MR. BROWN'S FAREWELL TOUR
It appears that with a full two years still
left in his term, Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown is going the aging rock star route, giving
us a sort of nostalgic, farewell tour, complete with "the best of Jerry"
retrospectives by local media as he waves his way out the City Hall door. Our friends
at the San Francisco Chronicle have been leading the pack, absolutely gushing
over Mr. Brown as they describe the "success" of the mayor's promise to
bring 10,000 new residents to downtown Oakland ("Downtown Brown," March
20), his increasingly law-and-order stances as he bucks up his credentials for California
Attorney General ("Tough Penalties For 'Sideshows'-Mayor Proposes Curfews For
Those Convicted Of Reckless Driving," March 30), or his wedding to Anne Gust
(too numerous to mention in one column).
You have to read deep into the Chronicle's "Downtown Brown" article
before you get what we used to call "critical analysis": "But experts
say that Oakland's urban core won't gain critical mass until new stores and restaurants
arrive in meaningful numbers," reporter Dan Levy writes. "The lack of a
true urban buzz has been the main shortcoming of Brown's 10k vision. Major retailers
have so far shunned downtown Oakland, preferring the big-box stores and shopping
centers of neighboring Emeryville, commercial real estate brokers say. The tomb-like
Sears department store at 20th and Broadway is a conspicuous example of downtown's
retail failure."
Even when they are (slightly) critical of Mr. Brown, local journalists–who should
know better–miss the point. In a March 11 column on "Brown Looks To Life After
Oakland," Chronicle columnist Chip Johnson writes: "Reviewing [Mayor
Brown's online] calendar from May through last week shows why some critics would
contend that Brown has reduced his mayoral presence for a law-and-order campaign
that would vault him to his next position as the state's attorney general. … Nearly
two-thirds of all of Brown's scheduled appearances-106 of the total-were consumed
by trips outside of Oakland, radio talk shows in Los Angeles and the Bay Area or
media interviews with national magazines, newspapers or television news shows."
The problem is, some of us have been reviewing Mr. Brown's online calendar for years
(and even written columns about them), and it is difficult to see much change from
the beginning to the middle to the beginning-of-the-end of his administration. Mr.
Brown has never been as interested in Oakland as he is in the rest of the
world, if you judge by the public time he says he puts in our town.
The further you get from Oakland, the gushier it gets. "A Match Made In Oakland"
in the Sacramento Bee this week starts out with "Anne Gust must be one
heck of a woman," and fills space at the end with speculation as to whether
or not Mr. Brown's old girlfriend Linda Rondstadt will be at the wedding (Ms. Gust
says Mr. Brown has invited her, and she approves), and whether or not there will
be a wedding waltz to one of Ms. Rondstadt's tunes. For Oaklanders who think all
of this free publicity is good for our city, they might want to think again. In
its only description of Oakland, the Bee article notes that Brown and Gust
currently "cohabitate in a loft on a gritty street in downtown Oakland."
(Note to Cynthia Hubert at the Bee: there are many areas in Oakland
that one might describe as "gritty." However, the corner where Mr. Brown
and Ms. Gust live is not one of them.)
And when there have been articles about Oakland's problems, at least recently,
they manage to put Mr. Brown in the position of the exasperated father who cannot
understand why the teenagers have not gone to sleep after he has repeatedly gone
up to their room and urged them to do so. In an article this week on reports of Oakland's
52 percent public school dropout rate, reporter Nanette Asimov of the Chronicle
writes: "It's astounding and unconscionable," said Oakland Mayor Jerry
Brown. "It's a crisis that's been going on for decades. Oakland is trying hard.
They need money. They need leadership. It's quite daunting, and it's going to require
a lot more truth-telling and honesty than has been forthcoming in recent decades."
They?
What Ms. Asimov appears to have missed is that for the past five years, since Oakland
voters passed Measure D, Mr. Brown has had the privilege of appointing three members
to join the seven elected members of the board of directors of the Oakland Unified
School District, making him by far the most powerful individual shareholder of that
institution (if OUSD were a football team, Mr. Brown would be Al Davis). A fair reading
of recent Oakland history might be that before Mr. Brown came on the scene, Oakland
schools were solvent and making slow, but steady, progress. After Mr. Brown won the
right to make 30 percent of the school board appointments in 2000, the Oakland school
system virtually collapsed, went into state receivership, and students and parents
are streaming out by the busload. Unconscionable? Yes, indeed. There is an irony
there that, apparently, most of our news outlets have not caught.
Other low points of the Brown Administration?
If you're talking development, you might look at the fact that while obsessing with
downtown for six years, Mr. Brown has failed to understand where Oakland's commercial
potential actually lies. Oakland has a series of marvelously successful local commercial
districts that could have used the "star power" and push that Brown gave
to his 10k plan: Piedmont and College Avenues, Grand Avenue and Lakeshore, Montclair
Village, Fruitvale, the Laurel District, and Chinatown come immediately to mind (we'll
return to Chinatown in a moment). Meantime, commercial centers like the Jack London
Gateway Shopping Center (formerly the Acorn Shopping Center) in West Oakland and
the Foothill Center in East Oakland are hanging on, but suffering from neglect (Foothill
just announced its losing its anchor supermarket, Albertsons).
Even if you're talking about downtown development, Mr. Brown's vision appears to
have looked the wrong way. He has focused on uptown, helping to win city subsidies
for the Forest City project which is (again) slated to attract a lot of "new"
residents into Oakland. Meanwhile Chinatown, which long ago figured out a way to
successfully mix commercial and residential in downtown Oakland, gets little official
attention or notice. A better plan for the last six years than the uptown dream might
have been a project to link lower downtown past the Civic Center with Chinatown and
the Jack London Square area, figuring out a way to move the depressed and depressing
public buildings (jail, police station, coroner's office, et. al) in between to another
location nearer to the judicial center around the Alameda County Courthouse on Fallon.
There's more, of course, but we've run out of room, just as the administration of
Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown is slowly running out its time.