Speaking of new hotels, plans for a 220-room hotel to rise on the vacant Caltrans lot to the south of the Emeryville Target have been drafted and will be reviewed by Oakland’s Design Review Committee tomorrow evening, January 25.
The proposed “Mandela Hotel” would rise up to six stories in height along the Mandela Parkway parcel which is currently enclosed by a chain-link fence and borders the Bay Bridge approach.
Designed by Architectural Dimensions, the plans include an underground garage for 163 cars. And the hotel is to be operated by Ram Hotels.
Since it appears the property is entirely in Oakland wouldn’t a better title be “…near Emeryville” or, even, “…in Oakland” ??
I know this will inspire – if that’s the right word – the usual comments like “it will continue to be enclosed by a chain link fence” and cause an ill-informed downgrade of the project’s chances, but it’s nevertheless correct.
As for putting an underground garage just a few feet from the shoreline, well….
Considering the adjacent Target has an Emeryville address, and north of 580 is considered Emeryville by those in the know, as is the nearby commercial strip, the answer to your query is no.
“In the Know” and just sloppy, but it’s your site, I’ll accept this…”alternate fact” is, I think, the current vernacular (and what choice do I have?)
🙂
[Editor’s Note: It’s neither sloppy nor an alternate fact. And the choice is whether or not you care to learn.]
I think it’s complicated in that there is some sort of agreement between Oakland and Emeryville to split sales tax revenue for that whole shopping center. (And maybe police service) I live near there, and I thought Target was Emeryville, but it looks like it’s not, at least as far as the actual border, strictly speaking. I’m sure Target would rather be known as Emeryville than Oakland.
It’s in Oakland. It’s being considered by the Oakland planning dept. I don’t think USPS designations matter here.
A link to the PDF containing the rendering above would make this pretty clear & unambiguous.
Not sure why SS is taking a Sean Spicer approach to being incorrect. SFists would be flaming this site like it was the End of Days had they posted an SF project was in (hold on, need to settle my stomach) Daly City.
SocketSite, the proposal was submitted to the City of Oakland Planning Commission it is 100% within Oakland city limits. Also, the Target in question is the “Oakland-Emeryville Target” and it’s 100% inside the Oakland city limits, but Emeryville is more known for retail… so they flub the address, bleh.
“Those in the know”? Don’t you mean “those who are ignorant?” Those in the know know it’s Oakland. Or are you relying on “alternate” facts?
Actually, Emeryville is just a small cut out section of Oakland. The city is bordered on three sides by Oakland and is a natural extension of Oakland’s north west city limits line. The area is like the City of Piedmont and should rightly be within Oakland city limits.
Don’t talk about things you have no knowledge of. There is literally no concrete fact backing up the assertion that Emeryville “rightfully belongs” to Oakland. You have the mentality of someone living in colonial times.
I said it “should be” based on Oakland’s city lines. Emeryville is a small area which logically should be a continuation of the city of Oakland. As it currently stands, it is small cut out area designed to take sales tax away from Oakland.
There is no evidence of any kind to support that statement. Give CONCRETE facts supporting the idea that Emeryville shouldn’t get to be it’s own city. Spoiler: you can’t. It was incorporated as a city in 1896 and was never part of Oakland. It was administered by Alameda County until it became a city. This is all just you doing your normal thing and spouting your provincial, ignorant opinion about things that have no affect on you.
Oakland was incorporated in 1852. Oakland annexed the huge area just east of Lake Merritt known as Brooklyn. The Emeryville land should have also been annexed by Oakland just as the City of Piedmont should have been annexed by Oakland. These Area are logical natural geographic extension of the city of Oakland. Just because Emeryville “never was” part of Oakland, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be.
Might as well say that Oakland should be a part of Berkely… makes as much sense
FACT: What is now Emeryville was never part of the city of Oakland at any point in time.
FACT: What is now Emeryville used to be unincorporated Alameda County.
FACT: The people living in what is now Emeryville in the late 1800’s voted to become an incorporated independent city.
You continue to represent your ignorant opinions as if they are facts. But they’re not and never will be. They will always just be ignorant opinions that ignore historical facts.
By your childish logic, Oakland should just be part of San Francisco like Brooklyn or Queens are part of New York.
Well, by that standard, Oakland should extend to the Nevada State Line.
The GLORIOUS MANIFEST DESTINY OF OAKLAND, CONQUEROR OF THE GOLDEN WEST
Anonymous, a group of wealthy industrialists created a 100% commercial City of Emeryville to avoid paying taxes or being subject to Oakland regulation. At its formation the industrialists boasted it was the perfect modern city as it had no permanent residents. At the time Oakland had an embarrassment of manufacturing riches and did little about it However, they easily could have… and should have annexed. Oh well. In the coming decades Oakland is set to regain its status as a popular and prosperous city and so Emeryville’s days as an autonomous municipality are likely numbered.
Oakland is already “a popular and prosperous city”, certainly wrt to USA in general. Less so wrt the very popular and prosperous Bay Area in general, but so what?
BTW, Oakland’s days as a fully autonomous municipality were suspended when the feds began supervising OPD years ago. Today Hair Twitler threatened to “send in the Feds!” “If Chicago doesn’t fix the horrible “carnage” going on” Maybe Oakland will serve as a model. I think we all know why Piedmont and Emeryville will never become parts of Oakland, they wouldn’t want to join any muni that would have them as polities.
You guys using alternate facts now? City borders are very clear. This is in Oakland, legally. You are straight up doing a Trump-style denial of facts.
Agreed. What’s up with that Socketsite?
emeryville is more marketable than oakland. it will draw more people because of oaklands bad reputation
By what metrics?
By the fact the streets are clean in Emeryville. No grabage, no homeless encampments. The police show up within 5 minutes of being called. Emeryville has nowhere that looks as sad and pathetic as East Oakland.
Are you a comment bot? You don’t seem to know either city. I spend half my day in each city 5-7 days a week and that’s an extremely unrealistic assessment. You’re comparing like maybe Bay Street to some unspecific part of EO which is several square miles. There’s plenty of litter and dumping in areas of E’ville and East Oakland has some immaculate communities, too.
Rockridge, Montclair, Piedmont Avenue, Jack London Square, City Center, Lakeshore are as clean as anything in Emeryville. Could it be that Emeryville is a very small city of about 10,000 which has a huge retail base way out of proportion to its population and therefore has more money per square mile for maintenance? Who do you think shops in Eneryville? It’s plenty of Oakland residents spending their tax dollars in what should be a part of their city.
Is that why Oakland’s median home price is higher than Emeryville’s?
So are you saying affordable housing is a bad thing? No Emeryville does not have a bunch of Hillside Montclair millionaire’s, but neither do we have a bunch of tarpaper shacks like you see down by the Oakland Coliseum.
Pablito the gaslighter. There are more homes under $400k in Oakland than in E’ville, but we also have significantly more upper tier. I work in E’ville and our extremely posh office building had two daytime break-ins in our parking garage just last week. There have been a number of muggings -even at Bay Street. There are homeless camps in E’ville, too. EPD does seem to try to keep them out of view, which is actually quite unethical. #glasshouses
What utter nonsense. If your site was professional you would ascertain if it was within Oakland or Emeryville city limits and then accurately describe its location. What is so hard about that?
this is in no way a professional site
Will Godzilla come sit on the toilet seat?
i was just at the home depot near there the other day thinking about the vast amount of parking lots in the area and how it will all be developed in the next 10-15 years. This is a great addition!
Now they need the 2nd BART transbay tube to branch north (as well as south through JLS and Alameda) and stop at Bayshore then along 4th in Berkeley before connecting back up to the existing line around N Berkely.
I mean, this is “an” addition – idk about it being a “great” one. Though as someone who lives in west oakland/prescott, I am supportive of literally almost anything being built here or in my hood farther south. .
While I 100% agree about BART expansion, keep dreaming. BART has made it perfectly clear that it has no serious intentions of building a 2nd tube or expansion in this area of the East Bay. It’s only commitment for the next decade or two is bringing trains to San Jose.
BART to SJ will make Oakland the most accessible downtown in the Bay Area.
the bottleneck in the transbay tube is a huge liability for the region & needs a backup / alternate route. it shocks me this is even still debated by our officials vs being lobbied for intenstly via bonds or govt funding. this is a perfect example of the failing infrastructure that needs to be addressed …. i would think BART would be in the top 10 priorities nationally, definitley top 20.
It definitely should happen. Will it happen by 2040? I doubt it.
Given Trump wants a massive infrastructure spend (whether the GOP in Congress will go along is a big if) and monies may be available there is an opportunity. Problem is that the Bay Area is divided. Each city/county entity will want its pet project. Other regions, like LA, are more cohesive on transportation and likely will get the lion’s share of the money while the Bay Area shoots itself in the foot. Again..
That is true on all counts, but it’s been a problem in our infrastructure planning for the last 100 years so I doubt it’s changing.
It would have been far better to use the money we’ve wasted on the Central Subway for another BART tube
I like the idea of bringing more development and more workers to downtown Oak via a San Jose line. Why worry about adding additional BART access to already over built and congested downtown San Francisco? Why spend a huge amount of money to add the capacity to get more people to San Francisco when you can use the current BART system to get them to Oakland? I could see improving service in Berkeley & Oakland with additional north south stops but not over the Bay to SF.
Except that it will work in the opposite direction. Far more Oaklanders commute to the Silicon Valley than the reverse. Adding another transportation means via a BART line would make Oakland even more of a bedroom community for SV.
The SF CBD is not at all “over built”. The mass transit to it is underbuilt, though. Adding more subways BART/MUNI to the SF CBD would make the SF CBD even more valuable and more productive and benefit the entire multimillion populace within a 30-50 minute commute. As to why not pump more office workers into Oakland instead of SF, well, very very simple fact of business life: productivity is lower in the Oakland CBD than in the SF CBD.
Since the line doesn’t even go to the much smaller downtown SJ,(39,000 workers) it makes since that the current South Bay BART extension would benefit the much larger, 85,000 worker, downtown Oakland.
Jake, BART to SJ will enable SV to move east and north. Peninsula cities utterly refuse to grow up. Cities between Oakland and SJ are far more open to growth… and have more wide-open development sites. No doubt Oakland will take on more housing, but why wouldn’t commercial developments grow at the nexus of two major SJ and SF transit lines?
Matt, I think development in downtown Oakland will grow. I also think that the BART extension not just to downtown San Jose but, more importantly and before then, to Milpitas will make living in the East Bay and commuting to the valley significantly easier. I bring up Milpitas because that’s where BART will meet the VTA light rail, which runs along that Tasman corridor past Cisco and a number of other large companies. The benefit isn’t mutually exclusive, but the valley (not just San Jose specifically) already has a lot of the employment and development base to immediately take advantage of the connection. Oakland will reap some benefit immediately, but will have more of a ramp up period as development that draws employment happens in downtown is constructed.
Matt, SV has been growing eastward for 50 years, from Palo Alto to Milpitas. But it has mostly grown southward, reaching Los Gatos and Almaden 30+ years ago. San Francisco has been and will continue to be the primary beneficiary of the northward growth of SV, without a doubt. As well as whatever can still be crammed into San Mateo County’s 101 corridor.
Until we get on with it and fill the Bay south of the Port of Oakland, there won’t be a central “nexus”, though if you really really want one in the East Bay, then that would be Hayward-Fremont, which has been out growing and taking growth away from Oakland for decades.
The BART line will have stations in Milpitas and Santa Clara that connect with VTA and Caltrain. Oakland/innerEastBay lost the battle for the next major CBD in the Bay Area to the SV about 50 years ago, and it continues to get further and further behind.
SV has plenty of land to add more office space, much more than Oakland, and much more valuable than any in Oakland. Their main constraint, like SF, is how to get the additional workers in/out. Can’t add more freeways and they won’t build dense enough housing, so they are gradually adding train lines to extend their reach further into bedroom communities.
In addition to BART, they may reopen the old Dumbarton ROW and someday…HSR. Then it will take less than an hour from Fresno to San Jose, and Fresno has more people than Oakland.
EG, as usual, your comment has nothing to do with it. You keep comparing Oakland to San Jose, when for office workers SJ is primarily a bedroom community for SV, same as Oakland is for SF.
Are u seriously trying to say a 2nd transbay tube doesn’t make sense? I’m not even going to try to persuade you otherwise if that is really your base belief.
A second trans bay tube would benefit San Francisco and further harm Oakland. I’m not interested in trying to cram more businesses and residents into an already congested city of 47 square miles while Oakland has much more space and is on the side of the Bay with the much larger population.
Jake, Fresno? I don’t believe much of your comment is based in reality. Transit connectivity and walk-ability are the new names of the game. Oakland is light years ahead of SJ in policies that promote high density walk-able development. Oakland and the inner East Bay are growth friendly, the Peninsula is growth fearing. The path of least resistance is Oakland and the inner East Bay. Call Oakland a bedroom community all you want -it’s the coolest “bedroom community” in the Bay Area.
Yes, Matt, even Fresno; at least once there’s a ~60 minute train commute from there to the Silicon Valley. In the (very) mean times we actually live in, 580 routinely backups for 10 miles in the cold Oakland AM with commuters from eastern and southern Alameda County headed for the Bay Bridge and their jobs in SF and SM Counties. And 880 is worse. The reality is that the growth rate of long distance commuters into the SF and SV CBDs is much greater than the growth rate of those from the inner Bay Area. And has been for at least two decades.
The “new name” of an old “game” is Uber drivers that live as far away as Sacramento, drive into SF for their uber-duper-fat-$$$-shifts, sleep overnight in their cars in the Marina Safeway parking lot and similar, until they return home after another glorious SF work week.
The reality is that Oakland is a laggard in actually accomplishing “high density walk-able development”, though they may well lead in vacant pronouncements of such “policies”, just as they lead in vacant lots. The reality is HOV lanes as far out as Livermore, and population growth in the Livermore/Pleasanton/Dublin area vastly exceeds anything in Oakland for the past generation and surely will for the next generation too. That’s the reality, not your cute verbiage and trite name gaming. And I really don’t need any lectures about high-density development and walkability, as I often advocate both here on SS and have even actually really lived it for many years and in a city and neighborhood which has accomplished far more of it in the last 5 or 10 or 20 years than anywhere in Oakland.
There are some in the business community of SC county that want a BART line going north to the job centers of Santa Clara, Mountain View and Palo Alto.
There already is such a line and it is called Caltrain.
In some ways – and I’m just musing here – once the BART extension through downtown San Jose is done and Caltrain is electrified, wouldn’t it make sense for Caltrain to simply be absorbed into BART so that the two systems are operated by a single entity? Seems, at least on the surface, like that would be more efficient.
@ Anonymous Bingo. CalTrain should eventually be absorbed into BART. Yhe Bay Area needs to consolidate transportation entities.
Couldn’t agree more, finally some extension of “Emeryville” influence into West Oakland to help continue its vibrant culture and a little clean up to help us current small businesses.
I agree i wouldnt call this “great” it more the fact that development is occuring and continued to be planned there that is great. now about that 2nd tube….
Target shopping center sits on 1/3 Oakland land, therefore 1/3 sales taxes go to Oakland, 2/3 Emeryville. This land for the proposed hotel is 100% in Oakland, with an Oakland address, so if I’m not mistaken, Oakland won’t have to share the tax revenue with Emeryville.
Yes, this is in Oakland, but it’s inside 94608 and Emeryville sounds better so good luck persuading the world. Google Maps shows E’ville’s border hugging the curve of 580/80, but it’s actually a straight line slicing diagonally through the Big Box zone. Target, Best Buy, and this site are entirely within Oakland, Home Depot’s about half-and-half, and Nordstrom Rack is all Emeryville. I hate big box stores so I’m perfectly happy to let Emeryville take the credit as long as we continue to get our tax revenue split out of it.
More interestingly, given that this is the “Mandela Hotel”, which would indicate a knowledge of place, why is Mandela Parkway in the rendering above identified as “N. Mathilda Ave”?
They’re doing a similar project on N Mathilda Ave in Sunnyvale, oops.
Also, the Extended Stay America, Best Buy and Pet Club all state Oakland addresses on their web sites. SS is just being weird about this.
That is all Oakland and Oakland gets the sales tax. People need to give Oakland what is Oakland.
but emeryville is much more marketable. it doesnt have the poor reputation of oakland
Seriously? What decade are you in? 1980?
The stigma of Oakland is past.
Maybe except for those old SF people who still live be in the old days of cashing Oakland endlessly. Sorry secrets out. Get up to speed.
Emeryville more marketable than Oakland due to stigma? Seriously are you seriously stating this?
He has a very low opinion of Oakland.
That’s right, the Extended Stay America Oakland – Emeryville, the Best Buy Emeryville, and the Pet Club Emeryville. All of which make our point, not yours.
Why would “Emeryville sound better?”
This is the same thing realtors do in the Claremont Hills neighborhood of Oakland. There is a shared “Berkeley” zip code so all these 2 million dollar homes in the North Oakland hills are advertised as “Berkeley.” It’s strange since these homes are all serviced by OFD, OPD, Oakland Public Works and are in District 1 represented by Dan Kalb. No right.
There’s no more room to grow, but south. It would be amazing if retail spread south of the 580.
This hotel is in Oakland, not in Emeryville. It’s going to the Oakland Planning Comission for approval. It’s time Oakland get credit for all of its 57 beautiful sq. miles. Pretending parts of Oakland are Emeryville, Berkeley, or Piedmont, takes a way from the entirety and greatness of the city.
The existing hotel directly east across Mandela Pkwy from this site calls itself “Extended Stay America Oakland-Emeryville”. The Target just northwest of the site calls itself the “Oakland-Emeryville Target”. Who cares if this new hotel uses Emeryville as part of its name or is referred to as being in Emeryville or Oakland or both? That has nothing to do with the building itself.
There are such things as facts. This hotel is either in Emeryville or in Oakland. There is no question that the hotel is in Oakland within Oakland city limits. This is good for Oakland since it will get 100% of the city portion of the hotel occupancy tax.
Which has absolutely nothing to do with the nature of the structure itself. Period.
The bigger question is will this impact the Cidade de Deus under the freeway overpasses? I’m sure the hotel guests will love the Only-in Oakland experience of urban angst!
Ya only in Oakland, Oh wait you mean like the 5th st exit off the bay bridge, or the general area of needles, poop, violence and sadness underneath the elevated section of 101/80 interchange? Golden gate and market st? Where’s that you probably wonder?
Of course not, only downtrodden sadness and violence and urban decay affects Oakland. And sf snobs will be the first to say so while holding thier noses above thier own filth.
This thread was about a hotel and the the usual Oakland bashers come in and it’s just sickening!
Yes “the bigger question” your enlightened mind sees, and the focus on the sadness of poverty, which of course only happens in Oakland.
Absolutely, there are Oakland bashers coming here to denigrate and belittle Oakland at every opportunity. This hotel is in Oakland and will be good for Oakland.
The hotel site is a few hundred feet downwind of a huge sewage treatment plant, immediately adjacent to a 15-20 lanes of elevated highway, 5 rail tracks and a few blocks from the Wood Street favelas (literally hundreds of “homeless” people in a City sanctioned shanty town a few blocks away). Not where I would want to spend the night. Take a look on Google Maps satellite view.
There are already hotels in the immediate area. Do the hotels in Emeryville have a environmentally sealed bubble surrounding them? If can all pretend that this is in “Emeryville” the “stench” and “favela” talk would go away.
All of the hotels in Emeryville are much further north and west of the site. Look at a map. I could not care less about the politics of whether it is in Oakland or Emeryville. My concern is that this is presently a terrible site to build a hotel.
This is kind of a hilarious ridiculous thread nonetheless it now occurs to me that Oakland should form a militia and invade those punks in Emeryville! TARGET, IKEA, BAY STREET it will all be ours! In the meantime, you all should find something useful to do with your time….
It would be great for Oakland to be able to retain the retail tax base that now goes into Emeryville’s coffers. This is a small city of 10,000 on Oakland’s border which extracts retai taxes from Oakland residents who don’t have this type of retail base just across the border in a city 40x the size of Emeryville.
Yeah – Silicon Valley have the tech business and Emeryville have IKEA
This lot is def 100% in Oakland. It’s right next to the industrial park part of West Oakland. This is a gritty area. Small manufacturing and some of the last band rehearsal spaces in the Bay Area. There are tons of homeless people and a pretty big tent city right there. Lots of hipsters live around there. It will be nice to see this clean up a bit, but it has soul.
How do we keep up with the progress of this besides through media?
The City of Oakland website updates on the hearings. As for the actual progress, once – or if – it’s approved I would think the developer would adjust their PR accordingly.
How about some more exposure for all the other hotels proposed for Oakland? I know there is a proposal for an 18 story hotel at 14th & Jefferson in downtown Oakland along with other proposed hotels on 12th Street at City Center along with another proposal at 19th & Telegraph in Uptown.
SS, y’all even modified the Gmap to show an Emeryville address? Now other media outlets are snagging your false headline -good job! It says Oakland on the plans… cause it’s not in Emeryville. Let us have our developments!
While we dropped the pin, Google provided the location (which we didn’t modify).
We’re well aware the parcel is within Oakland’s city limits, hence our reference to “Oakland’s Design Review Committee” in our very first sentence above.
But we’re also aware that the location will play as Emeryville, as does the Extended Stay America Oakland – Emeryville, the Best Buy Emeryville, and the Pet Club Emeryville, all with Oakland addresses as you pointed out above, but which make our point, not yours.
Editor, you literally have no point. With exception of Target all those businesses use an Oakland address… as they are all located in Oakland. The hotel developer has Oakland on the plans. I’m not sure what google service you’re using but when you select the parcel on maps.google.com it says, “3401 Mandela Pkwy, Oakland, CA 94608” Again, let me know the next time you state an SF project is in Daly City and stick to your guns like this.
And yet, all three are positioned as “Emeryville” locations, as linked above.
And if you’re mapping 3401 Mandela Pkwy, you’re not only mapping the wrong parcel, but a parcel on the wrong side of 580 as well.
This whole debate is rooted in -your- prejudice. Why are you holding on so hard to the idea this hotel is in Emeryville? The hotel is Oakland -there’s no debate. You’re just prejudice. Sorry. Label it “perception” all you want -the truth is it’s just -your- prejudice. Flip the coin and your clear prejudice might just lend you to proclaim, “While Mission Street Hotel is thought to be in Daly City, it’s actually in San Francisco. Note the SFPC will be reviewing the plans, blah, blah, blah.”
There’s absolutely no prejudice. And if anything, we tend to prefer Oakland over Emeryville (but that’s just us and doesn’t mean one is better than the other). But despite the formal city limits, this location is more “Emeryville” than “Oakland.”
And not only are we willing to bet it will be positioned and recognized as such – and more easily placed by readers when identified as such in a headline – but the practical evidence of the surrounding businesses suggests we’re not the only ones.
If you use 94608 Zip code, it will come up as Emeryville – that is where the post office is located. The lot is inside Oakland city limit. The builder can market it as an Oakland hotel or use the address, 94608, Emeryville – whichever they think will get the best reception in the marketplace.
We should change the name of the Oakland Zoo to “San Leandro Zoo” for marketing purposes. Also Oakland Fox Theater to Emeryville Fox Theater. Oakland International Airport can be changed to Alameda International Airport. The Oakland Athletics can become the Berkeley Athletics. Oakland Museum will become Emeryville Museum. These name changed will all be better for “marketing.” What’s all of this looking down on Oakland? Oakland is a cool city with far more going for it than its small suburban neighbors. Who assigns “marketing value?” This attempted stigmatizing of the great city of Oakland is foolish.
Well, what a bunch of great ideas, but maybe Golden State Athletics and just Fox Theater would be better.
“Marketing value” is assigned by the businesses that put money on the table, and the customers that frequents the businesses. Looks like Pet Club and Best Buy like “Emeryville” in their name. Extended Stay America finds value in using both Oakland and Emeryville in their name.
Since the city of Oakland is so great I am sure that Best Buy will change the name of their store in the near future – perhaps rename it to the Emeryville-Berkeley-Oakland store.
No, Fox Oakland Theater is one of the busiest and most successful entertainment venues in the Bay Area. Oakland International Airport is booming and is one of the fastest growing airports in the United States. The Oakland Zoo is now one of the best on the country and certainly the best in Northern California. The Oakland Museum of California is one of the best museums in all of California. The Oakland Mormon Temple is a beautiful example of stunning religious architecture. All of these venues and attractions are all great “Oakland” brands. Little “Emeryville” is a better brand? To whom? Small minded and ignorant people?
Then why does it bother you? Usually, it is small towns/cities that are bothered by their larger neighbors that are more well known and attracts more business, tourists, investments etc. I had to look Emeryville up to see where it was located.
The issue with Oakland as seen from the outside is a high rate of violent crime – it has been in the top of statistics for years and it will take many years to shake that reputation. You say that it is much better now, but all I have heard in the national news is that you just got your fourth or fifth new police chief in as many years… is that true? If so, why such a high turnover?
Enjoy the success you see in Oakland.
This “crime” narrative about Oakland has been manufactured and nurtured by a biased SF-centric media for decades. San Francisco actually has the highest crime rate per square mile of any large city in the United States. SF recorded 55,000 crimes in 49 square miles in 2015 compared to 32,000 crimes committed in Oakland’s 57 square miles.
Those figures included 700 more violent crimes in San Frsncisco than in Oakland. Only LA had more violent crimes than SF out of all California cities. Also, Emeryville actually has a higher crime rate than Oakland. So far in 2017 Oakland has recorded 2 homicides in the first 27 days. In SF there have been at least 4 homicides while SJ has experienced 3 homicides. Those are all low numbers compared to many other American cities.
Chicago for example has already recorded over 45 homicides in the first 27 days of 2017.
The fact is that crime in Oakland has been going down for the last few years and is far lower now than it was back in the late 80’s and early 90’s when 175 people were killed in 1992. So, this tired old “Oakland is crime” narrative needs to be put to bed. It really now is a false narrative which has been used by Oakland’s adversaries to harm Oakland economically.
BTW, many Oakland neighborhoods like Rockridge, Montclair, Piedmont Avenue, JLS etc. have crime rates comparable to Walnut Creek and other suburban cities.
Oakland Police Dept and FBI report Oakland has a very high violent crime rate that has been among the highest in the USA year after year for a long time. EG tries to reframe the issue to avoid this obvious and well known fact that has been widely reported by east bay based news as well as national news.
Of course every city has crime, and Oakland has some very safe neighborhoods, some not so safe, and some with high concentrations of violent crime. As does Chicago, SF, etc. On an average per capita Oakland is among the worst, though it has some persistent competition for the title.
The only fair metric to use as far as violent crime rates would be homicides. Everything else used by the FBI in their “dangerous city” rankings is subjective and is manipulated by many cities by reclassifying assaults, robberies, into lesser categories such as simple assault or a robbery into a ” theft” in order for the crimes not to be included in the violent crime rate. LA, NYC, NO and some other large cities have already been caught reclassifying violent crimes to lower offenses in order to lower their reported violent crime rates. San Francisco has reclassified certain cell phone robberies into “thefts” in order to keep their robbery count down. The “dangerous city” designations are bogus due to the manner in which police departments classify and report crimes such as aggravated assault, robbery, and rape. The only violent crime category hard to fudge is homicide. San Francisco’s official reporter crime numbers are actually only half the crime incidents documented in daily crime reporting sites covering SF crime.
So yes, Oakland has been very unfairly depicted by a biased SF-centric media for decades.
[Editor’s Note: And now back to the actual topic at hand, which is the proposed hotel…]
There’s a chunk of the Oakland Hills along Claremont Avenue/Fish Ranch Road, adjacent to the UC campus, that has a Berkeley postal address and ZIP code. It is still Oakland. There’s a chunk of Danville that has a San Ramon postal address and ZIP code (much to the chagrin of the affected Danvillites, who claim a San Ramon postal address lowers their property values). It is still Danville. The Post Office can’t redraw city boundaries.
Does anyone else think the name “Mandela Hotel” is sort of a bad choice, since Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison?
Not really – Nelson Mandela fought for human rights, against apartheid; he was the South African equivalent of Martin Luther King Jr. He was a hero to many people, and the transformation he led South Africa through was rather peaceful compared to that of Zimbabwe/Rhodesia to their north.
Watch the movie about his life…
I think “Mandela Hotel” would turn off the same type of people who don’t like the “Oakland” brand. No huge loss there. I like the proposed name.
Physically in Oakland, marketed as Emeryville, either case I don’t like this location for a hotel. It’s not convenient to anything, it is surrounded by freeway which is your view unless your room faces the backside of Target (oh boy). There are no restaurants in walking distance (as if you’d want to walk around there at night) and if you pass under the freeway, it’s a very industrial part of Oakland.
I’m all for infill, but I don’t see this as desirable. The only thing that would be nice is if there was a connection to the Bay Bridge Trail.