think about where your from, what you have done fro the community. for most of you that will be no more than bring wads of cash and build monstrosities and pretend that you no what is best.

fair go to jay. he is doing brilliantly and if any of you accomplish what he has in your life times.. count yourselves fortunate.

to the person who wrote the article on this webpage. youre a disgrace.

What is injustice for one is injustice for all. He should care about them! They pay his mortgage, PG&E, EBMUD and anything else he needs. Justice for Recyclers just like we holler Justice for Everything that matters in the City of Oakland.

Since our City Council reads these blogs, I am concerned about the next steps for Alliance. Shall we create policy that makes recycling business responsible for building at least ONE HOMELESS SHELTER and ONE RECOVERY CENTER?

We tax the Citizens of Oakland, when we should lay the responsibility where it belongs on this one. On the head of Alliance!

The guy was being patently opportunistic, exploitive, and out of line.

A man pushes heavy laden carts up and down Adeline like a modern day junkie Sisyphus, day in and day out. Alliance uses these people like employees without rights. Alliance oughta be run out of town.

Many of the people who spoke to me admitted that they are in addiction and that this is how they support their addiction. One man said to me, it’s better than going to jail for stealing. We should hold Alliance accountable for his clients and those who helped him get his $30,000.00 new machine.

What is injustice for one is injustice for all. I stand with Ms. Brooks on this one. She was right in what she said and how she said it. This man bought KFC and warm sodas and paid people to speak on his behalf. Who’s minding Alliance’s store on the Council?

Prop 13 and insufficient blight enforcement work together to make land banking easy in oakland. Up until the bottom fell out of the market, it was quite possible that the annual dollar value appreciation on a vacant property would be higher than the property tax. That incentivizes owners to do nothing with their property. It also incentivizes sitting on multiple properties, doing nothing with them, and borrowing against them to buy other property.

I have no problem with creating disincentives for situations like that. The economy is already helping somewhat, and Ms. Brooks’ method might not be the best path, but I still think vacancy should be discriminated against. Especially in the case of multi-property owners, especially trusts and banks.

So yeah, if it’s land banking, or if it’s real estate investment of another sort that helps a wealthy investor but inflicts blight or even just stagnation on our community, that’s an investment I want to scare away. It’s not easy to differentiate with legal sanctions in this situation, but that’s why I’m not a lawyer or a legislator.

As far as the blight hotline goes, that’s not what I mean by single point of contact. I mean a single high level staffer tasked specifically and exclusively with orchestrating war on blight, particularly with coordinating multiple departments.

With foreclosures, there are citizen remedies that are possible too. One thing that came up on tuesday night was the possibility of multiple small claims suits from everyone in the neighborhood against an irresponsible loan servicer. I’m sure there are others.

I also thing that seizures need to be expedited for orphaned properties. If no-one can get an owner to respond to communication for multiple years, and if the property is empty, the city should be able to take it and auction it relatively easily.

Wow. That’s democracy!