The Lies That Matter

Guest Blogger: Priyanka Sharma-Sindhar

Why is it that some lies are so much bigger than others? I’ve been watching the amount of media attention Gavin Newsom’s affair has been getting, and frankly, I’d much rather the same amount of attention was showered on something that actually affected the lives of more than 10 people. I understand why more people would care about this affair than just Newsom, Ruby Rippey-Tourk, and Alex Tourk. He is the mayor of one of this country’s loveliest cities, he is good looking and wealthy, and yes, he did have sex with his friend’s wife who also happened to work for him (that makes for a good story). That might be a lousy thing to do. But things happen.

If it is “an asshole thing to do,” as a friend put it, there are a lot of other things that qualify as “asshole things to do”.. and everybody’s doing asshole things. Besides, I’m a strong believer in seperating people’s personal and professional lives — and so long he didn’t fail at his job, it still isn’t affecting more than 10 people.

What, however is a big deal, in my opinion, is….. fake handicapped parking permits. Yes, I’m sure you’re saying ,”What?” But please, why does someone’s sex life matter more than the dozens of lies that I see hanging from the rear view mirrors of cars and SUVs that no handicapped person is driving. These cars block the best parking spaces in downtown Oakland for hours. So, if someone’s really handicapped, or if someone wants to park legally in the area– by actually feeding the meter coins every hour — they’re going to be very frustrated.

And towards the end of the day, I often see someone very healthy (they may have other health issues, but obviously none that impair their walk) walk to their car, get in without much effort, and zip away. And we’re talking about Mercs, BMWs, and other gorgeous auto creations. Surely, they can afford to park in the garages across from their office buildings? Or maybe that eats into the car payments?

And these fake placards, I promise you, affect more people than some politician’s sex life. Some cities have set up teams of volunteers who cite parking permit offenders. We need to do so. A walk down Broadway and/or Franklin will convince you.

When I was growing up, I often heard people say a white lie is better than a thousand truths. Now if you want to know what a white lie is — it’s one that does no one any harm, that preserves peace, and perhaps even helps someone. Maybe the doctor that issues these fake health certificates thinks he’s helping someone. But he’s hurting a lot more people than he’s helping.

Grease is the Word

A friend’s wife recently tried to bribe the DMV. I’m not sure of the
details, but I think her unsuccessful attempt was as clumsy as
including a couple of twenty-dollar bills when she returned her
written test for scoring.

She was lucky. The clerk ripped up her test and told her to
reschedule some other day. Even with an American citizen for a
spouse, her immigration status isn’t entirely settled, and the DMV
official might have made a lot more trouble for her.

When she told my friend what happened that day at the DMV, he
threw a fit. He reminded her that this is California, and not her
homeland. Petty bureaucrats don’t break the rules for strangers for
$40. My friend’s wife knows this. She comes from a country that is
routinely listed as the most corrupt in the world. Everyone, from the
lowliest village traffic cop to the president, takes bribes where she
comes from. The relative honesty of public officials here must be
one of the more bewildering aspects of her new home.

But she wasn’t completely wrong. In fact, her miscalculation may
have been one of dollars and not cultural mores. In the last 16
months, the feds have charged five workers at the DMV on
Claremont Avenue with taking payments of $100 to $500 to issue
fraudulent smog clearances and bogus licenses on behalf of
brokers, who themselves were charging $1,500 to $4,500 per fix. In
December, I sent my friend the small article reporting the most
recent guilty plea in the Claremont Avenue case. He showed his
wife, who said, “I told you so.”

I was reminded of this incident this week while reading a piece on
the origins of public corruption in the Economist. The article notes
that political scientists aren’t sure if poor countries are rife with
corrupt officials because they are poor in the first place, or if
corruption itself makes countries poor. Either way, the most corrupt
countries are also among the most fucked-up. We ought to be
grateful that our local bureaucrats can’t be had for less than $100.
When $40 gets you a driver’s permit, you’ll know we’re in trouble.

See You on November 15

We’ll be taking a hiatus from the blog for the next several days as we prepare for the launch of our new site. We’ll be back with a new look, and many more stories about this great city from a new crew of writers, bloggers, and reporters on November 15. Drop us an email if you think there is something we should be covering, or you want to come to the launch party. alex@novometro.com

Inclusionary Zoning is Back

This is a tough one. Oakland City Council takes up an inclusionary zoning ordinance Tuesday evening that would require 15 percent of new rental units in the city be affordable to a family of four earning around $50,000. Affordable units for sale would have to be within the budget of a family of four with an annual income of $83,000. Thus, a maximum rent for a four-room apartment would be $1,458. A spacious, new condo could be had for $250,000. Developers could also opt to put money in an affordable housing trust fund. The fee for a project with 100 market-rate, two-bedroom units would be $5.3 million.

That works out to a “tax” of $53,000 on each unit. The question is this: Will that mandatory extra cost stifle development in Oakland? Oakland Native thinks so. And a paper published by the Reason Foundation in 2004, a Libertarian think tank in Los Angeles, argues that inclusionary zoning fails to create affordable housing while it simultaneously prohibits the creation of market rate housing. The study ends this way: “Inclusionary zoning should only be enacted if the goal is to make housing more expensive and decrease the quantity of new housing.”

But a 2002 study prepared for the Los Angeles Housing Department concluded that inclusionary zoning policies throughout the state have not hindered housing production, but have actually resulted in more housing in places like Sacramento and San Diego. The study found that “housing starts most closely track the unemployment rate.”

Part of the problem in evaluating the pros and cons of inclusionary zoning lies in the wildly different numbers the researchers use to support their competing arguments. For example, the authors of the Reason study claim that inclusionary zoning policies in the Bay Area have produced only 7,000 units over 30 years. According to another team of analysts in Washington D.C., that figure is off by about 93,000.

Crafted by City Councilwomen Jane Brunner and Jean Quan, the proposed ordinance would make an exemption for projects within 1,000 feet of a BART station.

Erecting a speed bump to development in Oakland makes me nervous. So does the prospect of Oakland no longer being an affordable home for the kinds of immigrants that make a city a hotbed of entrepreneurialism and creativity. Jane Brunner told the San Francisco Chronicle it would have been better to introduce inclusionary zoning in the midst of the housing boom. She’s right. It seems dangerous to do this now with DataQuick reporting Monday the first downward tick in housing prices in four years.

Oakland Violent Crime Report

A report released last month from the Alameda County Public Health Department finds that the homicide rate for black men in Oakland is 102.1 per 100,000 residents. For the city as a whole, the murder rate is 25 per 100,000. Statewide it is 6.7 per 100,000. For every 100,000 white people in Oakland, five are murdered each year.

The report is full of grim statistics that still shock despite the fact that, as the authors write in their introduction, “disparities by race, age, gender, and neighborhoods have been well documented.”

Kernighan Campaigns

One Friday afternoon, I joined Patricia Kernighan for some door-to-door campaigning in the lower San Antonio. It was late afternoon, and dead quiet. The neighborhood kids were inside playing video games, or watching television. The parents were still at work. Ms. Kernighan and her team of about six middle-aged Vietnamese volunteers accounted for just about all of the action on the hilly streets tucked behind Highland Hospital.

The leader of the volunteers was Trung Nguyen, a former lieutenant in the South Vietnamese Navy who first came to Oakland in 1969 to train at the Navy Supply Base. He returned to Oakland for good in 1981. But not before spending a few years in a Vietnamese prison. Mr. Nguyen pointed to another volunteer and said that the man had been a captain in the South Vietnamese Navy. The man smiled. Mr. Nguyen said that Oakland’s Vietnamese love Ms. Kernighan. If that’s true, it might be because Ms. Kernighan was once the chief of staff to Danny Wan, who represented the district until he resigned in 2005. Mr Wan was known as a politician who built bridges to Oakland’s Vietnamese community.

In her tight race against Aimee Allison to keep her City Council seat representing Oakland’s District 2, Ms. Kernighan is wise not to take the support of any group for granted. Ms. Allison, a smooth-talking political newcomer with a Green Party membership and a Stanford B.A. has been winning over supporters since the runoff race began in June. Ms. Allison, 37, depicts Ms. Kernighan, 57, as a pillar of the establishment.

With a troop of former officers in South Vietnamese Navy acting as her street team this particular Friday, Ms. Kernighan doesn’t even try to shake the image as an establishment candidate — although she protested the Vietnam War when she was a student at the University of Washington, and she opposes the war in Iraq. Only in Oakland could she be considered a conservative. She says she agrees with much of what her opponent says about the state of crime, affordable housing, and job opportunities in Oakland. But she says the political and fiscal realities inside City Hall quickly take their toll on high ideals.

Ms. Kernighan won the council seat after Mr. Wan resigned. She didn’t have much of a political career before that. She was active in her children’s school, Crocker Highlands. She did “volunteer stuff.” She ran unsuccessfully for the school board in 1990 against Jean Quan, who now serves on City Council. “We were just a couple of unknown housewives,” she says. She has a law degree from Hastings, but she hasn’t practiced law in years.

A politcal ally of City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente, Ms. Kernighan did not endorse Mayor-elect Ron Dellums, who beat Mr. De La Fuente in June. I asked her what she thought of the new mayor.

Kernighan: I think it’s going to be interesting. I’m pretty excited to have someone who is going to be more present and engaged.

NovoMetro: What do you think is the cause of Oakland’s crime spike this year?

Kernighan: I don’t think anyone really has the answer to that. It’s kids hitting a certain age. There’s also a new drug. I don’t know the street name, but it makes the (users) crazy.

NovoMetro: What about negotiations with the police officer’s union that would change the hours police officers work?

Kernighan: I think the council is going to be tough on (the police union). Somehow the message needs to get to get to (the union) that people are not supportive of what they are asking for.

Walking down East 27th Street towards 14th Avenue, Ms. Kernighan points to a pothole and says Oakland’s roads are a disaster. (This was before a study was released, which found that they are indeed among the worst in the state.) “The streets are always what we don’t do,” she says.

Detroit Vs. Oakland

Thanks to Oakland Native for directing us to this story from the Detroit Daily News. They even have “gritty” in the lead.

Street Heat Isn’t Hot

I accidently stumbled into this rally for Phil Angelides Monday afternoon. The Oakland Tribune called it a “throng.” That might be overstating the case. Sandre Swanson’s description of the lunchtime crowd as “street heat,” is certainly an example of political license. I walked away thinking that the Democrats will never make the mistake of running a non-celebrity for governor again.

Oakland’s Detroit Complex

As the Oakland Athletics take on the Detroit Tigers in the American League Championship Series that begins Tuesday, we can count on at least one offering from the sports commentariat that compares and contrasts the two cities. We already know the adjectives to expect: Gritty, working-class, overshadowed, etc. Race will be an unvoiced subtext. But apart from a black population above the national average, Oakland and Detroit have little in common. Detroit is at the epicenter of the American automobile industry’s slow-motion implosion and has lost 51,000 residents between 2000 and 2005. No one argues that. Oakland’s population is a matter of debate.

Fortunately, we have an alternative to the social commentary coming from the press box at the Coliseum this week. The American Studies Association hosts its annual conference in Oakland, October 12-15. With the title of “The United States from Inside and Out: Transnational American Studies,” race will not be under the surface.

On Saturday, just when the A’s will be (God willing) preparing to sweep the Tigers in Detroit in game four, the ASA will host a panel called “Visualizing Oakland and Bay Area Communities: Art, History, and New Immigration.” Here is the description from the ASA: The current demographics of the city of Oakland illuminate the wide range and complex racial and ethnic diversity of the United States in the new millennium. According to the U.S. Census 2000, whites comprise approximately 31% of Oakland’s population, African Americans 35%, Asians 15%, Latinos 21%, and Pacific Islanders 0.5%. This panel will provide an important visual corrective to the traditionally binary black and white ways race has been imagined in Oakland through an exhibit-format panel that brings together visual work on Chinese, Iranian, Latino, African, and Tongan American communities that have not shared a common space. In contrast to the traditional one-at-a-time group-by-group exhibit approach, this panel will provide a space for exploring the relation of these communities to one another.

Here’s another interesting panel to check out on Thursday. It looks at labor in the East Bay.

Wireless Coliseum

GigaOm’s Katie Fehrenbacher writes about Earthlink angling to make Oakland Coliseum a wireless hotspot. Earthlink wants Oakland to know it has the chops to provide wireless Internet across the city, and unwiring McAfee would be a demo. The coliseum plan comes as city officials are reviewing consultant candidates who will assess what it will take to build a municipal wireless network in Oakland.