The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights wants to know. They might just be able to provide those helping hands for you.

Through their Soul of the City initiative, the Ella Baker Center is organizing a city-wide day of service on Saturday, August 13th. From 10-2, they’ll have volunteer service projects (neighborhood clean-ups, tree plantings, stuff like that) throughout the City. Some projects are already confirmed, but they’re also still soliciting suggestions:

We are leading Oakland in a City-Wide Day of Service and we hope that you will join us! We’ve confirmed 15+ service projects throughout Oakland. However, it’s not too late to submit your proposal to host a project and help Oakland thrive.

You lead a service project and we’ll help turn out volunteers.

Your project can be anything from working on a community garden to cleaning up a neighborhood, to painting a school. Please click Host a Project and we’ll contact you to get all the details.

And after the work is over? Time to party!

After four hours of people-powered community service, we’re hosting a celebration at Mosswood Park. There will be food, dance, and a solar paneled hip-hop concert. This will be a family friendly event and an opportunity to build community after a hard days work.

So if you have an idea for a project you’d like to host, fill out the form. And if you don’t feel up to organizing something and just want to help out, mark your calendar for August 13th, so you can volunteer for whichever project speaks to you.

Part II

At Make Oakland Better Now!’s February 20 meeting, we will be looking at ways our city could reform its budget process to make city government more responsive and more cost-effective. Thanks to our host V Smoothe at A Better Oakland for giving us the platform to discuss two possible reforms. Yesterday we talked about Performance Based Budgeting. Today we consider “Budgeting for Outcomes.”

What Does The Budget Process Look Like Now?

In recent years, Oakland’s budget process has worked this way: The Budget Director asks department heads to submit their budget requests. Departments submit information — usually not very detailed — about what they think they need for personnel and other resources (often adding a margin because they know their requests will be cut). The Budget office prices out the requests, estimates the year’s revenues, and makes proposed cuts to the requests until the budget is, theoretically, balanced.
The proposed budget goes to City Council for public hearings, during which members of the public, public employee unions and other stakeholders mobilize to plead their cases against what they perceive — often correctly — as devastating cuts. Council makes some political compromises, and eventually agrees on a budget that is, on paper, balanced.

We understand that the new Mayor is taking a much more active role in the process than did her predecessor, and the new Budget Director has been moved to the Mayor’s office. The budgeting process has been fairly quiet since the first of the year, but we also understand that staff are trying to close a $40+ million gap (not including the $46 million PFRS bombshell). So it sounds as though the process is the same as before. And, as before, there is much likelihood that once it is adopted, the budget will be the subject of repeated mid-year corrections as revenue assumptions turn out to be too high and expense assumptions too low.

We doubt many Oaklanders think this process is getting us the government we want. Is it time for Oakland to try something new?

The Price of Government: Budgeting for Outcomes

Last November, Ventura City Manager Rick Cole spoke to a gathering of concerned citizens in Vallejo about how to make city government work in tough financial times. Obviously, if there is any California city in urgent need of finding new ways of doing business, it is the recently bankrupt Vallejo.

The core theme of Coles’ presentation was this: cities can go on cutting and trimming and slicing all their city services until no city function is performed well — the proverbial death by a thousand cuts. Or they can turn the process on its head. Specifically, they can prioritize their desired municipal outcomes, determine how much money they have to spend, allocate sufficient funding to the highest priority functions to ensure cost-effective outcomes, and when the available funding is exhausted, stop. In other words, they can take on less, but do the most important things well.

The “budgeting for outcomes” approach, which Ventura has used for several years, is based on a book by David Osborne and Peter Hutchinson, The Price Of Government: Getting the Results We Need in an Age of Permanent Fiscal Crisis. As the authors describe it at their web site, there are four key elements:

• Set the price of government: Establish up front how much citizens are willing to spend. Get agreement on a revenue forecast and any tax or fee changes. Set the priorities of government: Define the outcomes or results that matter most to citizens, along with indicators to measure progress. Set the price of each priority: Divide the price or revenue among the priority outcomes on the basis of their relative value to citizens.
• Develop a purchasing plan for each priority: Create “results teams” to act as purchasing agents for the citizens. Ask each one to decide which strategies have the most impact on their desired outcome.
• Solicit offers to deliver the desired results: Have the results teams issue “requests for results” to all comers including their own government’s agencies or department, other governmental jurisdictions, unions, non-profits and businesses. Invite them to propose how they would deliver the result and at what price. Then choose those proposals that will provide the best results for the money.
• Negotiate performance agreements with the chosen providers: These should spell out the expected outputs and outcomes, how they will be measured, the consequences for performance, and the flexibilities granted to help the provider maximize performance.

Budgeting for outcomes is not a privatization or outsourcing initiative, nor a bludgeon against public employees. Indeed, Coles reported that the transparency and buy-in processes that are part of budgeting for outcomes have resulted in collaborative and even cordial relations between the city and its unions. This is despite Ventura’s ongoing and worsening financial problems.

Budgeting for outcomes is a mechanism for inviting more innovative, more cost-effective ways to deliver the most critical services. The underlying theory is that competition makes service delivery more innovative and efficient. And Osborne and Harrison find that when city departments compete for the right to provide those services, most become more efficient and win the competition.

In a post-tax rebellion world, most cities are in a permanent state of fiscal crisis. Tax increases are unlikely, revenue growth from business growth is years away, and government will never have what it feels it needs to do everything. Indeed, in Oakland, the permanent fiscal crisis threatens to worsen dramatically (PDF) if some or all of Governor Brown’s budget proposals are adopted.

The usual way to address this permanent crisis is to make cuts every year. Certainly when Osborne and Hutchinson describe the usual budget process, it sounds awfully familiar:

The usual, political way to handle a projected deficit is to take last year’s budget and cut. It is like taking last year’s family car and reducing its weight with a blowtorch and shears. But cutting $2 billion from this vehicle does not make it a compact; it makes it a wreck. What is wanted is a budget designed from the ground up.

In the budgeting for outcomes approach, the community, and responsible leaders, jointly determine what outcomes they value most. They determine what it will cost to achieve those outcomes. And they provide sufficient funding to achieve the highest-priority results.

This process cannot be part of the routine, annual budget process. The initial organization and implementation will be complicated, contentious and time-consuming. So making budgeting for outcomes a reality will have to be a separate process from the usual, disheartening biennial budget dance.

It is too late to change the process for the 2011-13 budget. But wouldn’t it be refreshing to see a revolution in time for 2013-15 and beyond?

Should Oakland do this? We will discuss on Sunday, February 20.

I don’t have a dog now, my family always had dogs when we were growing up. Both of my sisters have wonderful dogs that I adore. I often think I would like to get one, and I’m sure I will someday. But for now, neither my apartment nor my schedule can accommodate one.

Anyway. One of the things I think about when I think about how I’d like to get a dog is that it seems like it would be hard to have a dog in Oakland. Or at least, for someone who lives in my part of the city without a car, it seems like it would be hard. There is nowhere for you to take them to play.

Or even to be with you when you want to hang out outside. I’m sorry, but I think Oakland’s no dogs in any park even on a leash unless it is a dog park policy is totally psycho. Everywhere else you go, you can take your dog to any park as long as you keep it on a leash. Sometimes I will complain about it to people who have clearly lived here too long, and they will immediate start back with this insane string of elaborate paranoid imaginings about all the terrible things that could possibly happen if there were a leashed dog in a park. I’m like “Dude, you know what? Somehow they make it work everywhere else. So I think it’s going to be okay.”

Wev. Anyway, one nice thing about the City recently is that we are adding all these dog parks. A new one opened in November at the a new one opened in November at the rededication of Old Oakland’s Jefferson Square Park. And there is going to be a new one at 37th and MLK. They are having a grand opening party on January 15th. The paranoid conspiracy theorist in me says that the reason the City is all of a sudden so eager for dog parks is because they know the dog owners are so desperate for a place to take their pets that the City can extort them into taking care of the property, so the City has less work. But hey, maybe it is just because people are really pushing hard to make them happen.

Lakeview Park Dog Park

Anyway. One neighborhood that has been clamoring for a dog park for a great deal of time is Adams Point. And tomorrow, they have a chance of coming one step closer to getting one. The Oakland Parks and Recreation Advisory Commission will consider, at their meeting tomorrow, Wednesday, December 8th, a request for approval of the design of an off-leash dog play area at Lakeview Park.

Where is it, you ask? At the corner of Lakeshore and MacArthur, nearby the adorable and tiny Lakeview Branch Library. From the report (PDF):

The Lakeview Dog Play Area will enclose the corner of the park bordered by MacArthur Blvd to the north and Lakeshore Ave to the southeast. The long-awaited dog play area will contain separate off-leash areas for large and small dogs to exercise and socialize.

If you were wondering what I meant above when I said “a great deal of time,” the report (PDF) offers a brief history of this project:

The Lakeview Dog Play Area was included in the Lake Merritt Park Master Plan, which was accepted by the Oakland City Council in July 2002, and in the Adams Point Urban Design Plan, submitted to the City of Oakland Community and Economic Development Agency in December 2002. The development of both these plans included extensive public review and comment. Both of the plans included graphic exhibits showing the dog play area in the location adjacent to MacArthur Boulevard where it is currently proposed.

The creation of a dog play area in the Lake Merritt area was identified as an unmet community need by the Northlake Neighborhood Group (NLNG) in 1998. In 1999, volunteers from ODOG and the NLNG collected 740 petition signatures of residents in the Lake Merritt area, supporting the creation of a dog play area near Lake Merritt. Important factors in selecting a possible location for the dog park included adequate distance from the wildlife sanctuary and low impact on other park user groups and the surrounding community. NLNG met with my office to discuss the dog play area in December 2001. Councilmembers Chang and Wan held a public meeting on behalf of the dog play area in February 2004. At that time Councilmember Chang offered $20,000 for the dog play area but the City was not able to commit to building it in time to accept the funds. Thus, Councilmember Chang’s funds were used to create the Joaquin Miller dog play area.

Public meetings for the Lakeview Dog Park were also held on November 7, 2005, and on June 29, 2006, and community input from those meetings was incorporated into the design. The meetings were sponsored by Councilmember Nancy Nadel and community outreach was extensive. The needs of other user groups in Lakeview Park, including tot-lot users and soccer players have been addressed in the plans.

In July 2006, the Parks and Recreation Advisory Commission gave one-year probationary support for the construction of a dog play area at Lakeview Park. The creation of the dog play area was conditional upon approval by the City Council to amend the Oakland Municipal Code, Title 6, Chapter 6.04, Article 6.04.080 to include the Lakeview Dog Play Area as an off-leash dog play area in the exempted list of such parks. Unfortunately, the project stalled before the Public Works Department could approve the final design. The delay was in part due to the larger scope of the original dog play area project, which would have required several hundred thousand dollars to construct.

For the past 18 months, volunteers, including design and landscape architects, have worked diligently to scale back the project to meet the City’s resource constraints while still fulfilling the design and maintenance requirements of the City. Extensive discussions took place between volunteers and City staff from PWA, OPR, and ADA programs. ODOG also presented to and received approval from the Adam’s Point Action Council (APAC) in October 2009 Additionally, my office continues to receive frequent constituent calls and emails requesting a dog play area in this area.

The project has identified funding from the following sources: Public Works Agency Capital Reserves Fund ($21,000), Council District 3 carry-forward Pay-Go funds ($10,000), Council District 2 ($2,000), At-large Council office ($2,000). ODOG continues to seeking funding for the remainder of the cost.

At tomorrow’s meeting, the Parks and Recreation Advisory Commission will be asked to approve the design for the park. The project specifics listed in the report are as follows:

To enclose/fence a section of the Lakeview Park for use as an off-lease dog play area for dogs to exercise, and for both dogs and their guardians to socialize.

Specific elements of the project include:

• Separate play areas for large and small dogs
• Fencing to enclose the dog play area, which will be 21,3000 sq. ft. total in area. The fence fully separates those on the inside from those on the outside without imposing unnecessary visual impact on the park
• Double gate entries that are ADA accessible with supply vehicle access
• Concrete mow-band around 2/3 of the fence to provide easy access for lawn maintenance
• Two in-ground waste receptables
• Wood chips to provide the ground cover
• Tree planting between the fence line and MacArthur Blvd

And here’s one more picture.

So I think this is just great. As I said, I think dog parks are awesome and Oakland should have more of them. And it is true, as the report says, the dog parks serve the important function of giving dog owners a place to socialize. My little sister used to go to college in the middle of nowhere in eastern Washington. And she would always be telling these stories about friends of hers where I could not for the life of me imagine how she ever ending up crossing paths with this person. Like, she’d be all “My friend Doug, who is a 60 year old prison guard at the state penn…” and I’d be like “Wait, what? How are you friends with this person?” And she would always be like “Oh, I met him at the dog park.”

And it is totally true. Whenever you go to the dog park, everyone there wants to talk to you. I’m not very social myself, so I don’t particularly like that aspect of it all, but I see how it would be important to a lot of people.

Opposition to the dog park

But not everyone thinks the dog park is such a great idea. There are all these people, and honestly I don’t know if there are only like five really angry people, or if these five people are representative of a lot of other people or what. But there is all this craziness on the neighborhood listservs that people forward me against this dog park. All these e-mails being like “I don’t think a dog park is right for this neighborhood” and “the dog park excludes people” and “the rights of humans to use their parks are being usurped by dogs” and “the fence around the park will cause traffic accidents” and “well I want a dog park that’s closer to my house than that” and “the dog park should be on the estuary” and “we need more community input” and “but I just moved here” and “the dogs will destroy the beautiful grass that my only joy in life comes from looking at every day as I walk to the bus stop.”

So, to those people — look, I am sorry you don’t want a dog park. My advice is to chill out and learn to live with it. It’s a dog park, not a nuclear reactor or a surface parking lot. People all over the place manage to deal with them somehow, I’m sure you will find a way to cope too. Dogs are a very normal thing to have.

Because seriously, at some point, you have to just admit that there has been enough community input on whether or not something is a good thing and you have to accept the decision that was made. This has been discussed and decided for a long time. And it’s not like it was just once twenty years ago or something. If that were the case, it probably would be appropriate to revisit the decision. But public input and planning on this issue has been ongoing for over a decade. I’m sorry if people who just moved here and missed all that don’t like it, but you know, we can’t just start deciding everything all over again every time somebody moves. We just can’t.

Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee

Anyway, if you’re interested, the Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee meeting tomorrow, Wednesday, December 8, 2010 meets at 4:30 PM at the Lakeside Garden Center, which is located at 666 Bellevue Avenue

I am actually interested in this, but I will not be able to attend the meeting, because I am more interested in the Pleasant Valley Safeway at the Planning Commission’s Design Review Committee, which is also happening tomorrow. If anyone does go, I would love it if you’d leave a comment informing us all about the discussion.

Help fund the dog park

And if you’re into the dog park and want to help, but don’t feel like going to the meeting? Well, here is one suggestion, from ODOG’s recent newsletter:

The city is providing only about half the $50,000 cost of the dog park. The rest is up to us. A holiday gift to yourself or another dog lover would be a donation to support the dog park. You can contribute here with a credit card of PayPal account.

Please note that for technical reasons your receipt and credit card might show the name Emily Rosenberg instead of Oakland Dog Owners Group. Please be assured that every penny will go to the non profit account of ODOG.

Another convenient thing about the park is that is dog owners feel like a drink when their pets are done playing, they can just walk across the street and go to dog-friendly bar the Heart and Dagger.

The Parkway Theater could be close to reopening more than a year after the screen went dark and the last beer was sipped on its spongy sofas.
The prospective owners — New Parkway Entertainment LLC — announced Tuesday that a deal could be less than two weeks away.

A lease with the landlord hasn’t been signed. But the new manager, J Moses Ceaser, said they are close to the finish line. For now the group is calling the cinema The New Parkway, or just Parkway for short.

Once the lease is signed, New Parkway Entertainment will be able to turn its attention to raising the $400,000 needed to reopen. Officials hope to raise the money from equity investors and donors. The doors could reopen as soon as May if they get the lease signed in December.

And that $400,000 they need to get the theater up and running? That’s where you come in.

Kickstarter

Do you guys know about Kickstarter? I think it is a really cool idea. If you haven’t used it before, here’s how it works. An organization trying to raise money will set a fundraising goal and some amount of time in which they think they can accomplish it. People who want to support the project pledge whatever about they’re willing to give. Then a running total of the funds raised as well as how many donors there have been is posted on the project page.

The catch is that if the project does not meet its fundraising goal before the deadline, then they don’t get any of the money. I like it because it makes me feel better about my money not going to waste. There has been more than one occasion when I’ve given generously to try and help some group raise enough money to do X or Y, and then it turns out I’m like one of ten people or something who gave and they didn’t get enough money to do what I wanted to support and then I’m like “Great. I just spent $50 so these people can buy a couple of reams of paper for their office printer. Awesome.” So with Kickstarter, you know that’s not gonna happen.

The New Parkway

Anyway. The people who are trying to reopen the Parkway Theater are doing a Kickstarter fundraising drive to help with their fundraising. They’re working on getting most of the money they need the old fashioned way, with normal investors, but are looking for community donations to fill an eighth of the hole — $50,000. With 61 hours to go before their deadline, they’re only about 20 percent of the way there.

So here’s what I say. As of this writing, there are like 125 donors total to this fundraising drive. And I know I heard whining about the Parkway closure from more than 125 people. Everyone is all, “The City should do something!” or “Someone should do something!” or “The theater landlords are assholes! This is so unfair!” And maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but the fact is that old buildings in disrepair cost a lot of money to fix and maintain, and while it sucks that it costs so much money to get the theater up and running again, it’s also just the way of the world.

I was sad when the Parkway closed, but was pretty skeptical about the prospects for anyone being able to reopen it due to the extreme costs involved. So I think it’s awesome that these folks are taking the plunge and trying to make it happen. And if you miss the Parkway Theater and want it open again, then there is no excuse for you not to help out. Through Kickstarter, you can make a donation of as little as $1.

If the theater doesn’t open, you get your money back. If they do open, and you donated at least $25, you get a cool thank you present! Here’s what they’re offering:

• $25 donation: 5 free shows at the New Parkway
• $50 donation: Date Night at the New Parkway: 2 tickets, pitcher of beer, pizza, reserved loveseat
• $100 donation: 10 free shows and an invite to the Grand Reopening with the always useful +1
• $500 donation: One year pass for free movies, plus the same party thing as above
• $1000 donation: Get your own screening room at the Parkway for one whole night. They show 2 movies, give you 10 pitchers of beer and 10 pizzas, and you invite 150 of your closest friends. They’re only giving away 5 of this prize, and 3 are already taken, so if you want it, move fast.
• $2500 donation: Lifetime movie pass at the New Parkway

All the passes (except for the lifetime one, obviously) are good for one year after the theater opens.

So if you want to see the Parkway Theater open again, please, give what you can, and pass the link on to your friends, and ask them to give too.

As the report of the Oakland Climate Action Coalition notes: Transportation is the largest contributor of GHG (Greenhouse Gas) emissions in Oakland, comprising nearly two-thirds of all emissions.

We can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, become more energy independent and create jobs here in Oakland. How?

Transit Oriented Development (TOD).

What is Transit Oriented Development?

Since we know that the transportation sector is the most important contributor to GHG, strategies to reduce consumption in the transportation sector must be central to our solutions.

It will be essential to rebuild our city in a way that makes it easy for people to walk, bike, take transit, and more — which, in addition to being one of the top ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, will also dramatically improve quality of life in the community.

Transit Oriented Development (TOD) is a mixed-use residential or commercial area designed to maximize access to public transport, and often incorporates features to encourage transit ridership.

A TOD neighborhood typically has a center with a transit hub surrounded by relatively high-density development with progressively lower-density development spreading outwards from the center. This is often called Smart Growth or TOD.

Funding & Planning Opportunities

In recognition of the fact that TOD is one of the top needed strategies for traffic congestion relief and reducing oil consumption, increasing amounts of funds are being made available to support “TOD” projects, at the Federal, State, and regional levels. The upcoming Federal Transportation and Energy Bills will likely include substantial new funding for TOD.

At the regional level, target “priority development areas” (PDAs) will be eligible for funding this year through the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC). Implementation of the State of California’s own greenhouse gas reduction strategies are also anticipated to include funding for TOD projects in California. Many other opportunities exist to fund TOD projects — Oakland must ensure we are ready to capitalize on these opportunities.

What Does This Mean?

In Oakland, right now, there exists an opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and create thousands of jobs, in construction and improving our sidewalks, streets, bike lanes, and streetscape, and ongoing in new commercial and mixed use development and for which outside funds are being made available.

It is vital for Oakland to complete the appropriate plans to position the City for these upcoming State and Federal funding opportunities. This is a major opportunity that we cannot afford to waste. We must track the grants, prepare the plans, and seek the support we need to make this possible.

Coliseum Village

One example of a large project which would transform Oakland’s economy is the Oakland Coliseum Transit Village. A coordinated TOD improvement plan for the Coliseum BART station area should be adopted and implemented as soon as possible. This plan should rebuild the area around the Coliseum BART station into a thriving, mixed-use destination with restaurants, bars, shops, and more.

• Provide an opportunity for the millions of patrons coming for games or concerts to have a great place for dinner and more (over 3.2 million visitors in 2009).
• Thousands of jobs in the community would be created, both during construction, and beyond.
• Make the area between the Coliseum BART station and the Coliseum/Arena into an Asset instead of an Embarrassment!
• Improve surrounding streetscape, traffic signals, sidewalks, lighting, and signage.
• Attract business and increase local sales tax revenue with amenities such as a Dave & Buster’s and an Everett and Jones, along with a conference center hotel where businesses and community organizations can host their meetings and then go to a game together would help establish the Coliseum Village as a sports and entertainment destination.

Next Steps Should Include:

• Conduct planning/design/engineering for these projects to enable them to be ready-to-go for grant applications
• Conduct Environment Impact Report/Environmental Impact Statement as needed
• Ensure zoning is compatible with these projects
• Ensure these projects are included in County and Regional plans as eligible projects for funding

With the right kind of vision and leadership we can move Oakland forward with a Coliseum Village TOD project that will provide jobs, help reduce GHG emissions, improve Oakland’s image and create more revenue for the City.

Rebecca Kaplan is the At-large Councilmember for the City of Oakland.

I love parades. I love fireworks. And, OMG, do I love festivals. A family friendly good time isn’t always the easiest thing to find in Oakland, and a festival offers that. And particularly in a city like Oakland, which often feels incredibly fragmented, so full of all these huge, wildly different groups of people whose lives somehow never manage to intersect, events that draw a citywide audience are just so refreshing. And in years like this, where so many people are struggling so deeply, and the torrent of bad, then worse, then even worse news often seems just endless, the totally free good time offered by these sorts of community celebrations becomes even more essential. Plus, how can you not love it any time major streets are blocked off from cars?

Anyway, Oakland has a fair number of festivals. But the Dia De Los Muertos festival in Fruitvale is easily one of my favorites all year. It’s so heartwarming to see so many children and families all over the place, having such a wonderful time. They’ve got rides for the kids, and they’re got all this music, and of course great food everywhere, and while I’m personally not all that big on crafts, well, they’ve got tons of those too.

But what sets this one apart from like every other festival in Oakland for me (besides the size, of course) is the color. I just love being surrounded by all these bright, cheery, vibrant colors, just everywhere you turn. The sounds, the smells, and, the colors, oh, the colors, just make for such a rich sensory experience. If you haven’t been before, you just have to go on Sunday.

And to give you a sense of what you’ve been missing, check out the photos below of previous festivals, mined from Flickr.

gwen on flickr

Tim in sanhazzay on flickr

jrbrubaker on flickr

jen_masier on flickr

g.p. macklin on flickr

gwen on flickr

Lydiat on flickr

gwen on flickr

jen_masier on flickr

So do yourself a favor, hop on the 1, and spend a little bit of your Sunday in Fruitvale this weekend (the festival takes place along International Boulevard between Fruitvale Avenue and 35th Avenue, and runs from 10 AM to 5 PM). Relish the color, the crowds, the altars, the food, and the music, and remember how lucky you are to live in such an incredible, vibrant, exciting city.

And if you bring your camera, be sure to submit your photos to the Fruitvale Dia De Los Muertos 2009 Flickr group, so everyone who couldn’t make it will be able to see afterwards just how much they missed out.

And of course, there’s the Dunsmuir Estate, a beautiful mansion out in East Oakland surrounded by expansive and quite stunning gardens.

Yesterday, the City Council’s Life Enrichment Committee approved a proposal to rename the Dunsmuir House (PDF) the Dunsmuir Hellman Historic Estate, in recognition of the Hellman family’s long history at the Estate, and their continued contributions to its preservation.

It’s kind of funny that it’s just been calle Dunsmuir all this time, considering that the Dunsmuirs, who built the estate, barely ever lived there at all. Alexander Dunsmuir, son of a Canadian coal baron, bought the estate and built the mansion as a wedding gift for his bride in 1899, then died while the couple was on their honeymoon. His wife Josephine then returned to the estate, but lived there barely over a year before she died of lung cancer in 1901.

The estate was then purchased in 1906 by I.W. Hellman Jr., President of Wells Fargo Bank in San Francisco, whose family owned and maintained it until the 1960s, when it was purchased by the City of Oakland for use as a conference center. Currently, the estate is maintained and funded by a non-profit, and is mostly rented out for weddings and other special events, although they have tours for the public on the First Sunday of the month and on Wednesdays during the summer.

You can also enjoy the Dunsmuir Estate in the evenings during the summer for their outdoor movie series (PDF), which begins this Friday with one of my all-time favorite movies, My Fair Lady. The grounds open at 6 PM for picnicking and wardering. Music is provided before the movies, which begin around 8:30, once the sun sets. And if you don’t have a car, no problem! AC Transit line 45 drops you off maybe a 10 minute walk (or less, depending on how fast you walk, I guess) from the Estate and runs until midnight.

Oh, and if you’re interested in learning more about the Hellman family, you may want to check out this fascinating book, Towers of Gold, published last year about Isias Hellman, father of I.W., which the Oakland Public Library has a number of copies of, although there is a waiting list.

I’m particularly grateful to Tom Carden, Eric Rodenbeck, and Michal Migurski of Stamen Design for their work in creating this, since the City of Oakland, for whatever reason, simply cannot seem to manage to produce a remotely usable incident map. CrimeWatch, in addition to being just hideously ugly, is painfully slow, requires an obscene number of steps to get any information, and in general, is just like, the complete opposite of a user-friendly or helpful product.

Ick. Anyway, Crimespotting just got a whole lot cooler, with the addition of two new features. First, you can now view crime maps going back all the way to mid-2007, when the site launched. And you can now get crime data, by beat, in spreadsheet form, going back all that time. Which is just so, so, incredibly cool. Every so often, somebody asks me about getting recent historical crime numbers for their neighborhood or whatever, and I hate how I can never give them a good answer, just offer them a giant zip file of a zillion old weekly crimes reported by beat files and tell them they can sort it out if they really, really want to. So this is just super.

But wait! That’s not all. There’s another, even cooler feature, where you can view incidents by when they happened – either in hours of your choosing, or by a few already set options: day and night, morning and evening commute, or police shift.

Isn’t is great? Anyway, head over to Crimespotting and play around with their new features. And if you like them, maybe leave a little thank you note on their blog.

At this time, there were like, two restaurants, one of which was expensive and not very good, and the other of which was very cheap and also not good. Me, I was thrilled about the McDonald’s. I had this fantasy in my head that since there were no other dining out options, my parents might decide to take us all there for dinner sometime, which they never would have done back in Louisiana. It didn’t quite work out that way – we just ended up driving half an hour to another town whenever we wanted to go out to eat, just like we did anytime we wanted to buy anything besides groceries.

The whole time I lived there, I couldn’t wait to get away. It was a nice enough place, I suppose, if you wanted to be able to send your kids to public school and had no interest in doing anything other than golfing or lounging around in your backyard. But these are hardly the things that teenagers dream about.

So I go back to Texas once or twice a year, and I never cease to be completely flabbergasted by much things out there have changed. I spend my vacations irritating the hell out of my family with incessant and totally uninteresting observations about the way things used to be:

Jeepers, I still can’t believe you can actually buy decent meat around here now. When I was in high school, we had to drive forty minutes to go to that market in Houston if we wanted a nice meal.

Golly, I remember when the mall first opened. It was so exciting to have actual stores out here! I came here with my friends to the ribbon cutting ceremony and then we walked around the whole thing like six times and then stood outside smoking cloves until it closed and then we went to Denny’s. Is that horrible candle store still around?

I worked opening night at this movie theater you know. You’re probably too young to remember what a big deal it was. I think the entire town was here that night.

The transformation is incredible. My sleepy little suburb has turned into a thriving miniopolis. The population has grown to over 80,000, and I don’t even know if it’s right to call it a bedroom community anymore, what with it being home to 3 million square feet of nearly-fully occupied Class A office space, with another 600,000 square feet being delivered next year. (To put that figure in perspective, downtown Oakland has a little under 10 million square feet of Class A space.) They even have a building taller than anything we’ve got here in Oakland! It’s actually…well, as strange as it is for me to say, considering how much I used to despise the place…kind of nice.

Okay, I’m babbling. And I’m sure you’re all wondering what, if anything, any of this has to do with Oakland. Well, Becks suggested that we all use our break to think about what Oakland could benefit from in the places we visited, so here are a few things that, well, I don’t know if we could learn from exactly, but things that I found myself thinking about while I was away:

• Change can be a good thing. Those people who were so upset about McDonald’s? Well, actually, I can’t really speak for them in particular because I don’t know any of them, but I’d bet that if they’re still around, they’re pretty happy these days. Everyone else seems to be. Turns out, people like being able to take their wives out to dinner. They like having coffee shops and bars to meet friends at. People I know who mercilessly mocked all the new development when it was being proposed now find themselves regularly applauding all the benefits that have come with it. Maybe people around here should just relax a little bit and not assume that every new thing is going to cause the sky to collapse or whatever it is they’re so afraid of. No matter what you do, things aren’t going to stay the same forever. And hey, sometimes change makes things nicer.

• A lot of people actually like density. I fell in love with downtown Oakland the first time I saw it, even though, relative to how it is now, it was a kind of a wasteland. And I love it even more now, with the added vibrancy in the neighborhood that’s come with all new development. So it really stings when I have to listen to people talk about what a hellhole it is down here and how no one would ever tolerate living in such oppressive crowded conditions. (This happens all the time! Some guy at the Planning Commission just the other night was going on about how all you have to do is look at my neighborhood to see what a blighted nightmare mid-rise development causes for a neighborhood!) Sometimes it feels like half of Oakland is completely repulsed by the very idea of relatively dense, transit-oriented housing.

  So imagine how weird it is for me to go back home and have everyone I encounter want to talk about how great it would be to move into one of those adorable little apartments along the waterway, where you’d be so close to all the restaurants and shopping and nightlife and just walk to the store or take the trolley or water taxi out to eat at night. (Note: the “trolley” is actually a bus, and based on my admittedly limited observation, I don’t think anyone actually rides it anywhere ever. Ha! I sound like one of those anti-bus people!) And those places are selling like gangbusters. In fact, no less than three of the families on my old street have abandoned our cosy cul-de-sac for yardless “downtown” townhomes, and couldn’t be happier.

• Traffic is everywhere. People here get so worked up about traffic! Every development anyone ever proposes, it’s traffic this and traffic that. The traffic from “Manhattan-like” development will destroy the neighborhood! People get so melodramatic about it, too. Seriously, watch the Planning Commission next time they consider a development in Temescal – the way the opposition talks, you’d think someone had filed an application to unleash a pack of rapid kangaroos on the neighborhood or something. Seriously, people. Your intersection already blows. How much worse can 100 more people living in the neighborhood possibly make it? (Yeah, yeah, I know. Cumulative impacts. Wev. How much worse can 1000 more people living in the neighborhood possibly make it. How many cars drive through Temescal every day?) If I was queen of the State of California, I would decree that traffic is not an environmental impact subject to CEQA.

  Anyway, where I come from, although they’ve grown a great deal, it isn’t exactly the type of place you’d call dense. Pretty much the opposite, really. The roads are well-maintained, enormous, and plentiful. Yet the traffic congestion out there is just as bad as it is anywhere in Oakland. You have to deal with traffic, people, no matter where you are. Get over it! Get an iPod and take the bus.

• You can never build enough parking. In my part of Texas, there is parking everywhere. Everything is also surrounded by giant surface parking lots and/or multi-story parking structures. Yet there still never seems to be enough parking anywhere you go, and you end up spending as much time driving around looking for a space as you do in busy commercial districts in Oakland. No matter how many spaces you build, you will always have a shortage. So again, just accept that parking will always be an issue no matter what and stop whining about it.

I’m not suggesting Oakland should look like The Woodlands – not at all. Hell, we couldn’t even if we wanted to. But I do think it would be nice if we could, as a city, just try for a little while to be at least as tolerant of growth as people in suburban Houston.

It was a banner day for intolerance, not just in California, but across the country. Arizona voters approved a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage 56.3% to 43.7%. Florida did the same thing, voting 61.9% to 38.1% to “protect marriage.” Even sicker, 56.95% of Arkansas voters decided they don’t think gay couples should even be able to adopt children. WTF?

This Saturday, equality advocates across the nation will come together to protest this widespread show of intolerance and rally for an end to discrimination and equal rights for all citizens. Protests are being organized in more cities than I can count, and Oakland, of course, will have one of its own at 10:30 tomorrow morning in front of City Hall. Lucky for us, local organizers have lined up some truly excellent speakers, including newly-elected at-large City Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan and Equality California development director Sean Sullivan. So if you can, please try to make it down to City Hall on Saturday morning and show your support.