Mayor Quan, Oakland Needs 10,000 Jobs, Not 10,000 Housing Units!

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan is obviously desperate to maintain her job as Mayor of Oakland. She’s proposed a new version of an old initiative to build 10,000 new housing units, and is set to introduce the idea at tonight’s State of The City Address – perhaps to a chorus of boos from the balcony.

Oakland doesn’t need 10,000 new housing units, it needs 10,000 new jobs. That Jean Quan would propose housing over employment shows she’s totally out of touch with the needs of Oaklanders, and that our economic development program is all-but non existent.

The last time I checked, Oakland’s unemployment rate was still high. It currently stands at 11 percent, and while that’s down from 16 percent in 2009, it’s still around two percent higher than for California (which is at 8.9 percent) and double that for San Francisco, which stands at 5.6 percent. And what’s equally disturbing is that Oakland was the robbery capital of America in 2013 and shows little signs of abating in 2014. What do some people do when they can’t find work for an extend period, and don’t see a way out of their situation? Some turn to robbing others, and there’s a lot of that activity in Oakland.

With the unemployment rate and the robbery rate, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that Oakland needs to attract new business operations. You’d think Oakland would have an effort to market itself to businesses looking to move, right? Well, it doesn’t.

The “Advantage Oakland” effort is an initiative to attract business, but to Oakland County, Michigan, not to Oakland California. Yes, Oakland has a set of business relocation assistance programs to draw from, and currently lists Zack Seal as the contact person regarding them, but they’re buried in the City of Oakland website, where you’d have to think of relocating to Oakland to even put yourself in a position to find them. That pretty much means Zack Seal’s got a cush desk job, rather than having a set of marketing tools and a travel budget, and going out to meet manufacturing business owners around America and selling Oakland to them

Mayor Quan’s Administration doesn’t know how to do that. What it knows how to do is chase real estate developers to build housing projects, but that’s an old thing, and has been part of Oakland’s political culture for decades. Many of the developers are local, and pay in to the campaign coffers of Oakland’s city councilmembers, and so are poised to do business here.

But that’s not what Oakland needs, because it’s done nothing to change that unemployment rate. We’ve had thousands of units of housing built since 2000, and over that entire time, Oakland’s unemployment rate has not once dipped below the average for the State of California. By contrast, San Francisco, which hovered around the State’s average before 2006, moved below it, and is now well-below it.

San Francisco has a more desk-top professional class of worker than Oakland, which has been historically blue collar. What has happened is Oakland basically gave up going after manufacturing jobs. It’s not really that we stopped making things in America, but that Oakland never went after businesses that made things once it lost those that did make things and that happened during the 70s and 80s.

As an intern in the Oakland Office of Economic Development in 1987, I formed an initiative that would have saved Oakland’s apparel makers, many located in West Oakland, and I think would have built that area into a local fashion capital today. It was called The Oakland Apparel Incubator and the idea was to convert a warehouse into a giant space for seamstresses, designers, and all that make up Oakland’s small apparel workers, and basically equip them with a set of people and communications systems that would allow them to get orders from around the World and then ship out what they make in an efficient way. The idea was to set up a kind of flexible apparel manufacturing concern in West Oakland.

Outside of California Capital Groups’ Oakland Global Project, I’ve not seen any initiative that creates business and job opportunities for Oaklanders, especially those who make things. Oakland doesn’t even embrace its creative music culture, and tries to ignore its deep history in the rap music genre. That, unless you’re out of your mind, is also a form of manufacturing.

Oakland misses all of that, efforts that would create jobs, and under Jean Quan as Mayor, as the nerve to try and build more housing, thus pushing up the economic forces that have pushed many Oaklanders out of their apartments because they can’t afford them any more.

If Mayor Quan did this to get reelected, it was nothing short of a stupid move. Sorry to be mean, but Oakland needs jobs, not housing. Heck, the housing will follow the jobs anyway – that’s urban planning 101, and something obviously lost on Quan’s Administration.

This will be Mayor Quan’s last State of The City Address.

Stay tuned.