Politician on the Rebound Will Take Over City on the Rebound

Jerry Brown is a pretty lucky guy.

Once his $40,000, bargain-basement inauguration ends late Monday--when the pillow-sitting lovingkindness meditation is over and the final bar of Oakland blues has faded into the darkness--he can look up and survey the city he has inherited.

And heave a huge sigh of relief that he’s becoming mayor in 1999 and not a moment sooner.

Yes, there is still poverty and drug abuse, and the school district faces great difficulties. But just check out the other vital signs:

The murder rate here has just hit its lowest level in 25 years. Non-subsidized housing is being built for the first time in recent memory. Job creation is up. Although the economic boom has not flourished here as it has in many parts of California, the recession is over.

The Cypress Freeway overpass has finally reopened after crashing down in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. And many of the 3,500 homes razed in the monstrous 1991 Oakland Hills fire are being rebuilt, to often palatial specifications.

When current Mayor Elihu Harris was inaugurated for the first time eight years ago, the city was in far different shape. “The manufacturing base was leaving town,” says Vice Mayor Ignacio De La Fuente. “Retail was gone. Crime and murders! The city was in rampage, really.”

Bad Times in Oakland

The city that landed in Harris’ lap was bad and got worse in the early 1990s. Murders had hit an all-time high the year he ran for office, compliments of a crack cocaine epidemic. Redevelopment money that could have gone to build fancy shopping centers was used instead to patch up damage from earthquake, fire and recession.

The turnaround for this growing city of 396,000 began in 1996, said William Claggett, executive director of the city’s community and economic development agency. Today, “the economy in the region is very, very strong, and Oakland is now in the catbird seat as far as immediate future development goes in the next five to seven years. Brown’s coming in at a really good time.”

Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr., 60, the former California governor, former presidential candidate, former Linda Ronstadt date, campaigned against what he viewed as cronyism in City Hall. He described his efforts as “a public statement that the old ways of carrying on business in Oakland must be changed.”

It worked. He won election in June with nearly 60% of the vote, becoming the first white mayor since 1977 in a city that is 41% black, 26% white, 17% Latino and 16% Asian and Pacific Islander. And his strong-mayor initiative, Measure X, designed to give him greater power over Oakland’s government, was overwhelmingly approved in November.

The big question, though, is whether Brown can harness that power, says David Tabb, professor of political science at San Francisco State University.

“Even though Brown’s lucky in respect to some things about Oakland, the fact is that West Oakland and East Oakland and the Fruitvale area still have high crime rates, and the problems of economic development are overwhelming in those areas,” Tabb said. “It’s been very difficult for Elihu Harris to do anything about it. And I think it will be equally difficult for Jerry Brown.”

Indeed, things are far from perfect here in this bad-rap, not-so-bad-reality city. At the top of the new mayor’s still fuzzy agenda is a school district with a majority of students performing below national proficiency levels.

And although crime has dropped by double digits throughout the self-proclaimed “Capital of the East Bay,” there are still nagging pockets of deep urban decay, neighborhoods where empty warehouses loom and young men on street corners at 8 a.m. are selling drugs, not waiting for carpools to well-paying jobs.

“The crime rate is down, but the drugs still flow,” said one longtime East Oakland resident as she and her neighbors watched police officers sweep in and make a flashy drug bust in the early morning light. “Crime and grime, that’s what we got.”

Yes, that’s definitely what they have in East Oakland near the Coliseum, in West Oakland and along the industrial Interstate 880 corridor. But today many parts of this varied city--of hills and flatlands, waterfront and lake--are more vibrant than they’ve been in a decade.

Jack London Square along the city’s waterfront used to be a nearly empty venue, with consumers staying away from restaurants and retail outlets largely due to fear of crime. Today it is difficult to get into Scott’s Seafood or Il Pescatore on a weekend evening.

The port has grown extensively, and the airport is about to undergo a $650-million expansion. City Hall, shuttered for the better part of Harris’ term because of earthquake damage, is restored and forms the centerpiece of the new Civic Center complex.

That $100-million administration complex consolidated government staff in one place, vacating at least 200,000 square feet of office space elsewhere in town. The market is so strong that the vacated space was rapidly snapped up, officials said.

Part of Oakland’s good luck is due to the even better luck of San Francisco and the Silicon Valley, where affordable office and warehouse space are hard to find. In comparison, Class A office space can be found in Oakland at half the rent of space in San Francisco, officials said. Koret of California, a San Francisco-based clothing manufacturer, is moving its headquarters to Oakland, bringing another several hundred jobs to the downtown, which is already home to the headquarters of the Clorox Co., the national and California headquarters of Kaiser Permanente and the systemwide office of the University of California.

Oakland, says the city’s mayor-to-be, is “catching up.”

“It’s a city with unspent potential that will attract more and more people,” Brown said in a recent interview. “My goal is to build up the core of the city as a place to live and work, which provides social and ecological benefits.”

New Jobs in High Tech

While estimates show that the city bled jobs in the early part of this decade--dropping from 170,200 in 1990 to 166,470 in 1995--local development officials figure that the city has added nearly 14,000 jobs in the last five years, many in high tech.

And in November, the most recent month for which statistics are available, unemployment stood at 5.8%--just a hairsbreadth above the statewide rate of 5.7%. Even as the population has grown, the number of residents on public assistance has dropped. In 1996, 19,727 families were on public assistance; today the city has thousands more residents and 15,738 families receiving assistance.

However, Luann DeWitt, spokeswoman for the county social services department, notes that although the number of adults on general assistance is down, more people are receiving food stamps than ever. And the rosy unemployment figures do not account for those who have never been employed in any legal fashion, she said.

“When you are taking temperature gauges, there are an increasing number of people working, but there’s an increasing number of working poor,” DeWitt said.

Among the city’s most intractable problems are its schools. Before 1991, the district had gone through six administrations in as many years, and at least half a dozen employees or former employees were indicted or arrested in 1989 on suspicion of misappropriation of funds or stealing from the district.

While the turmoil has abated since, students in the Oakland Unified School District still fare poorly on state standardized tests. According to district statistics, only 29.5% of all eighth-graders tested in the spring of 1998 were considered at, near or above proficiency in reading--down from 39% a year earlier. Only 35.1% were at, near or above proficiency in mathematics, down from 40% a year earlier.

Plummeting Crime Rate

In fact, the only level showing consistent improvement is second-graders--the beneficiary of statewide class-size reduction and a current local push to make sure all children here can read by third grade.

“There was growth in second grade districtwide,” said Sue Piper, district spokeswoman. “That says to us what we’re doing to turn things around is starting to work. But we’re not there yet.”

Crime is another good news/bad news topic. Last month, Police Chief Joseph Samuels announced that the murder rate for 1998 had dropped 34% from the year before--to 63 or 64 from 99. At the same time, armed robberies and assaults with a deadly weapon were down about 27%.

“So far this year, less than 20% of our homicides are drug-related, compared to over half in 1990,” Samuels said then. “The drug problem is not as bad as it used to be. But it’s not what we want it to be.”

The city that handed him a rare mandate is also rooting hard for Brown. Poet and author Ishmael Reed, among the best known of Oakland’s literati, believes that his city of sharp contrasts, of proletarian flatlands and palatial hillside homes fit for “dictators,” will probably benefit from Brown’s attentions.

“When he came to our neighborhood, he was mobbed,” said Reed, who will read his poetry during ceremonies Monday night. “He’s very popular among African American voters. I hope he doesn’t blow it.”

* CALIFORNIA AND THE WEST: More state news appears on A10.