It would take an army of works to quake retrofit all the houses.

When the giant kindling box Claremont Hotel burns, so will the rest of Oakland.

To drastically slow crime, Oakland could install video for all streets.

Bottom line, the real fundamental reason for the nationally organized (yep, top-down) hate fest against Oakland is not due to its crime (it’s not the most crime filled and certainly nowhere near as bad as many dozens of other U.S. cities if broken down category by category); but is due to the fact that Oakland way back in 1946 got itself together to have something today unheard of, the General Strike, which sort of labor strike is responsible for all business revene that small businesses gather, for all benefits that we 99% who work had before the Reagan era started and now eroded no matter the marionette administration in DC, for the formation of the EPA, the weekend, for OSHA, for all of what little social safety net we have, for all that most of what little is left of and of whatever existed in the U.S. of a middle class ever had or counted as a pleasure. The richest bring nothing w/o self interest or horrible parasitic exploitation strings negating their grants and foundation “generosity”. The workers generated all that is good for the masses and Oakland, CA, was the very last city in the U.S. to have the balls to have a general strike. Funny, Oakland rawks even though we are treated to nearly unending negative propaganda in the national media and by casual reactionary snobbish regional genuflection by increasingly worthless know nothing yuppy nimby wealth worshippers. Worship the goddess nature and community values or get the hell out. Spoken by a resident of a proudly moon in Scorpio city.

I bet the wealthy thought it was all over when after WWII Oakland brought it by General Strike in 1946. By then it was that most horrifying thing the wealthy could have imagined from labor, a culturally and racially diverse uprising in solidarity. Want to see another case, a national one, where the punishment by the rich in the media and practice (enforced by U.S. military) has gone on for centuries, study Haiti, the nation where ex-slaves through off France, a colonial power…the first in the Hemisphere to do so, unless you count the uprisings by some NM Pueblo nations, also significant.

wake up, you aren’t living the dream. you are living in one of the most violent cities in the nation — where it isn’t safe to walk the streets alone at nite, the police force is so brutal/racist/ineffectual it may be overtaken by the feds, and prostitution and homelessness are rampant. if you want to justify it by saying its hip, more power to you.

those of us who have been beaten, robbed, and raped will happily diss your city and leave it to you.