V – Thanks for the videos.

I actually see quite a few vacant houses in my neighborhood. I expect that my anecdotal evidence conflicts with the statistics because of where I am. The neighborhood isn’t doing great, and I also expect that the vacancies are underreported. West Oakland is not likely representative of the whole city though.

It makes sense that we’re growing. We’re cooler and cheaper than Berkeley or SF!

Oakland has gained somewhere in the realm of 8-10,000 people in the last 5 years. There are huge swaths of land the were purely industusrial that now have medium/high density housing, and even in this era of forclosures, there are few vacant houses in the city.

I would hazard to guess that our actual population, including illegal immigrants, is somewhere around 475,000

The fight in the video actually happened during a special meeting of the City Council where they were supposed to be discussing the police whistle-blower lawsuit settlement – wait, do all you guys know about this? This whole story is just insane. From the (sort of) beginning and (sort of) quickly:

Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick threw this party in 2002 at his city-owned mansion and his wife, who he wasn’t expecting, came home and found him with all these strippers, attacked one of the strippers and then the police started investigating the incident but Kilpatrick intefered with the investigation and then the police officers investigation the party and some officers from internal affairs were fired during the investigation, and sued the city over it. One of the strippers from the party was later murdered during the investigation of this party, and at least one former police officer alleges that the murder was committed by the police.

The whistleblower lawsuit came to trial in 2007, and the City lost, and got a judgement against it of $6.5 million. Kilpatrick said he would appeal the verdict, but soon later agreed to settle the suit for $8.4 million. Part of this settlement was that everyone agreed that text messages sent between the Mayor and his former chief of staff remain confidential. After much legal fighting, the text messages finally got released, and it turns out that they proved that Kilpatrick and the woman had had an affair, and lied about it under oath during the trial. After this and other details of the settlement came to light, Kilpatrick was charged with perjury, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy in March. The text messages are insane. The City Council passed a resolution in March requesting that Kilpatrick resign (with every member present except Monica Conyers, the charming woman from the video above) voting in favor. Kilpatrick is not interested in resigning, and the Council has asked their City Attorney to try to find a way to legally remove him. Someone tried to start a recall petition, but the Mayor’s office had the petition’s approval rescinded.

Anyway, the Council was talking about the repercussions of their approval of the settlement when this video was taken. Conyers (wife of Congressman John Conyers), had already gotten into a fight with one of the other Councilmembers earlier in the meeting, so this is her second flip-out of the day.

Sweet Melissa has updated her post with another amazing video, in which Monica Conyers sits among a group of middle school girls and defends her behavior, saying that the kids have probably all done it too and that it’s okay because she was frustrated. This 8th grade girl totally schools her, too. It’s awesome.

She says in a subsequent interview that she’s seen worse behavior than that at work in her capacity as a school teacher, and explains that she “never said Shrek was bad or good.” She later gives an excellent pitch for moving to Detroit: “Come live in Detroit. Detroit is a wonderful place. You’ll find good schools. You’ll find lots of beautiful water, nice landscaping. Our neighborhoods are thriving, and coming back alive, and Detroit is UP on the move! Come look at Detroit for yourself and check out Detroit. DEEE-Troit!”

Doesn’t Oakland’s city government not look all that bad now?