Nothing can cure Oakland’s blight — except perhaps its people.
That’s the idea behind the Oakland Civic Assembly on Transforming Oakland’s Vacant Spaces
. 20,000 randomly selected Oakland households have received invitations to participate. From hundreds of replies, organizers selected by lottery a demographically representative pool of 40 Oaklanders. These residents will convene over late this summer and fall, earning a $1,350 stipend for their time.The delegates’ task is straightforward but immense. They will hear from experts, weigh hard data from the Possibility Lab at UC Berkeley, debate competing interests, and forge recommendations on how convert the city's vacant lots into vibrant community assets. Institutional backing is robust, spearheaded
by the research-and-action institute PolicyLink and the Democracy Policy Initiative at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy.
Audits suggest Oakland has more than 4,000 vacant lots, about 80% of them zoned for residential uses. Most of the lots are smaller than 6,000 square feet. Most city residents want vacant lots to become housing, but building housing is slow, expensive and legally complicated.
When lots sit vacant for extended periods, they become canvases for vandalism and worse — abandoned cars, mattresses, furniture and hazardous debris. The scope of Oakland's blight, from West to Deep East, is staggering. Oakland annually receives 25,000 cleanup requests for illegal dumping. The city’s strategy for keeping vacant spaces clean is the “Three E’s” of education, eradication, and enforcement. But the approach is failing.
Which is why Oakland is handing the vacant lots problem directly to the people.
I know how this deliberative model works because I helped organize a similar civic assembly, using lottery sortition to reform the Los Angeles city charter. Our lottery-selected, representative group of everyday Angelenos focused on the corruption and dysfunction of the city council, because the council refuses to heal itself.
Our assembly in L.A. operated under a compressed timeline to accommodate the strict schedule of the Los Angeles charter commission, which had just nine months to propose a revamping of the city’s 51,000-word constitution. Despite the hurried pace, the L.A. assembly worked as democratic theorists promise. Citizens eschewed political posturing and provided a remarkably even-keeled assessment of the corruption and underrepresentation plaguing L.A.’s scandal-ridden city council. The 37 delegates combined recommendations that increased the council’s size and representation along with measures to increase oversight.
The charter commission, appointed by the council, voted to accept our assembly’s recommendations, and should have had the power to place them on the ballot for voter approval. But the city council refused to grant the appointed commission that power, reserving that power to itself. In June, we found out why, when the council refused to put the assembly’s recommendations and the commission’s larger suite of recommendations on the ballot.
In essence, the council blocked reform of itself by referring the strongest assembly recommendations — expanding the city council, switching to ranked choice elections, and adding oversight to the council through an inspector general — for “further study.”
That’s the standard bureaucratic maneuver for burying good ideas, one that poses a problem for civic assemblies all over the world. Ordinary people find common ground, only to have the political establishment shelve their solutions.
L.A. is still Chinatown, Jake.
But I’m more optimistic about Oakland, because city leaders there want solutions to eradicate vandalism and waste. In L.A., Mayor Karen Bass wouldn’t acknowledge, much less talk to, the assembly of Angelenos doing charter work for her city. Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee is actively supporting the process.
Having genuine city leadership buy-in changes the entire calculus for a civic assembly. Citizens' recommendations then carry immediate political weight.
If a room of lottery-selected residents can figure out how to solve the intractable problem of vacant lots, rusted cars, and vandalized storefronts, it won't just clean up Oakland. It might demonstrate that best way to fix a broken city is to let its people take charge.
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square and is founder-publisher of Democracy Local.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Can Oaklanders solve their vacant lot problems? | Mathews
