Oakland’s Economic Development Problems: Zennie Abraham’s Plan

Oakland has forgotten how to do economic development. The one obvious way to learn that this is the case is to do a search on Google under “oakland economic development.” What one finds, as of Wednesday, June 25 is a first page result on the City of Oakland’s website, which reads this:

“Community & Economic Development Agency (CEDA) Dissolved”

That’s a real incentive to want to do business with the City of Oakland, isn’t it? Well, it gets worse.

The page, as it stands now (and I took a screen shot of it in case someone went to alter it), reads in a nutshell that Oakland doesn’t have much money for economic development, and there are many functions it doesn’t do anymore.

So here we have Oakland Mayor’s Race Candidate, and friend, Joe Tuman, presenting what he says is the only economic development plan ever presented by anyone running for mayor, which is true, and yet, it’s completely divorced from the reality presented on the City of Oakland’s own economic development page.

What the City’ Of Oakland’s economic development program page is saying is 1) we don’t have the resources we once did, 2) we don’t have a plan to replace them, 3) we don’t have a handle on what the problems are, and 4) we don’t have a plan to deal with them.

Consider that the City of Oakland says it “Established a new Office of Economic & Workforce Development to ensure that the City’s economic development priority has adequate resources and is focused on business relations, retention, attraction, and development. This newly formed office will be positioned to grow as legislative activity emerges that supports economic development in light of the dissolution of redevelopment.”

See: http://www2.oaklandnet.com/Government/o/CEDA/index.htm

Really?

What’s happened is that Oakland was so reliant on tax increment financing to pay for everything from land acquisition to staff salaries (including part of Mayor Quan’s salary) that it forgot how to use other nationally-available economic development tools, and never tried to create its own to fill the void. Fully 70 percent of Oakland’s flatlands area was in a redevelopment project area of some size (the 7,000-acre Coliseum Redevelopment Area was the largest in California). That means the Oakland Redevelopment Agency collected that property tax revenue and used it for tax increment financing to generate tax increment revenue. When the State of California and the California Supreme Court, at the behest of former Mayor of Oakland and now California Governor Jerry Brown, made redevelopment agencies illegal, all of that went away.

Oakland did nothing to replace it, and to this date hasn’t done anything.

What’s bothersome is that everyone from candidates to Charlie the Dog seems to have the idea that if some Oaklanders are retrained, that will solve all of the economic development problems. That is the lazy way out of economic development. It doesn’t say that the economic planner has to bring business to Oakland that employs our residents; it implies there’s something wrong with some Oaklanders, when that’s not true.

A New, Workable, Real, Economic Development Plan For Oakland

The Oakland Economic Development Plan I propose will do the following:

1) Identify our economic development needs.
2) Match those needs with available resources
3) Turn areas where Oakland lacks the resources into places where we have them.
4) Implement the resource use plan to build an inventory of businesses that employ Oaklanders who are low-skilled and low-income first.
5) Monitor our employment rate with the objective of getting to full-employment in Oakland.

The first action of the new plan is to form a template of specific needs, what we have, and what we need.

Employment: what’s the unemployment rate, who’s without a job, and what kind of job do they need. The unemployment rate we know to be around 12 percent, generally the largest group of those not employed are African American and female – the vast majority without a college education. Thus, we need low-skilled, well-paying manufacturing jobs.

That, in turn, calls for working with real estate brokers to identify land areas in Oakland suitable for the development of manufacturing plants. (And something I did as an intern for the Oakland Redevelopment Agency fresh out of Berkeley Planning School, when I found six different sites to relocate EBMUB large and small storm pipes from their then-current facility across from what’s now the Oracle Arena and now has been the site of a software company office building for several years. The objective in 1987 was to put a Price Club there).

Once that’s done, we then make a list of existing businesses seeking relocation, and go after those companies.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has 27 active programs under Community Planning and Development. Oakland has not shown that it’s applied to use any one of them – the website acts as if the national programs don’t exist. It makes one wonder what Oakland Mayor Jean Quan’s doing when she flies to Washington D.C. other than getting a photo-op with the President of The United States, Barack Obama?

Consider that a perfect program for the City of Oakland’s called “Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) (Entitlement)” What is does is ask cities to establish what are called “entitlement communities” or…

 

“Entitlement communities develop their own programs and funding priorities and consult with local residents before making final decisions. All CDBG activities must meet one of the following national objectives: benefit low and moderate income persons; aid in the prevention or elimination of slums and blight; or meet certain community development needs having a particular urgency. Some of the activities that can be carried out with community development block grant funds include the acquisition of real property; rehabilitation of residential and nonresidential properties; provision of public facilities and improvements, such as water and sewer, streets, and neighborhood centers; public services; clearance; homeownership assistance; and assistance to for profit businesses for economic development activities.”

 

Now, that’s so much like what our own Redevelopment Programs were that the City of Oakland could use its existing project areas as the basis for new entitlement communities, and that’s what my plan calls for.

We will use the entitlement funds and combines them with funds from the Oakland Private Venture Capital Organization. The OPVCO’s objective will be to match private investors with business opportunities in Oakland. The board will consist of a mix of business, investment, and community activists, but call for the businesses identified by it for investment to be solid in operation, or have real market-capturing potential. The board will also identify companies around the World that have operations they can relocate or expand in Oakland. By focusing on manufacturing businesses in the entitlement areas, we can assure the creation of low-skilled, middle-class-wage jobs.

Consider that we’re using programs that exist right now, today – programs that the City of Oakland doesn’t identify, and Joe Tuman’s proposal seems to imply never existed, and no other person running for Mayor of Oakland has pointed to.

Sports In Oakland Is Economic Development

My plan recognizes that sports in Oakland is economic development, and that means we approach it with a plan. Sports in Oakland is more than the Oakland Raiders, Oakland A’s, and Golden State Warriors, it’s knowing something we don’t know right now: how many arenas, hotels, gyms, concert halls, tracks, and other sports-related facilities do we have, and compare that to the master list of available sports events to bid on annually, and that’s released by the National Association of Sports Commissions.

There are, at last count, over 200 events to bid on, from volleyball championships to The Super Bowl. Each one of those sports events draws tourists to Oakland, provides employment and contracting opportunties for local vendors, and gets the city noticed by the national and World media.

Now, Oakland can’t just think about this; we need a sports commission to take on this work. I started the non-profit Oakland-Alameda County Sports Commission in 1999, and on a bet with then-City Manager Robert Bobb that I could create such an organization and get it Federally-approved within four months. I did just that.

The City of Oakland, under economic development director Bill Claggett in 2000, was set to fund my sports commission for $80,000 to start, and for which I had a plan for matching funds. But then-Mayor Jerry Brown slammed it when he asked that I not return after my Super Bowl effort, and all because in an email to my Oakland-Alameda County Sports Commission board I accused him of not being comfortable with anyone who was young, black, male, and as intellectually aggressive as his white counterparts.

(I could never get a meeting with Mayor Brown regarding my Super Bowl work and did not get one until he was made aware of my email, and then called me info our first meeting, a year, and a half into my Super Bowl: Oakland project. On April 21st, 1999, at 4:21 PM, Mayor Brown told me that he didn’t have time for me when I approached him regarding the Super Bowl.)

So, I quit Oakland, and I stand by what I wrote to this day, even as I voted for Brown for Governor of California.

But the bottom line is the Oakland-Alameda County Sports Commission was never picked up by anyone. When I went away, it dissolved, as I controlled it. But no one at the City of Oakland bothered to ask me to help them revive it.

The Oakland Downtown Coalition

Another part of my Economic Development Plan will be to work with the Oakland Chamber of Commerce to establish the Oakland Downtown Coalition. The ODC is something I created in 1997 to help bring together a set of downtown business groups who’s relations had become so bad they stopped talking to each other.

The ODC met monthly to focus on the formation of a transit plan for the Broadway and 14th Street Intersection, grew to a 45-person membership, and became the focal point for the resolution of a number of problems in relationships between City of Oakland and Alameda County organizations and offices, and private business people. The Broadway and 14th Street Intersection Plan got “un-stuck” and is now complete and has been for years.

The ODC will focus on specific development and business objectives that have become stuck for whatever reason, and bring the parties together to get to a resolution and implementation. The idea is to prevent downtown Oakland from becoming nothing more than a set of divided interests.

The Port of Oakland Is Part of The Plan

Rather than micro-manage the activities of the Port of Oakland, this Oakland Economic Development Plan will look at how it fits into our overall objectives and then ask how we can help where it may be weak. Where the Port’s clearly on track, we’ll leave it alone. Where it’s not, we’ll work with the Port of Oakland and its board to shore up that weakness. That could wind up bring in a new airline for the Port, for example. It may call for a new baseball or football stadium on Port land, but only if we can gain the right financing.

This Economic Development Plan Will Not Do Too Much

The plan will not stray from the focus I have laid out, which is really getting to a point of full employment by working to employ those who have the greatest job need and live in Oakland. Sometimes in Oakland land-use development is confused with economic development.

For example, we say we don’t have retail in Oakland, and that’s a problem, but it’s not an employment solution that brings middle-class jobs – it’s a land use and quality of life problem. We have to do the hard work of bring in the jobs that pay money to Oaklanders who need them the most, and the retail businesses will then have a reason to be here when we work to attract them to fill a land-use / quality of life objective. Indeed, for every one manufacturing job we create, history shows, even today, that there are between 3 and 6 new service jobs create via new businesses growing in number around that facility.

Look, what I’m talking about is being done in America, today – in places like Montgomery, Alabama, and even in Hayward, California. There’s no reason Oakland can’t rebuild its inventory of middle-class jobs, and grow into a full-employment city. That objective is the primary one in my economic development plan