first paradox: West Sac was able to grow rich because it was so poor. Across the river, Sacramento became a city in 1849, a year before California won statehood. West Sacramento didn’t incorporate until 1987. For most of the 20th century, it was an afterthought—an industrial town of seedy hotels, vacant lots, warehouses, rice silos, and major highways nearby communities didn’t want.

All that kept land prices low, which made West Sac attractive as the rest of the region became more expensive. The city carefully invested in new infrastructure, streets, and sewers to allow for new neighborhoods. A first wave of development, around the turn of the century, focused on the riverfront. Among the catalysts there was the A’s future digs, previously called Raley Field (now named for Sutter Health), which opened in 2000.

This brings me to the second paradox: West Sac achieved big success because it was small. A quarter century ago, it had just 30,000 residents and a median household income of $32,000.  Residents wanted to see improvements. And the powerful unions, environmental groups, and state agencies that so often delay California projects were too busy elsewhere to mess with a poor city with relatively few people.

So, Raley Field took just 19 months from ground-breaking to opening. Restaurants and other businesses found they could launch quickly. And while housing construction languished elsewhere, West Sacramento built both market and affordable housing at some of the fastest rates in California. That speed was a function of West Sac’s ability to create entire new neighborhoods, like master-planned Southport, as well as infill development in the city center.

The small city also faced little public opposition as it used its cheap land to bring in several large retailers, most notably the Capitol region’s first IKEA, a crowning achievement, in 2006. The retailers produced considerable sales taxes that provided the city with revenues for more projects. After the retailers came corporate headquarters, many of them companies involved in food production.

Such speedy development points to the third paradox: West Sac benefited both because of its distance from, and its proximity to, the city of Sacramento.

The two cities lie just across the river from each other. But West Sac is its own separate municipality and is situated in a different county, Yolo, with a mix of rural places and smaller cities. Sacramento runs on constant political competition, which can distract from the slow and painstaking work of governance. West Sac has had the good fortune of stable political leadership for over a generation.

The embodiment of that stability was Christopher Cabaldon, a legislative aide and higher education administrator who first moved to West Sac after taking the wrong freeway off-ramp. He ended up serving on the city council and then as mayor for more than two decades.

In a small community, he could move fast. “We focus on results as opposed to process,” he told Governing in 2019.  “A lot of other communities are into community meetings and workshops and planning and task forces and consultant reports, and, no, that’s not us.”

In contrast to Sacramento, whose city government is prone to obsess about creating signature attractions (an arena, an aquarium), to draw visitors, West Sac focused on building the housing and amenities to attract more residents.

Its proximity to the Capitol eventually became a draw. As California’s growing state government brought more people to Sacramento, and affordable housing became ever harder to find, people took notice of West Sac, with its new housing, new neighborhoods, and new restaurants. Many West Sac residents lived so close to the Capitol that they could walk across the Tower Bridge and be at work in minutes.

In 2014, West Sac was named the “Most Livable City in America” by the U.S. Conference of Mayors. The honor only made West Sac more ambitious. In 2017, with more families moving in, the city devoted its growing revenues to West Sacramento Home Run, an initiative offering universal preschool and college saving accounts. Its household median income now exceeds $87,000.

Ironically, the very same state government whose proximity helped West Sac grow also produces regulations that make it harder for California cities to grow. Now that West Sac is bigger, its leaders confront more obstacles and opposition. But West Sac remains a great counter-example of what California cities might do if they had more freedom.

The A’s decision to come to town brought public joy. Many Capitol region residents say that they can’t wait to go to the West Sac ballpark and marvel at the famous stars of the Dodgers and Yankees as they hit homers against the weak, and temporary, home team.

Of course, the real marvel won’t be the ballplayers, but the small city they’ll be visiting.

The post The Losing A’s Found a Winning City to Host Them appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In California, a land blessed with more than its fair share of winners, we learn our most important lessons by dwelling among the losers.

So, in this final week of the baseball season, your columnist visited the bottom of the standings in American League West to ask: Which pro sports owner is the more instructive California failure—the failed heir fleeing Oakland, or the billboard billionaire sticking around in Anaheim?

Bay Area fans and pundits already have their answer: John Fisher of the Oakland A’s.

The core allegation is that Fisher, the youngest son of the billionaire Gap founders and philanthropists, Don and Doris Fisher, is engaged in a ruthless campaign of sabotage—of his own team. His goal has been to alienate fans so that he can justify moving the A’s to Las Vegas, where he stands to receive hundreds of millions in public subsidies for a new stadium.

This has made him the most hated sports figure in Northern California, and singularly unpopular beyond. The Mercury News, distilling local sentiment, suggested that Fisher might be the “worst owner in sports history.” CBS Sports called him a human embodiment of “the depredations of shareholder capitalism” and suggested that describing his true awfulness would require the invention of a new pejorative.

To be fair, Fisher’s start with the A’s wasn’t bad. The team had several winning seasons after he became owner in 2005. But Fisher’s real goal seemed to be no victory but rather a taxpayer-supported new stadium. Unfortunately for him, and fortunately for taxpayers, California and its communities have wisely stopped offering subsidies for those. Oakland officials did propose a massive entertainment development and ballpark on the bay, at Howard Terminal, near Jack London Square. But the deal wasn’t generous enough to satisfy the billionaire and his team.

At some point, Fisher seems to have concluded that he could only secure massive subsidies for a new stadium by moving elsewhere. So, in recent years, he stopped supporting the team, and started dismantling it. He raised ticket prices, while letting the stadium fall apart. And he got rid of all players who would give the A’s any real chance to win. As a result, they became the worst team in Major League Baseball.

Fans stopped coming, allowing Fisher to justify his decision, announced earlier this year, to relocate the A’s to Las Vegas. Fisher has refused to sell the team to anyone who might keep it in Oakland, despite campaigns by fans and local politicians. Fisher has even refused to give up a partial stake in the Oakland stadium and its land—a position that will make it hard to redevelop the area after its team’s departure.

Fisher’s behavior has been so deplorable that even a sports villain, Mark Davis—owner of football’s Las Vegas Raiders, which abandoned Oakland twice—was moved to say of the A’s under Fisher, “All they did was f—k the Bay Area.”

Fisher’s malperformance might seem hard to top, but he has real competition in Southern California:

Arte Moreno, owner of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

Moreno is a different character than Fisher; a Mexican American from Tucson, he made his own fortune in billboards before buying the Angels in 2003.

Just as the A’s won during Fisher’s early years as owner, the Angels repeatedly went to the playoffs in the early years of Moreno’s ownership. But in the 2010s and 2020s, the Angels have become one of the most puzzling failures in the sport, with Moreno largely to blame.

The trouble in Anaheim was not Fisher-style sabotage. Moreno kept ticket prices affordable and spent money on his team. It was how he spent that money that’s been the problem.

The best baseball teams are deep, especially in pitching. But Moreno was obsessed with stars he could promote—the kind of star ballplayers that would be recognized on a billboard. This strategy produced a familiar sort of California inequality. Moreno, by multiple accounts, including his own increasingly infrequent public interviews, sought to build his team around one or two superstar players. He spent big money on huge contracts to established players, while neglecting homegrown talent.

The Angels became one of the most imbalanced teams in history. For the past 12 years, they have employed superstar outfielder Mike Trout, statistically the best baseball player of the 21st century. Five years ago, they picked up the most talented baseball player on Earth, the Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani, a top-10 hitter—and pitcher. The only comparable player in baseball history is Babe Ruth.

Even with Trout and Ohtani, the Angels have been losers, making the playoffs only once since 2010. Why? Because beyond these players, and one or two other expensive stars, the rest of the team is well below average.

Moreno disinvested in minor league players who might have provided greater depth for the major league team. (In one case, he was accused of not providing them with enough food to eat.) And he vetoed trades of older players for younger, healthier athletes to support Trout and Ohtani. As a result, the two superstars seem overburdened; both ended this year on the injured list.

Angels fans—including your columnist, introduced to the game by grandparents who lived in Anaheim—rejoiced last year when Moreno announced he would sell the team.

A sale promised a more balanced squad and a fresh start in the community. Moreno infuriated many fans with his public backing of Donald Trump. He and the Angels were also at the center of an ugly scandal in Anaheim involving a stadium lease and development rights for stadium parking lots. That deal with the city ran afoul of state laws requiring affordable housing, and led to the FBI arrest and federal conviction of former Mayor Harry Sidhu.

Despite the scandal and the fan base’s desire for new ownership, Moreno took the team off the market earlier this year, and the future is bleak. Ohtani, frustrated at the franchise chaos and losing, is all but certain to leave to play for a franchise with better owners, perhaps the L.A. Dodgers or San Francisco Giants.

This season in the AL West, the A’s will finish last, and the Angels next to last.

All these two owners have given us this season are two very California models of failure. Fisher, a rich man who refused to invest in the team that was his asset, is all too much like the state of California, which refuses to put enough of its wealth in service of its infrastructure, its people, and its future.

Moreno, all too much like the state, devotes its attention and money to the very richest of its players, thus failing to recognize that California, like a team, can only win when the whole roster of people performs well.

Perhaps they’ll come to their sense while watching the balanced and well-managed Dodgers in the playoffs.

The post Which California Baseball Team Has the Worst Owner in Pro Sports? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Kiara Johnson, 17, lives at the Regal-Hi apartments on High Street in East Oakland—for now.

She doesn’t have the money for next month’s rent, which her landlord is doubling. She can’t rely on parents—her dad’s dead and her mom’s in prison. The bus pass she uses was stolen.

For work, she begs for more shifts in a liquor store. But that’s not enough for her to support her older brother, who won’t get a job, and to take care of Trevor, her 9-year-old neighbor, who is living alone because his mother has disappeared. So lately, Kiara has started doing sex work along the International Boulevard corridor.

How does she go on? How does she cope? She walks around Oakland, with Trevor or her friend Alé accompanying her. “When there is no choice, the only thing you have left to do is walk,” she says, later adding: “Out here, there’s a kind of stillness that comes with having nowhere to go.”

Kiara Johnson isn’t a real person. She’s the fictional central character and narrator of the novel—newly out in paperback—Nightcrawling, by Oakland native Leila Mottley, who turns 21 next month.

With the imprimatur of the Oprah Book Club, Nightcrawling has become a bestseller, with a page-turning plot that feels very of the moment, involving sex trafficking, housing displacement, mass incarceration, and a police scandal closely modeled on a real-life case in which an officer’s suicide exposed cops’ sexual abuse of a young girl.

But the book’s real magic is how, in a story full of so many horrors, Mottley, who served as the city’s youth poet laureate, manages to convey deep affection for Oakland and the people who struggle through life on its streets. Much of the book consists of Kiara, and other characters, taking buses or walking around the city.

I found the novel so compelling that I spent the better part of a day and a night walking the very same thoroughfares the fictional Kiara roams in East Oakland, a diverse and struggling side of the city that stretches from Lake Merritt down to San Leandro.

Nearly four years and a global pandemic have passed since Mottley wrote her manuscript, in the summer of 2019, just after she graduated high school. But the streets where Kiara spends her time have not much changed.

Starting from the Fruitvale BART station, I headed over to High Street, where Kiara lives.

It was just as Mottley describes it:

High Street is an illusion of cigarette butts and liquor stores, a winding rail to and from drugstores and adult playgrounds masquerading as street corners. It has a childlike kind of life, like the perfect landscape for a scavenger hunt … It is everything and nothing you’d expect with the funeral homes and gas stations, the street sprinkled in houses with yellow shining out the windows.

In the 2900 block, I came across a ramshackle apartment building with a name suspiciously similar to Kiara’s—the Royal-Hi, rather than the Regal-Hi of the novel. The Royal-Hi seemed in better shape. It didn’t have a swimming pool at all, much less one filled with poop, like its fictional counterpart.

At the top of High, I cheated, taking a rideshare to San Antonio Park, which is as lovely as Kiara describes it in the book. Then I began a long walk, heading more than 50 blocks down International Boulevard, deeper and deeper into East Oakland.

I didn’t spot any sex workers. I did encounter various men, some of whom appeared to be living on the streets. And I saw the mix of taquerias, churches, liquor stores, and housing Mottley depicts—”International Boulevard is a weave through every kind of East Oakland living,” as Kiara narrates it.

I didn’t see the wide variety of people that the novel describes on the sidewalks. Business owners told me that street traffic hasn’t really recovered from COVID.

By early evening, I was feeling tired, and hot, even after a day far cooler than what I’m used to back home in Southern California. But I kept walking, as Kiara advises: “I think about each step and repeat to myself: heel, toe, heel, toe. Makes it easier.”

The setting got rougher when, still on International, I crossed 70th Avenue, entering the part of Oakland the locals call “Deep East.” The sidewalks were riddled with cracks. There were more people living in tents, and far more trash. Damaged cars, some obviously undrivable, seemed to take up every available street parking space.

When I turned down 75th Avenue, on my way to my walk’s conclusion at the Coliseum BART Station, I was literally walking on broken glass. I couldn’t take more than a step or two on the sidewalk without having to dodge it. And so, I started to walk on the street, trying to stay out of the way of cars driving past.

There were people around, mostly on the corners or sitting in front of small homes, but I felt isolated. I could understand why Kiara describes a walk not far from here as “the closest thing to being a live ghost. Disappearing into roadside trash and trees that somehow figures out how to grow in California’s eternal drought.”

Why can’t these streets be in better repair? Why can’t these neighborhoods have more resources? Why do we tolerate so much pain in the lives of others? In the novel, Kiara, when asked such questions by a friend, is dismissive. “Life won’t give you reasons for none of it,” she says.

She has walked every street of her city, and she knows that danger and desire are all just facts of life. “Oakland contains it all,” she says. “Heartbreak and yearning.”

The post Heartbreak and Yearning on the Streets of East Oakland appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s the proposition posed by democracy vouchers, an idea with Seattle origins that has reached the Golden State.

This fall, voters in the city of Oakland will decide whether to distribute four vouchers, worth $25 each, to city residents ahead of future elections. Oaklanders would be free to give those vouchers to local candidates for mayor, city council, city attorney, city auditor, or school board. People could split up their vouchers among different campaigns, or give all four—the full $100—to just one candidate.

Not all campaigns could accept the vouchers. To qualify to receive the money, candidates would have to receive a certain number of traditional cash contributions. They’d also have to agree to spending limits on their campaigns. That’s something a wealthy self-funded politician (think developer and Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rick Caruso) would be unlikely to do.

But those campaigns that did participate could redeem the vouchers for real money to spend on campaign activities, from polling to lawn signs. The money would come from the city’s general fund—at an estimated cost of $4 million per election.

Democracy vouchers—or “democracy dollars,” as they’re called in Oakland—may not win on this November’s ballot. But the idea is gaining traction across California and the country because of its pragmatic “if you can’t beat them, join them” logic.

Generally, a very small number of mostly rich people—less than 1 percent of the population—donate to local political campaigns. This is the case in Oakland, too, where backers of “democracy dollars” have found that most election donations from Oakland residents come from a few wealthy neighborhoods. About half of the money doesn’t come from Oakland at all, but from people or business interests who want something from the city, but are located elsewhere. Candidates spend most of their time talking with wealthy and far-flung donors, and responding to their concerns. That doesn’t benefit most Oaklanders.

Democracy vouchers don’t challenge the dominance of money in local politics; in 2020, Oakland elections saw $5 million in donations, between candidate campaigns and independent expenditures. But they do allow regular people to get in the game, creating incentives for candidates and campaigns to go out and talk to all of us. If vouchers take off, might the concerns of everyday Californians receive more attention in our politics?

Democracy vouchers make sense in an era in which Americans are concerned—or at least pretend to be concerned—about racial equity and justice. Since Seattle pioneered democracy vouchers back in 2015, the concept has made the population of donors more representative of the city as a whole by race, income, and neighborhood. Studies also suggest it has boosted voter turnout, since voters who give vouchers are more likely to cast ballots.

Vouchers also have proven their worth in court. Attempts to reduce the influence of money in elections have run afoul of judges who rule that limits on campaign money are unconstitutional. The voucher approach—inviting the public to put money into politics—has survived legal attacks.

All of these reasons are why Oakland’s “democracy dollars” plan has drawn support from a coalition of race-oriented advocacy groups like Asian Americans Advancing Justice, civil liberties groups (such as the ACLU), and old-line good government organizations including California Common Cause and the League of Women Voters.

The next step is to build more support for the vouchers among voters and elected officials. The idea has a mixed record at the polls. In recent years, a ballot measure to establish a statewide democracy voucher system narrowly failed in Washington state. A similar measure in South Dakota won among voters, but was repealed by the Republican state legislature.

Still, the attention that those campaigns generated, along with the success in Seattle, has raised the idea’s profile, and inspired movements to enact democracy vouchers not just in Oakland but also in L.A. and San Diego.

And that’s just a start. If such vouchers work in candidate races, perhaps their uses could be expanded. Imagine if citizens could use democracy vouchers to fund signature-gathering campaigns to qualify their ideas for laws or policies as local or statewide ballot initiatives.

People present many objections to democracy vouchers, most focused on the money. Why inject more money into political campaigns, critics say—doesn’t that only produce more conflict, more polarization, more propaganda and misinformation? And why devote scarce local dollars to turning residents into campaign donors, instead of paying for essential services? Can’t systems of public finance for campaigns prop up candidates with extremist views?

These are valid questions. You might say vouchers fight fire with fire—money with money—because that’s the system we have. Democracy vouchers can’t fix the campaign systems in California or the U.S. Real fixes will require major changes to our constitutional structure.

In the meantime, what democracy vouchers can do is make those campaigns fairer, and give everyday people, and especially low-income people, a voice in our democracy that they don’t currently have.

Welcome to the donor class, everyone.

The post Can Fighting Money with Money Create Fairer Elections? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The best California movie scene of recent vintage is the opening of the 2018 film Sorry to Bother You. A young man and his girlfriend are getting intimate in what appears to be a dark apartment when the room suddenly fills with daylight, making their union visible to the people outside on an Oakland street.

What the heck happened? In short, the Bay Area housing crisis. The apartment is really a garage and the garage door has abruptly opened, at just the wrong time.

This example of love interrupted is indicative of another unconsummated relationship—that between Oakland and the Oscars.

Over the past year, the city of Oakland has built itself up into a capital of cinematic excellence, inspiring more great films than even movie-mad nations like France and Japan. This reflects both a rising generation of filmmakers who are proud of their O-Town roots, and the city’s own ascendancy in an era that prizes authenticity. Since all the real people have left unaffordable San Francisco, and since there have never been all that many real people in L.A., those who want to set a story in a relatable California reality are drawn to Oakland.

But neither Hollywood nor the Academy have responded with the requisite level of love.

Now, of course, Oakland won’t be shut out at the ceremony on February 23. The greatest new American movie star of this cultural moment, Oakland-born (and Hayward-raised) Mahershala Ali, is favored to win his second acting Academy Award in three years, for playing the pianist Don Shirley in the film Green Book. And Black Panther, which begins and ends in Oakland, is one of the eight nominees for best picture.

But Black Panther—despite being a groundbreaking cultural document and a comic movie of, by and for black people—is unlikely to win. And the film’s maker, Oakland’s own Ryan Coogler, didn’t get nominated for best director, even though he brought to life the land of Wakanda, which fulfilled Californians’ dreams of a sustainable economy with a high-speed rail system that is finished and functional. This was the second time Coogler got overlooked. He also wasn’t nominated for his brilliant 2013 film Fruitvale Station, about the killing of a young man, Oscar Grant, by a BART police officer in Oakland.

And the Academy completely overlooked two of the past year’s very best films: Sorry to Bother You, a satire with sci-fi elements (and that great intercourse-gone-awry opening), and Blindspotting, a beautiful buddy film about two troubled young men, one black and white, who work as movers. Both movies were set in Oakland and made by Oaklanders, and thus capture the city’s mix of beauty and pathos.

And while the politics of Oakland are reliably progressive (the city’s badass mayor Libby Schaaf could star in her own movie about facing down Trump administration threats of arrests after she warned the public of an impending immigration raid), both films are conservative, in the original sense of the word. The films are about conserving traditions, neighborhoods, families, and humanity, for all its messiness, in the face of frightening change. Both films thus cast Oakland as the front line of defense for a world trying to fight off the disruptive power of technologists from the richer, smugger side of the bay.

In Blindspotting, the main character Collin—played by the film’s own screenwriter, the Oakland-born actor-singer Daveed Diggs, best known for his role as Thomas Jefferson in the musical Hamilton—is an ex-con on probation who moves richer people into his own gentrifying city. The film builds to a fight scene at a tech party and then a haunting confrontation in which Diggs aims a sad and angry rap soliloquy at a racist cop.

Sorry to Bother You, from the multi-dimensional artist Boots Riley, starts as a working-class comedy but turns into a darker film about a Silicon Valley company that proposes to solve the world’s economic problems through a business model secretly built on slavery and turning people into animals. In seeking an explanation for its Oscar shutout, I wondered if that plot line cut too close to the bone for Netflix and Amazon, which now fund so much of Hollywood.

Of course, Oakland is not without its own resources. Yes, it is losing two of its sports teams—the football Raiders to Las Vegas, and the basketball Warriors to fancy San Francisco. But Oakland is getting its due in other ways, since it’s that rare American place that is still distinctive and strange enough to convey its own message.

In politics, Oakland-born Kamala Harris, who rose to power as an establishment figure in San Francisco, tried to seize back some Oaktown cred by holding her presidential campaign kick-off at Frank Ogawa Plaza.

And in the literary world, Tommy Orange’s There There, a novel about Native Americans in Oakland, has been sweeping the top 10 books lists for its intimate portrayal of how different communities make a common home there.

“Cities form in the same way as galaxies,” Orange writes. “Urban Indians feel at home walking in the shadow of a downtown building. We ride buses, trains, and cars across, over, and under concrete plains. Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere.”

In her 1937 book Everybody’s Autobiography, Gertrude Stein lamented, “what was the use of having come from Oakland,” before making her famous (and false) observation that “there is no there there.” The truth is that Hollywood and American culture have long found things to use in Oakland.

The most honored-star of the past generation, Tom Hanks, still boasts about being from Oakland and graduating Skyline High. Oakland can claim George Stevens, the Oscar-winning director of A Place in the Sun, who grew up in an Oakland theater family, and Clint Eastwood, who was born in San Francisco but grew up in Piedmont and went to Oakland Technical High School. And serious Star Wars fans will tell you that Oakland is the real hometown of both Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill was born and lived there until moving to San Diego at age 11) and Yoda (Frank Oz, a child immigrant from Europe, was raised in Oakland and got his start as a puppeteer at the city’s famed Children’s Fairyland).

After the Oscar snub, Boots Riley, the Sorry to Bother You director, tried to calm enraged fans by declaring he hadn’t campaigned for the Oscars, and didn’t much care about not being nominated. The Blindspotting team hasn’t protested either, since worrying about what the rest of the world thinks is not a very Oakland thing to do.

But the rest of the world would benefit from seeing more of the cinema and stories now coming out of Oakland.

The post Is Oakland Too Real for the Oscars? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

How do you learn from a really big mistake?

Walk across it.

Which is why I recently found myself putting on a windbreaker and beginning a long, slow walk across the east span of the Bay Bridge, from Oakland to Yerba Buena Island. This piece of the bridge, completed in 2013, is probably the biggest California mistake of the last generation. The east span was completed a decade late, cost seven times more than official projections, and remains dogged by serious safety concerns.

However, the bridge does have one virtue: It holds lessons for the future, as California faces massive challenges that will necessitate big projects. Indeed, after eight years of the cautious, small-bore governorship of Jerry Brown, new state leaders are preparing to take on big initiatives on infrastructure, taxation, and early childhood.

Before they do, they should read a recently published book I brought on my bridge walk: A Tale of Two Bridges, by Stephen D. Mikesell, a Davis-based historian who previously served as deputy historic preservation officer for the state. Mikesell compares the original 1936 Bay Bridge with the troubled 2013 east span, but his book is really about the special challenges of megaprojects—that is, complex and controversial initiatives costing more than $1 billion.

Today’s cynical conventional wisdom is that big projects are nearly impossible to carry off, and that those that do go forward are destined to fail. But Mikesell argues otherwise. He explains that the original 1936 Bay Bridge met conditions for successful megaprojects.

First, local and state leaders built broad consensus about the purpose and need for the project: constructing a bridge from San Francisco to Oakland was clearly a game-changer for the region in that era. Second, political people made the political decisions about the bridge, and technical people made the technical decisions. While a politically appointed commission approved the bridge and its budget, the details of design and construction were left to technical experts brought in from all over the country. Third, costs were estimated accurately and the bridge came in under budget. And finally, the bridge builders used proven methods for construction and materials, emphasizing functionality rather than trying to make an artistic statement.

The 2013 eastern span didn’t pass all these tests, Mikesell writes. The bridge was a divisive political issue for years. Cost estimates were way off. Technical decisions about bridge design and engineering were made through political processes. And the crucial political decision—to build an expensive new span instead of a less costly retrofit of the old span—was made inside Caltrans. Who were these decisionmaker? Shockingly, Mikesell, a seasoned expert on bridges, writes that the process was so messy it’s impossible to identify exactly who was responsible.

Ultimately, warnings from leading bridge engineers were ignored as Bay Area political leaders chose what they saw as the most visually attractive bridge—a self-anchored suspension bridge—even though this less common design created all sorts of problems.

To walk the span today is to get a firsthand sense of a bridge gone wrong. The walkway itself offers the first clue: It’s on the wrong side of the bridge, the south side, which means that you get a view of the port of Oakland. If the walkway had been on the north-facing side, better views of the north bay, and even the Golden Gate, might have been possible. The walk is also polluted from the passing cars. I was often startled by loud noises from trucks hitting seams on the bridge; the eastbound traffic is so close it feels like it might run you over.

It took me nearly an hour to walk from a small parking lot at the Bay Bridge Trail entry point on Burma Road to the bridge’s signature tower and curve. There is nothing particularly beautiful or interesting about this tower and the cables attached to it. That’s a shame, since this is the section of the bridge that created most of the cost overruns. The tower is also the site of many structural problems, including saltwater intrusion into the foundation, damage to anchor rods, and substandard welds.

The bridge is also a failure because of what it didn’t do. Big projects should be transformational. But this span isn’t. It didn’t increase the bridge capacity or improve traffic flows. It is no artistic masterpiece. Paying for it actually raised bridge tolls. And prominent engineers argue that the new span may be more prone to fail in an earthquake that the old bridge it replaced.

“The 2013 East Bay is notable for how little it actually changed things in the Bay Area,” Mikesell writes.

The bridge was such a fiasco that prominent officials skipped its opening in 2013. It was left to the lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom, to handle the ceremonial chain-cutting. In brief remarks, he expressed hope that the bridge would inspire “a generation to dream big dreams and do big things.”

Now that Newsom is becoming governor—and promising big things—perhaps he can turn the bridge into a perverse inspiration by following its essential lessons. Any big project must be truly transformational, providing a service or a connection that truly changes people’s lives. Paradoxically, the execution of such transformations must be intensely practical and risk-averse, emphasizing function over form.

In other words, when you are pursuing a transformational project, achieving the transformation itself must be the sole focus.

How might such lessons be applied? If Newsom wants to build a single-payer health care system, it shouldn’t be the gold-plated model that progressive groups have been advocating for, but rather something simple, cheap and sturdy, covering everyone. He’ll need to resist efforts to make his promised new systems for taxation, homebuilding, and early childhood highly complex with loads of new formulas; the simplest systems are more likely to be durably transformational.

After reaching Yerba Buena Island, I walked around and enjoyed views of Newsom’s city of San Francisco for a few minutes. Tired and sweaty, I called for a Lyft to take me back to Oakland. But no driver would come. So I trudged all the way back, on sore feet, repeating my earlier mistake.

The post Can a Troubled Bridge Show California How to Avoid Big Errors? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For those of us who work at the Oakland Museum of California, one moment came during our exhibition “All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50,” which was on view at OMCA from October 2016 through February 2017. The realization arrived with a simple text message one Friday night during the exhibition.

Engagement has been part of our institution since its founding in 1969 as the “museum of the people.” A multi-disciplinary museum of California art, history and natural sciences, OMCA strives to connect our community and our visitors to the places, people, heritage, and creativity of our state through our exhibitions and programming.

Over the past several years, though, the OMCA has been on a journey to bring community engagement to the very core of our organization. We have made an even more concerted effort to see our mission as broadly embracing social impact and civic well-being—thanks in large part to support from the James Irvine Foundation through the New California Arts Fund, a statewide initiative that supports organizations in better engaging with new audiences and particularly low-income communities and communities of color.

The Black Panthers exhibition is part of those efforts. The history of the Panthers is, at its heart, an Oakland story, just like our museum. The Black Panther Party was founded in the same place and time as the Museum. When our building opened in 1969, the Party was mobilizing mass protests across the street at the Alameda County Court House. After Party co-founder Huey P. Newton was released from jail in 1970, he moved into the top floor of an apartment building just blocks from the Museum. Adjacent to OMCA is the Oakland Civic Auditorium, a building that held many large-scale community events, including a July 1969 conference organized by the Party that brought together leaders from civil rights organizations around the country.

Vistors enjoy “Friday Nights @ OMCA,” a program of the Oakland Museum of California, during the exhibition “All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50.” Photo courtesy of the Oakland Museum of California.

In 2014, with the 50th anniversary of the Party two years away, the Museum began to develop an exhibition that would tell more of the unknown story of the Black Panther Party. OMCA staff worked extensively with former Party members, scholars, artists, and civil rights leaders, including leaders of the coalition Movement for Black Lives (the coalition that includes the organization better known as Black Lives Matter), to bring personal stories, multiple perspectives, and creative responses together with contemporary art works, historical artifacts, and commissioned media pieces in an immersive way.

As an institution, we had a number of major goals for this project. We hoped to share a deeply local story that also had broad relevance for California, the nation, and even the world. We also aspired to connect events and movements that took place 50 years ago with what is happening in our streets, courtrooms, and civic institutions today. And, yes, we hoped to engage new audiences—including audiences that may never have come to OMCA.

Not everyone in our community was enthusiastic about our decision to embrace this subject. We got questions about whether we would tell “both sides of the story.” We were asked about whether we were glorifying a group that promoted violence. We knew we could face potential pushback both from more traditional Museum supporters and from people affiliated with the Black Panther Party about the legitimacy of a “mainstream” institution representing this still-contested history.

The exhibition opened on October 8, 2016—just one month before the presidential election. Throughout the development of the show, we had been thinking about incidents of young black men being killed by police and the resulting Movement for Black Lives. But the election hadn’t quite figured into our thinking. The exhibition and its programming took on new, even greater, relevance after November. For example, on January 21, 2017, the day after the presidential inauguration, the Women’s March took place right outside our front door while, inside our theater, the Panther Party co-founder, Bobby Seale, spoke at a public event with the poet and activist Chinaka Hodge. What had always been a timely show suddenly felt different. Very urgent.

People hungered for a place to come together to remember, to hope, and to feel empowered, just as they had 50 years ago. “All Power to the People” provided that space. Over the four-and-a-half months of the exhibition, more than 84,000 people attended, including close to 45,000 in the month of February alone. Lines stretched around the block during the culminating days. Seven hundred people joined the museum as members in the last five days in order to be sure to get into the show. We reached capacity in the gallery, since people stayed, and stayed some more, in the space. Indeed, our visitor tracking indicated that people spent two to three times as long as they do in typical museum exhibitions. Moreover, 62 percent of the visitors surveyed were people of color and 30 percent were visiting OMCA for the first time.

Vistors enjoy “Friday Nights @ OMCA,” a program of the Oakland Museum of California, during the exhibition “All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50.” Photo courtesy of the Oakland Museum of California.

The exhibition succeeded according to less traditional measures of engagement as well—such as the number of times a visitor reaction took our breath away (as when a grandmother pointed herself out to her young grandson in a picture of a protest at DeFremery Park). Or left us in tears (as many of us were at the opening when former Panthers and OMCA supporters gathered as if it were a family reunion). Or gave us hope. Or made us believe that a revolution is still possible (a belief reinforced by the many middle and high school students who came on field trips and then returned on their own with family and friends).

Which brings us to the final Friday before the Sunday closing of the exhibition. René de Guzman, the curator of the show and the Senior Curator of Art at OMCA, received a text while we were in a meeting together at the end of a long afternoon. OMCA is open late, until 10 p.m., for Friday Nights @ OMCA, a program that includes food trucks, live music, hands-on activities for kids, and other programming. It regularly attracts thousands of visitors. We already knew we would be packed that evening and it was an all-hands-on-deck affair for staff—to help with greeting guests, signing up new members, and generally ensuring a positive experience for the long lines of people.

The text was from one of the most well-known and beloved former leaders of the Black Panther Party, Ericka Huggins. Ericka asked René if she could bring a few special guests to the show that evening. We all took a deep breath, knowing that navigating special entry on this particular night was going to be tricky. René asked for the names. Ericka responded: Lezley McSpadden, Michael Brown’s mother; Gwen Carr, Eric Garner’s mother; Tressa Sherrod, John Crawford III’s mother; and Wanda Johnson, Oscar Grant’s mother.

Ericka was bringing members of the Mothers of the Movement—a group of activists whose children had been killed by police violence—to experience the OMCA exhibition. We passed the phone around the table to take in the implications of this message—and the trust and pride that it represented. For many of us, that moment meant more than even the lines around the block or the new member sign-ups.

As OMCA has evolved in our engagement work, we’ve had some successes, some set-backs and challenges, and many discoveries. This was a moment, though, in which we came to understand what engagement feels like at a whole different level.

The post How a Black Panthers Exhibition Connected Activism of the Past to an Evolving Present appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On Saturday, E3 will be cordoned off by layers of security before undergoing a controlled demolition. The monumental caisson (engineering parlance for an underwater concrete sarcophagus) will be encircled by a curtain of bubbles to dampen the destructive shockwave caused by 600 demolition charges. This will happen in the midst of extreme scrutiny from environmental watchdogs, while convoys of boats measure water quality, marine mammal movements, and underwater acoustics. When the six-second explosion is complete, the last great reminder of the “greatest engineering feat of modern times” will disappear under 50 feet of Bay brine.

We mourn the loss of great works of architecture like Penn Station and decry the wanton destruction by Islamic fundamentalists of Palmyra or the Buddhas of Bamiyan; we know that something beautiful and great has been lost forever. When a bridge is taken down, it rarely makes the papers. Bridges, as some engineers will tell you, have one function: To get you from Point A to Point B, safely and efficiently. Form following function, sometimes without the form.

We should take a minute to mourn the passing of “Old East.” It was a true workingman’s bridge: “It’s rivets, it’s steel. It’s dirty at times. It’s a means to an end, to get by. You’re working and you’ve got to cross this thing, but it’s still looking out for you. It’s taking care of you. … It’s a blue-collar bridge,” said Richard Mooradian, a structural steel welder on the former eastern span for Caltrans, who was interviewed by UC Berkeley historians for the Bay Bridge Oral History Project. In fact, it is—was—comprised of 650,000 pounds of rivets. The 22 million pounds of steel was, at the time, the largest steel order ever placed in the U.S. By the mid-20th century, the rivets and I-beams of the cantilevered Old East were supplanted by high-tension bolts and pre-stressed concrete.

Rivets on Old East

In 2013, just prior to the dismantling of the cantilever structure above Pier E3, I made a night-time journey to photograph the beauty and art in the old eastern span. I crawled up into the girders to photograph a bridge that is far from a quotidian means to an end, but something more transcendent: poetry, a spiritual relic, even somewhat alive. I’ve been exploring the deepest, tallest, and largest manmade structures in the U.S.—from Cold War missile sites, to the highest cranes in San Francisco, to manufacturing facilities for everything from paper to concrete for the past fifteen years. In the rivets of Old East I saw an inherent beauty; combined with the gusset plates, girders, and I-beams, now long gone, they were a vocabulary that many engineers could read like a verse of Shakespeare or passage of E.M. Forster.

And if we imagine engineers as poets, then cantilever bridges like the Eastern Span are the iambic pentameter of civil engineering—common and underappreciated, meant to have a lifespan in the centuries and withstand the heaviest weight loads and winds in the world. Though often denigrated for their erector-set appearance, cantilever spans have survived intact since the 1880s for a reason: None have collapsed due to natural causes.

In February of 1968, a military plane crashed into the cantilever section of the Bay Bridge’s eastern span in heavy fog, leaving only a few blackened and bent pieces of I-beam. Even the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake did not really provoke a “partial bridge collapse.” A deck at Pier E9 succumbed to the 7.1 temblor at an awkward connection between two truss decks—but the cantilever structure itself held strong.

Until its demolition, the Bay Bridge was the world’s most diverse, concentrated collection of bridge types. And it held the title as longest bridge in the world for decades. When the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed steelworker Al Zampa about his favorite bridge in 1986, he replied, “Bay Bridge. Jesus, look at her. Two suspensions end-to-end, six different kinds of bridges, 8 ¼ miles long, deepest piers in the world. We lost 24 men; we dangled up there like monkeys driving shot iron. No net. You fell, that was it. They thought we was all crazy.”

When it was complete, Old East had a spirit and life of its own, sometimes expanding and contracting up to 12 inches due to differences in temperature and load. “Have you ever been on the bridge?” Mooradian rhetorically asked the Berkeley historian. “It has a heartbeat. They all have a heartbeat. They’re all different. They all bounce and move in a different way, and that’s the heartbeat.”

East Bay truss span

The Bay Bridge was also the site of an improbably spiritual awakening that became part of the area’s intellectual history. In 1974, Gary Warne was climbing on the bridge when he had a revelation. “Once I was on the bridge I was greeted by moonlight on still waters and the skyline of the city diminutively reduced to scale on a plywood board, ready for display,” he wrote in his seminal essay “Carnival Cosmology.” “The bridge was obviously a jungle gym made to climb rather than drive over: The cars just using it for the in-between times. … It was then that I was first struck with the feeling that we were here to play, if nothing else, here to play with the world and other people.” That distinctly local exaltation of conscious play became the basis for Warne’s Suicide Club, which was an inspiration for the Cacophony Society and Burning Man, even though Warne himself died in 1983.

In fact, the bridge has been seen in spiritual terms since its opening on November 12, 1936. It was hoped that the bridge would not just join two great cities, East and West, but also unify “the hearts and goodwill of men.” The opening events lasted five full days, and they included 200 planes flying in perfect mass formation; fireworks releasing parachutes with American flags; President Roosevelt activating a switch to signal the procession; the release of a thousand pigeons. The governor of California cut a golden chain with an acetylene torch.

When the final scraps of steel exit the Bay, there will remain just a few pylons of the old causeway at a soon-to-be-created Gateway Park in Oakland. Parts of it—about 1 percent—will be reincarnated as park benches, lamp posts, bus shelters, gazebos, and other public art projects under an agreement with arts organizations in Oakland.

No doubt someday I’ll have feelings for the new bridge, but now it lacks the imprint of time and the memories and ownership that can only come through the rituals of working, reflecting, remembering, and playing. Mooradian knew how he would respond when asked about the new Eastern Span, “I don’t pay attention to it. I just don’t. It’s not mine. I have no thing with it yet.”

The post Mourning the Loss of a True Workingman’s Bridge appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.