Oakland just might be broken for good.
Some say tech will help - bringing in new fancy high paying jobs and companies. Some say tech is making things worse here by blowing up the cost of living and forcing people into the streets.
Here's the Oakland PTSD T Shirt featured in the video: my-store-57884...
Downtown Oakland everyone! Don’t get too excited. This isn’t a very fun place. In fact, it’s not a very nice place at all. Oakland has always been the cheaper, more culturally stimulating ugly sister of San Francisco across the bay. And based on what I saw and from what people are saying, Oakland is in a bad place right now.
For this drive, we’re going to tour downtown Oakland and visit a few neighborhoods here. It was late in the day at the end of October and the skies were partly cloudy.
You probably won’t be wowed by this downtown. But it’s actually nice compared to the surrounding areas. Cause Oakland is a very rundown place in every direction. Trash graffiti and homeless people seem to be in every nook and cranny. You can see that in other videos I did.
Downtown is one of the few areas in Oakland that’s not completely trashed. Yet. It’s in west Oakland which is the better Oakland - but that's not saying much. This downtown isn’t fancy and it's very dangerous at night. A little later I’ll talk about my night walk through downtown, but as you might expect it wasn’t pleasant.
Oakland is trying to gentrify the downtown area. They’re tearing out old ugly warehouses and putting in sparkling new condos in parts of town. However, it can be hard to justify paying $5,000 a month for a condo here when the first floor windows get smashed, people are getting shot nearby or your car is vandalized. And all the new growth has outpriced a lot of people here, so there are a bunch of empty buildings. People here wonder why they can’t be turned into cheap apartments.
Now I talked to several people while in Oakland this day, and there seems to be a dichotomy among residents here. On one hand, there’s a lot of pride among people in West Oakland. Oakland is very funky and gritty and rough around the edges, and a lot of people here are into art and music and self expression. It’s often hard to tell what’s vandalism and what’s art. Or what’s both.
Many residents have pride in Oakland, and they think San Francisco is an overpriced bunch of snobs without a sense of community and culture. Here in Oakland you pay $5k for a condo only to have your windows shot out. But across the bay, you pay a million bucks for a house with poop on your porch.
People I talked to say they look out for one another on this side of the bridge and they want change. A lot of people here say they want to make Oakland better - or at least not let it get worse. Some will say Oakland is pushing BACK against the negative that has crept in. Locals will tell you stories about how during protests, the community would stand guard to protect the small business owners from being looted. Or how people will demand a more even playing field for the poor.
But when I drove around Oakland and the surrounding areas, it was hard to see evidence of the community pride. It’s like people live in what they used to call paradise, but now treat it like hell.
Oakland is challenged in many ways. Drugs, gangs, shootings, graffiti, trash, homelessness and poverty are issues that are getting worse all the time. And it used to be that you could flee up into the surrounding hills to get away from Oakland’s drama, into areas like Walnut Creek. But it’s even creeping into the nice neighborhoods, too.
Here in downtown, it’s not very safe. Besides the property crime that happens on just about every block, there are often shootings. Sometimes you can hear gunfire down here every night of the week.
It’s not ALL bad here. Because it’s cheaper here than in San Francisco, a lot of technology companies have moved into the downtown area. There’s certainly a startup scene here and with that comes a lot of smart, motivated wealthy people. The city has a downtown economic development plan with hopes to revitalize the area with additional housing, public spaces, and other improvements. So that’s good.
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