THE MALLS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
Competitive elections give citizens a rare
opportunity: a chance to participate in a discussion that could actually the future
of their community.
The Oakland mayoral race–which includes heavyweight candidates Nancy Nadel, Ignacio
De La Fuente, and Ron Dellums–gives Oaklanders such a chance. But this is simply
an opportunity. It works only if citizens take advantage of it by demanding that
candidates answer questions about issues that are important to us.
In a recent Oakland Tribune article on a De La Fuente fundraiser, reporter
Heather McDonald attempted to outline some of the terms of the current mayoral debate
in the area of economic development, writing that “De La Fuente promised to encourage
the influx of private investment in Oakland, and use it to revitalize the waterfront
and other blighted areas of Oakland. Dellums has articulated a very different philosophy,
saying he supports development–but only after city leaders ensure that it embraces
Oakland's racial and economic diversity.”
I’m not sure if this accurately portrays the views of these two candidates, or shows
the differences between their positions, since it seems to imply that Mr. De La Fuente
is not in favor of Oakland’s racial and economic diversity, or that Mr. Dellums would
not encourage private investment to help cure the city’s economic problems. I doubt
if either one of those assertions is true. And, even though Ms. McDonald neglected
to mention the third major candidate in the race, I would also guess that Ms. Nadel
would also encourage development and promote diversity. So if we’re to understand
the differences and the possibilities, where should the debate go?
There is one view of city planning that cities are defined by their central core–their
“downtown,” in the old way of saying things–and that without a live and lively downtown,
a city is dead and has no identity at all. I’m not sure if Mayor Jerry Brown holds
this view–one can never be quite sure what Mr. Brown actually believes–but he certainly
acts like he does, and during his administration we have seen most of the economic
development attention coming out of the mayor’s office concentrated in the downtown
area (and by downtown, of course, we also include the Forest City “uptown” project,
which is located in the northern end of downtown).
There is another view that modern cities can be better defined by their neighborhood
commercial/social centers, and that concentration on the economic health of those
neighborhood centers can make for a living, vibrant city, even with a downtown that
is virtually dead, or never existed.
In this view, the city of Oakland is bustling and thriving, and only in need of a
little help from City Hall in order to burst out once more as the East Bay’s economic,
social, and cultural center.
The common complaint about Oakland’s downtown is that it lacks a variety of shopping
outlets, and that it virtually shuts down after dark in many places, turning into
a virtual ghost town.
That is certainly not the case in many of Oakland’s neighborhood commercial centers.
A visit to these centers–Grand Avenue/Lakeshore, College Avenue, Montclair Village,
the Laurel, the Fruitvale, the wildly-successful Chinatown–delivers a far different
experience: sidewalks jammed with shoppers, restaurants and clubs filled with patrons,
parking lots and metered spaces at their capacity. In some of these areas–International
Boulevard between 29th and 35th, for example, or most of Chinatown–vehicle traffic
comes to a virtual halt at times, Manhattan-like, because of the massive amounts
of commercial and social activity.
Traffic and parking, in fact, not “how to attract development,” is Oakland’s major
economic problem that the newly-elected mayor ought to address, and where the mayoral
debate ought to focus.
Oakland’s streets were laid out in a slower, more elegant time, and if you ever get
the chance to drive San Pablo Avenue from the Berkeley border to downtown, and then
International out to San Leandro at, say, 4 in the morning, you can see how much
the street patterns once made sense. As the population rapidly fills in, and vehicles
increase both in size and in number, that is no longer the case. At the same time,
it is easy to see that the available parking in any of the neighborhood commercial
centers no longer meets the demand.
Those twin problems, lack of sufficient parking and lack of flowing traffic, is what
has halted the further development of Oakland’s neighborhood commercial centers,
why it’s not practical to try to entice a JC Pennys to, say, Lakeshore Avenue instead
of Broadway or Telegraph. Residents of these areas are rightfully resisting further
development because the city streets and parking areas can’t handle what is already
there.
But are these problems unsolvable, simply the curse of modern city life? A quick
look around the East Bay shows that they are not.
No local city has packed more commercial development into a small space than little
Emeryville, and no East Bay City had a greater traffic problem in recent years. Many
people thought that the Emery Bay development would be the death of that city, bringing
traffic to a halt. It didn’t. Instead, Emeryville has combined creative solutions
($1 for four hours of parking in the lots, for example) with some sort of deal with
Caltrans that caused the creation of a four-lane flyover overpass that connects Stanford
Avenue with Emery Bay and Ikea and on back up to San Pablo Avenue. If Emeryville
has the smarts and the state political clout to develop such remedies, the new occupant
of the Oakland mayor’s office–whoever that will be–should certainly be able to do
the same for the transportation problems along College Ave.
One of the stories about Oakland is that in the early 1960’s the city leaders–swollen
with their assurance that the city had always been the East Bay’s economic engine
and always would be–looked on the development of the malls as a passing neon-driven
fad that could never compete with Oakland’s brick-and-mortar downtown. That might
simply be urban legend, but it certainly has the ring of truth to it. The malls in
Pleasanton or Hayward or Richmond are booming. (At the same time, none of these cities
has what one would call a thriving downtown.)
I’m glad that Oakland missed out on the malls. They are for the most part sterile,
artificial economic environments, most often completely divorced from the social
environments of the city’s in which they temporarily exist.
But for Oakland, the neighborhood commercial/social centers are the malls of the
21st century, the place where our commercial and social future ought to lie. Are
these neighborhood centers important to the three major candidates for mayor of Oakland?
If so, how would each of them preserve what we already have, and what would they
adopt as policies of improvement? How would they bring similar development to the
areas that have been left behind–much of West Oakland, for example, or the far reaches
of East Oakland going towards San Leandro? Specifics are in order. A candidate who
could successfully answer those questions–and build a campaign around those answers–could
develop a coalition that would include neighborhood residents and activists as well
as the majority of the city’s business owners, stretching across all of the city’s
diverse economic, racial, social, and cultural lines. That’s the kind of coalition
that Oakland needs. That’s the kind of political debate that Oakland needs.
I’ll wait, patiently, to see if that happens.