dogtown commons

Since I’ve compared the murder rates of Oakland and Newark recently, I thought I would pass on the sad news that Newark’s long stretch of time without a homicide has ended:

A 43-day stretch without a homicide in Newark — the city’s longest such period in decades — came to an end Tuesday night in front of a bodega in the violence-prone South Ward, where the police said a young man was fatally shot in the head.

This was the longest period of time without a homicide in Newark since 1961, there was a 57-day stretch without any murders.

I wrote last week about the historical similarities between Oakland, CA and Newark, NJ — and the dramtically different paths they seem to be on right now, with Oakland’s murder rate soaring while Newark’s plummets.

Well, a week later, the contrast looks even starker. While Oakland just had its most violent week of the year, Newark has now gone for its longest stretch without a homicide since 1963 — and the NYTimes article points out that the decline in murders is not only good for the victims, but it has freed up detectives to revisit unsolved cases, which may lead to arrests, which may lead to a reduction of further crimes, and so on:

As the weekend approached, with its promise of gunplay, law enforcement officials said Friday that they had passed a new threshold: 33 days without a murder, the longest stretch since 1963, when there were no homicides for 40 days.

As of last night, there had been two homicides this year; by this time last year, there had been 12. The number of shootings has also decreased, the Police Department said. In 2007, there 99 homicides in the city of 281,000.

In a speech earlier this month, the city’s mayor, Cory A. Booker, said the city would “set the national standard for urban violent crime reduction.”

Since homicide detectives have fewer new investigations to handle, the police said they were using the lull to try to resolve old cases. The Essex County prosecutor, Paula T. Dow, said her investigators were also looking at old cases, with the help of a new federal grant that would allow them to take a closer look at DNA evidence.

“When you keep adding on increased resources, manpower and strategizing, you’re going to reap results in the long run,” Ms. Dow said. By the end of June, law enforcement officials will know better whether a real change is under way, she said. “I’m hoping for the best.”

No one in Newark seems ready to declare any long-term victories yet, but even the most skeptical citizens quoted in the article seem cautiously optimistic. Contrast that with Oakland, where the most skeptical citizens are calling for the mayor’s job, and cautious optimism can hardly be found at all, except among city employees whose job it is to be optimistic.

When the Grand Lake Guardian sounded the alarm two weeks ago that a thrift store chain — Out of the Closet, which supports healthcare for AIDS patients — might take over the vacant GapKids storefront on Oakland’s Lakeshore Avenue, the forces of nimbyism and “progressive” hypocrisy were mobilized. Commenters on the article were almost comical in their self-involvement and fear of the unwashed masses, writing things such as “As a homeowner in this neighborhood, I would like to see the Gap Kids store replaced with something I would actually shop in” and “I have no issue with reuse of goods, but out of the closet usually has a goodwill image.” (A “goodwill image,” in case you can’t read between the lines, means poor and trashy, certainly not the kind of refined clientele that we want in our neighborhood).

While many of the concerns raised are euphemisms like “not a good fit for the neighborhood,” the distaste for poor people is hardly concealed. Local eminence Pamela Drake is quick to distinguish between a used-clothing boutique (desirable) and a thrift store (undesirable), and she says explicitly that she likes thrift stores, as long as they are not in her neighborhood: “As a former owner of a consignment store, there is a big difference between a Goodwill and a consignment shop like Maribel. They are not really in the same category though both promote reuse. I often shop at the Alta Bates Thrift and like it. However, Lakeshore/Lake Park is a very small shopping district. Having a very large store full of dollar bins and possibly junk could tip a delicate balance and discourage new small businesses from investing.”

To be fair, there are a number of commenters who welcome the idea of a thrift store, and who seem to appreciate that vibrant urban neighborhoods depend on socio-economic and lifestyle diversity. Maybe the homeowner quoted above won’t shop in a thrift store, and that’s her prerogative, but did it cross her mind that other people who live in the neighborhood might never shop at a GapKids?

City Council member Pat Kernighan, always responsive to the needs of her constituents, has leapt into action. She wants “a more desirable store” to come to that space. She calls for community meetings and mobilization among citizens to fend off the looming thrift store menace. She informed the site owner’s representative that “a thrift store would not be welcomed by the majority of area residents” (apparently she believes this because she has heard from “15 neighbors” opposed to Out of the Closet, but only “3 neighbors” who support the idea — a very unreliable survey, given that the vast majority of neighborhood residents probably have no idea yet that a thrift store might come to the location). She called representatives of Out of the Closet and says that she “explained that Lakeshore is trying hard to attract more shoppers with disposable income to keep all the stores in business and that a thrift store would lead in the other direction.”

There you have it. Kernighan dispenses with the euphemisms about Out of the Closet not being “a good fit” for the neighborhood, or its “goodwill image,” and she gets to the heart of the matter in no uncertain terms: Thrift stores mean poor people, and “Lakeshore” is trying hard to attract rich people, not poor people. Give her points for being candid about it, at least. The “Keep Oakland Economically Segregated” lobby seems to be as strong as ever.

Oakland, California and Newark, New Jersey have a lot in common; in some ways they are like mirror images of each other on opposite sides of the country. They are both mid-size cities that crouch in the shadow of a larger and more glamorous neighbor across the water. They are both major regional ports. They are both former industrial powerhouses that have suffered in the last half-century as jobs disappeared and many residents fled to suburbs or other cities. They are both known for their social strife and high crime rates. They are both in the middle of major revitalization efforts, especially around their downtowns. And they both have relatively new mayors, Ron Dellums and Cory Booker, who talk idealistically about working with citizens to turn their cities into models for the nation.

So how do Oakland and Newark differ? Well, nobody who currently lives in Oakland will find this description in Friday’s New York Times at all familiar:

NEWARK — Thursday night’s State of the City speech was the annual occasion for Mayor Cory A. Booker to highlight his accomplishments and broadcast his grand plans, but for many here — including, to a significant extent, Mr. Booker himself — the actual state of the city can be summed up in a single digit: 2.

That is how many murders there have been in Newark so far this year, down from 12 at this time last year. And, as Mayor Booker exulted, 109 fewer people were shot last year than in 2006, earning Newark plaudits from a national police executives’ organization.

Mayor Booker, like Mayor Dellums, uses plenty of inspirational rhetoric. Some examples from the Times article are: “In 2007, we kept our focus, we kept our momentum and we continued to march toward what I believe to be Newark’s certain destiny: to be America’s leading city in urban transformation” and “We believe that we will create miracles in our sacred city. Let the world watch us rise.” The Newark Star-Ledger reports that he finished his speech with “I believe, I believe, I believe in Newark.”

But unlike in Oakland, there are signs — preliminary, but real — that Booker might be earning the right to boast. And if the comments on the Star-Ledger’s report are any guide, many Newark residents are feeling pretty optimistic that things really are getting better. Contrast that with the comments on the San Francisco Chronicle article about Dellums’s State of the City address, which are dominated by pessimism and calls for his recall or resignation.

I don’t want Dellums recalled myself, but instead of spending his time chasing Federal funds and campaigning for Hillary Clinton, I wish he would take a close look at what cities like Newark are doing that Oakland isn’t. No one expects miracles or instant results, but more than a year into his term, it would be nice to see something to give Oakland residents a reason to believe.

If you need an example of the mindset that public transportation supporters are up against, all you have to do is look at today’s San Francisco Chronicle article on parking around city schools. The gist of the story is that teachers and school staff around many SF schools park in public spots on streets near the school, and since most of those parking spaces are in one-hour residential-parking zones, they end up running out to their cars between every class, moving their cars to new spots, and then running back in time for the next class. Many end up getting tickets because they don’t move their cars in time.

Everyone seems to recognize that this is completely insane, yet the only solution anyone takes seriously is increasing the availability of parking, by distributing more city permits which allow teachers to park all day in residential zones for a small annual fee. Public transportation is mentioned only once in the article, in this paragraph reproduced in its entirety:

City and school officials encourage everyone to take public transportation, walk, ride a bike or carpool whenever possible. Teachers said that such options are often impossible or inconvenient with bags full of lesson plans, books, students’ homework and art supplies.

This is, frankly, ridiculous. It might shock the Chronicle reporter to hear this, but there are many teachers in cities all over the country — and in San Francisco — who get to work just fine without cars, lesson plans and all. And I would bet that a lot of the students in these San Francisco schools also get to school just fine without cars, often carrying more than a fifth of their body weight in textbooks on their back. Yet in two short sentences, the notion of mass transit, walking, or bicycling is dismissed as “often impossible or inconvenient” for teachers.

To get an idea of what lengths people will go to in order to avoid “inconvenient” public transit, here is one choice bit from the article:

On a recent morning, Buena Vista school secretary Judy Diaz abandoned the phones and the photocopier to run out to her van - again.

She stopped in her tracks just outside the building’s front doors.

“Where did I park?” she mumbled to herself before seeing the vehicle up the hill.

She then drove down up and down side streets where there are a limited number of all-day spots, but every one was taken. Some teachers arrive by 6:45 a.m. to get one of those spots before they fill even though classes start at 9:30 a.m.

Diaz grudgingly pulled into another one-hour space around the corner and checked the time.

Think about that: Some teachers arrive by 6:45 a.m. to get one of those spots before they fill even though classes start at 9:30 a.m. Yet these same teachers think that carrying homework and lesson plans on a bus or a bike would be too inconvenient? And Judy Diaz (who as a secretary probably doesn’t need to schlep lesson plans, art supplies, or homework to work with her) would rather run to her van and search in vain for a better parking spot several times a day, instead of finding an alternative to driving?

I don’t mean to pick on the teachers or other staff in San Francisco schools. They are surely no sillier than anyone else when it comes to transportation alternatives, and that is the most depressing aspect of this. No one — not the teachers, not the reporter who wrote the article, and not the city officials quoted in the article — seems to be able to break out of the mindset which assumes that the only possible solution is to increase the availability of parking, rather than to reduce the need for it.

This lack of imagination about transit options actually manages to take an advantage of urban life and twist it into something negative. For example:

School board members admitted this is a long-standing problem with no easy solution.

“In a neighborhood with crowded parking, we can’t expect them to put the teachers’ interests above all others,” said board member Jill Wynns. “This is just an ongoing problem of an urban school district. It’s a conundrum.”

This is exactly backwards. It is precisely in urban school districts where parking should be less of a problem, because unlike in suburban or rural areas, people in urban districts have access to buses and trains, or may be able to live close enough to walk or bike to work. One task that proponents of mass transit must work on is to reframe discussions over transportation, so that urban density is seen as an opportunity to eschew use of cars, rather than a problem of where to park them. The lack of vision shown by every single person involved in this Chronicle story demonstrates just how tough that task will be. If these teachers in San Fransisco can’t comprehend the possibility of getting to work without cars — and the benefits, personal and global, that would ensue — then the odds of getting people in most other parts of the country to leave their cars behind seem long indeed.

It says something depressing about Oakland — or maybe about me — that my first thought when I read about the following incident was, “How strange that the knife fight didn’t quickly escalate into a gun fight”:

OAKLAND — As many as eight people suffered knife wounds early Sunday at an East Oakland house party when a fight broke out after a woman pushed a man who had pushed her, police said. Some of the brawlers later kidnapped the woman who rented the house where the party was given — along with her niece and a man — but the abducted trio were able to escape, police said.

Those wounded — the woman who was initially pushed and at least seven men — are expected to recover. Some of them sustained only minor cuts while others suffered injuries ranging from punctures to gaping wounds that required dozens of staples to close, police said. They were being treated at local hospitals and none of their names were released.

It’s also a reminder of why it’s so ridiculous for people to say, “Guns don’t kill, people do.” If guns had been involved, we would likely be reading about several people dead, not several people wounded.

The New York Times reported on Thursday that Chinese officials are expected to cut Beijing’s automobile traffic in half during the summer Olympic Games, as part of their strategy to reduce the pollution that pervades the city’s air. (A separate article describes plans by athletes and their coaches to cope with the pollution, including doing their preparatory training outside the area and possibly even wearing masks during competitions.) Beijing did a test of this anti-smog tactic last August, when cars with license plates ending in odd and even numbers were only allowed to be driven on alternating days. Traffic delays were dramatically reduced, but it is not clear that there was much short-term effect on pollution levels.

The Beijing plan got me daydreaming earlier today about what would happen if for some bizarre political or environmental reason, all motorized vehicles were suddenly removed from roadways forever. (Yes, I know this is an absurd fantasy, and no, I am not proposing this as a goal.) What would become of our urban geography, if all those millions of acres of pavement were suddenly available for carfree use?

(An empty Bay Bridge shown during the closure of labor day weekend 2007. Flickr photo by The Artist™ used under a creative commons license.)

One model for imagining new uses for old spaces is the conversion of abandoned rail lines. Nationwide rail-to-trail conversions like the Iron Horse trail in Contra Costa county are one example, but more exciting, at least to me, is the high line project in New York. The high line is an abandoned elevated rail line that snakes for well over a mile down the far West side of Manhattan, where it used to bring freight to and from the area’s warehouses and factories. It marches unperturbed over busy surface streets and passes right through several buildings as it makes its way through 25 or so blocks of the city.

(The high line shown passing through a former Nabisco factory — now the gourmet Chelsea Market complex — at West 16th Street and 10th Avenue. Flickr photo by Zantony used under a creative commons license.)

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Via BLDGBLOG come these whimsical visions of a future San Francisco utopia — at least for those who prefer farming over football. The posters are displayed on kiosks along Market Street as part of the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Art on Market Street program.

The full series of six posters, along with some photos of them in place on Market Street, can be found at Steve Lambert’s Flickr set or at his own website.

Lambert and co-creator Packard Jennings were also the people behind the Bus Stop Ad Bench Project in Oakland in early 2006, which I don’t remember noticing at the time. I generally prefer the posters, although I do like the “you don’t need it” bench ad, shown here on Grand Avenue near the corner of Telegraph. (I wonder how Ken Nwokedi felt about having his ad subverted by the neighboring bench.)

China, like several Bay Area cities, has declared war on plastic bags. The campaign is described as follows on the government’s English-language website:

In a circular posted on the central government’s Web site (www.gov.cn) on Tuesday, the General Office of the State Council ordered a ban on the production, sale and use of ultra-thin bags (defined as less than 0.025 mm thick) as of June 1. Further, supermarkets and shops will be banned from giving free plastic bags to customers as of that date….

…Meanwhile, ultra-thin plastic bags are banned in passenger trains, vessels, buses, planes, stations, airports and scenic spots. Relevant supervisors must make sure their underlings would not offer such bags.

I hate to be so cynical (really, I do!), and I don’t mean to dismiss the problems caused by plastic bags, but this may just be the latest publicity effort by China to improve its environmental reputation in advance of the summer Olympic games in Beijing. In the photo below, by Flickrer rytc, the new Olympic stadium might look to coastal Californians as if it is shrouded in a familiar fog, but in fact the stadium is obscured by a miasma of “thick smelly smog”:

People are raising serious questions about whether athletes will be able to compete safely in air as polluted as Beijing’s. Chinese officials reportedly plan to take drastic measures to clean up the air by summer, including closing factories and limiting car use in Beijing, but it’s not clear that there is enough time to fundamentally change the city’s air quality. Chinese officials take pride in the number of “blue-sky days” that Beijing now has, but one recent visitor describes what it was like to go for a brisk run through Beijing even on a day when the air appeared to be clear of smog:

Well, apparently poor air quality doesn’t begin to engulf your lungs until they are stressed. I discovered this about a half mile into the run along this crowded six lane boulevard while jogging in the sparsly populated biking lane. The run came to its first grinding hault when a bus accelerated in front of me and I literally stopped to gag. Despite the move toward more restrictive auto emissions, at least half the cars on the road appear to have been built before the advent of the catalytic converter…

Nonetheless, after my first bus encounter I picked myself up and pressed on, making good time (6:55 to 7-minute pace) past the Forbidden City and across Tiennamen Square as Mao smiled down. Yet with each passing step it became more painfully obvious that the air had overtaken my lungs. For perspective, it was like a having a large man press against my chest and every attempt to gasp for more air only made him heavier.

It’s encouraging that China is taking its environmental problems more seriously, even if the government is motivated as much by a desire to host “Green Games” as to protect the health of its own citizens and the world’s climate. The problem with being motivated by Olympics-related scrutiny, however, is that it makes the efforts less likely to continue after the world’s athletes and journalists leave China. Permanent residents of Beijing, not to mention all the future residents of a world altered by manmade climate change, don’t have the luxury of packing their bags and moving to cleaner air after all the medals have been awarded.

(For a thorough report on Beijing’s efforts to clean up the air in time for the Olympics, see this New York Times article, part of an ongoing series on China’s pollution problem.)

When a pedestrian in very walkable Old Oakland approaches the Oakland Convention Center from the direction of 10th and Clay, he or she is greeted with this forbidding garage exit:

If the walker perseveres on 10th street, past the “CAUTION: CAR COMING” warning, along the otherwise barren and unbroken wall, he or she does eventually come to a pedestrian entrance at the intersection with Washington. Welcome to Oakland, conventioneers!