The Oakland City Council has a habit of not listening to the people. And as May 5th, 2015 approached the Council was once again shooting up on dollar bills instead of healthily contemplating the needs of its existing residents. This time they got busted, as dozens of peeps from “rogue organizations” and over one hundred supporters arrested the City Council proceedings, declared a “People’s Council” and gave City Council members the gift of adjourning by 8:00 PM – with no business, funny or otherwise, being transacted.
Instead of listening in October, 2011 to peaceful people decrying the vast social and economic inequality in the United States, Oakland made the decision to beat them, tear-gas them and shoot them in the head, leaving taxpayers with a bill in excess of $10,000,000 and still accumulating.
Instead of listening to the anguished cries of the parents of Alan Blueford in the summer of 2012, and a decade of evidence that OPD was rotten to the core, the City Council chose to bury its collective head in the Oakland Hills, and is still doing so. Not a single piece of reform legislation mandating change in OPD – even the most tepid – has emerged from City Hall to date.
Instead of seeing the obvious need and the popular will, the City Council refused to deal with raising the minimum wage. Ultimately  Oaklanders stood up and voted – in unprecedented numbers (80%) – for a proposal that, for the nonce, has given Oakland the highest minimum wage in the nation. Yet not a single Council member was willing to introduce an equivalent, or even watered-down, measure.
And now, instead of attempting to do something about residents being pushed out of their homes, the City Council’s response has been to attempt to approve the sale of public land for private, luxury housing that will do nothing for the vast majority of Oaklanders who fear the next rent hike. Not only do they wish to approve the sale, but they both refuse to sell it at fair market value AND are willing to ignore both their own and State law concerning such sales.
If the City Council really listened, a large number of affordable, mixed-income public (or cooperative, or land trust) buildings would be rising on City-owned land as I type, all with a goal of preserving the diversity that Oakland is so justly proud of, rather than lining the pockets of developers and creating a twisted mirror of San Francisco on this side of the Bay.
For a few glorious hours on May 5th the City Council belonged to the people, not the police or the profits. What could Oakland achieve if that were to become permanent?
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