yeah. That was cool. With a little coordination, at least part of this sort of wall space could be used to create a city-wide theme. There are other opportunities beyond this one type of wall too. If we expect to be stuck with a stagnant building climate for a while, why not make the most of the hand it deals us?

I loved that.

The flowers I was talking about aren’t real flowers. I mean the ones that were on signs put next to IDLF campaign signs in fruitvale. The idea is that if OBA could coordinate a voluntary arts program of some sort on vacant lot fences, we could do something really cool, and cheap.

Imagine if OBA or the city put together something where the plywood fences bounding construction projects were made available to a coherent art campaign. Something as simple as painting these fences with images of famous Oaklanders, or historical facts in artistically enhanced fonts, or fanciful maps of the surrounding area. Take the impact and turn it into local character. Create a graffiti deterrent. Add “brought to you by OBA”. Win win.

Relative to the larger issue of buying flowers for empty lots, which I’ll extrapolate to mean the developers and builders providing additional benefits to the community, it’s certainly a conversation worth having within the context of a balanced governing body that is also willing to look at the benefits that come from the act of construction and development itself.

Beyond that, though, it sounds to me like the problems go deeper than the individual personalities on the council. They are clearly not working as a team and don’t trust eachother. The Mayor should be doing a better job of keeping the council members on the same page. Management books will tell you that a certain amount of conflict among a peer group is a good way to get differences of opinion out in the open. But our council is more than just disagreeing here. They are distrustful of eachother and, while that’s not new in politics, it’s very hard to get anything done when relationships are fractured like that.

The fee limit is because CEDA can’t recoup more than administrative costs with the fees, right?

If developers are wiling to pay more, perhaps they’d be willing to consider taking a little spare cash (and I know there’s not a lot of it) and using it to beautify sites waiting for development. There are all sorts of cool and low cost ways to pretty up a vacant lot or a fence, and I’ll bet that a loose partnership with the arts community could make some of them happen. If OBA had a unified approach for site beautification, it would create opportunities for inexpensive city-wide art projects, which would in turn create a positive city-wide identity builder for Oakland and OBA.

You think those sets of cut-out flowers tied to chainlink fences are cute? Wait till you see what we can cook up to out do them.