Whose streets? Oakland's shadow government presses City
Hall to end the occupation

by Adrian Drummond-Cole and Darwin BondGraham
http://sfbayview.com/2011/whose-streets-oakland%e2%80%99s-shadow-government-presses-city-hall-to-end-the-occupation/
Posted By Mary On November 11, 2011 [1] 

Not considering local law enforcement sufficient
protection against the 99 percent, downtown Oakland
"business improvement districts," or BIDs, hire private
security firms to patrol public space. These riot clad
Alameda County Sheriff deputies were protecting the
property of the 1 percent on Oct. 25, the day Oscar
Grant Plaza was reclaimed after the encampment had been
brutally destroyed by police from 17 local
jurisdictions. 

Photo: Jay Finneburgh 

In a letter [2] addressed to Oakland's Mayor Jean Quan
on Nov. 8, two little-known entities, the Lake
Merritt/Uptown District Association (LMUDA) and
Downtown Oakland Association (DOA) implored Mayor Quan
to "step up and provide cohesive, common sense
leadership." Cohesive leadership, according to these
two organizations, means giving the Oakland Police
Department a green light to eradicate the now month-old
Occupy encampment. "It's time for Frank Ogawa Plaza to
be given back to the people of Oakland," they conclude.

Who are the LMUDA and DOA? What gives them the
authority to make such demands? Further, who are the
"people of Oakland" referred to in their letter? If
those occupying the plaza do not constitute the people
of Oakland, then who are the rightful owners of this
contested public space? The privatization of public
administration

"Lake Merritt/Uptown" and "Downtown Oakland" are not
community associations or neighborhood groups comprised
of Oaklanders with historic roots or identity in
Oakland's larger patchwork. Rather, they are business
improvement districts, or "BIDs," an apt acronym given
their focus on commodifying and privatizing government
and public space. Both LMUDA and DOA were founded in
2008. BIDs are commercial districts within cities where
special taxes are collected on properties for use
towards activities determined by the BID's board of
directors. As hybrid public-private entities, their
explicit purpose is to increase property values and
rents and to cultivate other profitable opportunities
in designated geographic areas.

Because they have the power to levy and spend taxes,
BIDs must be formed via a petition process and then by
majority vote of businesses and property owners within
the chosen area and finally approved by the City
Council. However, once the BID is established, it
largely operates under its own discretion. It does what
it wants with its money, which can involve funding
events, contracting for extra sanitation and trash
services, and even hiring private security to patrol
public space.

The Lake Merritt/Uptown District and Downtown District
are two of nine BIDs established in Oakland since 2001.
The others include Fruitvale, Koreatown/Northgate,
Lakeshore/Lake Park, Laurel, Montclair, Rockridge and
Temescal/Telegraph Avenue.

BIDs began to emerge nationally in the 1970s as
vehicles for gentrification and the militarization of
urban space. Laws enabling the incorporation of these
districts have spread to nearly every state, and most
major U.S. cities contain multiple special districts
run mostly by real estate developers and large tourism
and entertainment companies, with smaller businesses -
restaurants and retailers - as junior partners. BIDs
especially took off in the 1990s as real estate capital
focused its energy on urban zones from which it had
previously divested.

BIDs are a strategic response of real estate businesses
to the political backlash against the Civil Rights
Movement. Because much of the public sector was
de-funded through tax cuts and capital and wealth were
withdrawn into newly rich suburban enclaves buoyed by
white flight or into private institutions, cities found
themselves tax-starved and unable to raise revenues for
the public services that many place-dependent
businesses once depended on. Many small urban
businesses were ruined. BIDs are a strategic response
of real estate businesses to the political backlash
against the Civil Rights Movement.

Rather than fighting against these racist forces of
disinvestment, most remaining local business
establishments instead turned to a solution provided by
consultants working for large real estate companies -
privately run districts with special tax powers that
don't have to share the wealth. BIDs have the
"advantage" of not requiring tax increases to support
services that do not directly enrich the businesses
paying the tax. These funds are not shared with
populations outside the BID's geographic boundaries and
need not pay for things like schools or streetlights in
working class residential neighborhoods.

The LMUDA and DOA districts are administered by
nonprofit management corporations under contract with
the City of Oakland. Each corporation is governed by a
board of directors. The acting presidents, J.C. Wallace
and Deborah Boyer, are employees of San Francisco-based
real estate investment and management companies SKS
Investments and the Swig Company, respectively. Both
have speculated on properties in Oakland and stand to
profit from increased rents generated by
gentrification.

Before joining SKS, J.C. Wallace was a "relationship
manager" with Wells Fargo's Real Estate Group,
responsible for a $300 million portfolio. John Bruno of
the Los Angeles-based CIM Group, a real estate
investment firm with over $9 billion in managed assets,
sits on both boards, as do members of the San
Francisco-based CAC Real Estate Management Co., Inc.
The board of the DOA also boasts two employees of Los
Angeles-based CB Richard Ellis, the world's largest
commercial real estate services firm, which owns much
property in Oakland. [3] The Occupy Oakland encampment
has brought some of the issues previously discussed
only in the hood to downtown, where big business
rightly feels threatened. - Photo: Dave Id, Indybay
Under the BID paradigm, property owners, many of them
absentee corporations - not the people of Oakland -
dictate the terms of services once considered the
purview of the city administration. BIDs effectively
remove services from the political arena, making
everything from sanitation to security privately
managed.

The LMUDA, for example, can circumvent the law
enforcement pensions deadlock and yearly general fund
budget shortfalls affecting the city's police force and
subcontract instead with the private security company
Block by Block to provide additional security personnel
in the downtown area.

A subsidiary of the SMS Holdings Corp., which made Inc.
magazine's list of fastest growing private companies in
2011, Block by Block specializes in staffing BIDs.
Block by Block runs BIDs in 42 U.S. cities, including
Berkeley, Oakland, Pasadena, LA, West Hollywood and
Santa Monica. Block by Block's non-union, minimum wage
workforce effectively reduces the costs of city
services for corporations and allows these same
corporations to determine who benefits from these
services, while undermining better-paid, unionized city
employees who would provide services to all residents
under the ultimate authority of elected officials, not
private corporate boards. A small gang of primarily
non-Oaklanders

In their letter to Mayor Quan, LMUDA and DOA remark
that the city needs to focus on "identifying the small
gang of primarily non-Oaklanders," those they deem
responsible for property destruction, vandalism and
skirmishes during the police riot that followed the
General Strike. Ironically, most of the leadership of
both BID management corporations take their orders
directly from companies based outside the city.

This small gang of corporate directors and their
associated companies are equipped with the resources
needed to disrupt the encampment and discredit the
organizing coming from the steps of City Hall. SKS, for
example, has four lobbyists registered in Oakland since
February 2011. SKS has maintained a lobbying presence
in Oakland for years, most recently meeting with Mayor
Quan to discuss what sorts of business development
activities she envisions as the new mayor. The
interests of big business have become the law of the
land.

The interests of big business have become the law of
the land. The fictive "people of Oakland" invoked by
the LMUDA and DOA are nothing more than the personified
corporations who want to turn Oakland into a gentrified
metropolis devoid of any real public space. The people
of Oakland vs. the product Oakland

"Since the early 1990s, there has been an explosion in
private and public efforts to revitalize older urban,
street-based business districts," explains New City
America Inc., the San Diego firm that wrote the
legislation to establish both the DOA and LMUDA and has
spearheaded similar efforts in 61 other cities since
1995. "Historic downtown and urban neighborhood
commercial corridors and urban mixed-use neighborhoods
valuable for their setting for human experiences,
places of social change and fond memories, are
experiencing a renaissance." But in order for this
renaissance to take place, New City America advises
that, "property owners ... must take the first step -
organizing themselves - to respond to the changes
occurring in the evolution of our urban areas."

The transition New City America and similar consultants
are promoting - the neoliberal urban shift - ultimately
boils down to the privatization of public space and the
elimination of democratic politics from city budgeting
and services. In the words of New City America:

"The business district must be seen as a product to be
defined, marketed and sold to a target audience. A
business district, just as a business product, is
subject to the laws of supply and demand. The district
must distinguish itself from other districts or malls
because of its own unique assets and resources."

The encampment at Frank Ogawa Plaza, now dubbed Oscar
Grant Plaza, offers many alternative visions of what
the people of Oakland desire for the future of their
city. In the section of the Oct. 8 statement of the
General Assembly addressed to the people, Occupy
Oakland declared, "The purpose of our gathering here is
to plan actions, to mobilize real resistance, to defend
ourselves from the economic and physical war that is
being waged against our communities."

In the days to come, as speculation swirls regarding a
second police raid and demolition of the encampment,
the larger war rages on to determine who are the
rightful people of Oakland, and whose vision will be
adopted for a future as yet unwritten.

Adrian Drummond-Cole is a writer, organizer and
musician who lives in Oakland. Darwin BondGraham is a
sociologist and author currently visiting Occupy
encampments across the U.S.; he can be reached at
[log in to unmask] [4].


Related Posts

* The police raid on Occupy Oakland was nothing new for
this city [5] 
* My thoughts on Occupy Oakland after the murder and 
one-month anniversary [6] 
* Notes from Occupy Oakland [7] 
* Call for GENERAL STRIKE Nov. 2 - plus Occupy updates [8] 
* Gang injunctions, unfettered police power gentrify Oakland [9]

Article printed from San Francisco Bay View: http://sfbayview.com

URLs in this post:

[1] Image:
http://sfbayview.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Occupy-Oakland-Alameda-County-Sheriff-deputies-in-riot-gear-102511-by-Jay-Finneburgh.jpg

[2] letter:
http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2011/11/08/11.8.11.oakland_letter_fin-mayor.pdf

[3] Image:
http://sfbayview.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Occupy-Oakland-Welcome-to-Oscar-Grant-Plaza-102111-by-Dave-Id-Indybay.jpg

[4] [log in to unmask]: mailto:[log in to unmask]

[5] The police raid on Occupy Oakland was nothing new
for this city:
http://sfbayview.com/2011/the-police-raid-on-occupy-oakland-was-nothing-new-for-this-city/

[6] My thoughts on Occupy Oakland after the murder and
one-month anniversary:
http://sfbayview.com/2011/my-thoughts-on-occupy-oakland-after-the-murder-and-one-month-anniversary/

[7] Notes from Occupy Oakland :http://sfbayview.com/2011/notes-from-occupy-oakland/

[8] Call for GENERAL STRIKE Nov. 2 - plus Occupy
updates:
http://sfbayview.com/2011/call-for-general-strike-nov-2-%e2%80%93-plus-occupy-updates/

[9] Gang injunctions, unfettered police power gentrify
Oakland:
http://sfbayview.com/2011/gang-injunctions-unfettered-police-power-gentrify-oakland/


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