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Comment by mikeryan | Hacker News Reader

So the biggest issue I see right now with Oakland is that it really suffers from a lack of decent or desirable office space.

I'm currently 15 months into an SF lease for my company and when I originally looked for space I spent a lot of time looking in Oakland thinking I'd get a lot greater value. Unfortunately I found only one nice "SOMA style" space in Oakland it was right on the edge of Chinatown in an area I'm not sure I'd want female employees walking to BART late at night.

Honestly there's a huge opportunity here for some developers to look at building out some nicer office spaces in Oldtown, Jack London or the Grand/Broadway area near 19th St BART. I don't mean stuff thats gorgeous just something slightly contemporary would be an upgrade.

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The crime problem is overstated. While it appear high on a per capita basis, cities are dynamic. The cancers that plague the city will be forced out of downtown and Jack London once business activity picks up, because that will coincide with an increased presence on the street of people doing things as well as more police (the force is less than half of what is needed).

Oakland has this very unique history of activism that really scares people into not investing here and even that is changing -- for the better.

Funny thing about $1,000/SF apartments in the city though...people start to re-evaluate their options. Even if you do not move your office space to Oakland, you can't beat the 15 min commute from downtown Oakland into the "city". Oakland will never really rival SF but it does not have to. Today, without much of a tech scene, Oakland has many attributes (big city amenities with a small town feel) that allow it to trump the city, including better weather.

I will go on record by saying that Oakland (core, around lake, downtown, Jake London, Uptown, etc) will become one of the most desirable place to live in the Bay Area within the next 10 years.

I want to clarify, the crime thing isn't the main thrust of my argument. Its an issue but not the one I'm addressing. My point is that a lot of the actual physical spaces I saw were outdated offices or Office Space style cube farms.

Give it 5 years and agents will start calling those cube farms a "Retro and Quirky work environment"

Are Oakland's problems mostly caused by low per-capita tax revenues or by inefficient city government? If it's just a matter of cash, that will change quickly. If the government culture is broken, that can take much longer to fix.

I'd say the latter because Oakland experienced a significant windfall in real estate transfer taxes prior to the real estate crash, and it was all squandered by Ron Dellums[1] and cronies.

The current government are hardly better. Mayor Quan is a semi-literate career politician. Her ideas are basically terrible and stupid.

1: True fact: I couldn't remember his name so I just googled "dipshit mayor of oakland" and his name popped up #1.

What are your thoughts on the candidates in the upcoming mayoral election?

I only know a few. There's the civil rights attorney who was on Quan's staff. That's two negatives for me; trying to be nice to everybody at once is how Quan got into a quagmire with Occupy Oakland. Seigel refers to the space in front of city hall as "Oscar Grant Plaza" which puts him firmly in the moron column on my ticket.

I know Schaaf, who represents my district. I don't really like her policies because they represent the clueless barely-affluent people up in the hills. Anti-tax and tough-on-crime on the same ticket? Schaaf has that ticket. It doesn't make sense. She's also been active in trying to rollback pedestrian improvements and bike lanes in favor of a handful of parking spaces which reinforces my image of her as a bit clueless.

I guess technically Quan is also running again. Heh.

Your thoughts?

In the abstract I like the notion of someone who's been City Auditor at the helm, but don't have strong feelings about Ruby in particular. Probably weakly prefer Seigel to Quan but that's not saying much. Schaaf doesn't seem awful. In general I need to dig deeper.

I think there's some decent 1970s style office space in places around 20th/Broadway -- where Pandora, Kaiser Center, etc. are. I personally prefer mostly-private-offices, with some project spaces, to the "SOMA style" warehouses open plan offices. I haven't looked in a year or two (if I were getting office space, it'd be R&D/lab/light industrial plus office space, and I'd be fine with a bad area and a big fence/gated parking/armed guard).

There is a lot of stuff just on the other side of 980 at Grand, too, but that's approaching warzone status unfortunately. It's weird when a Taco Bell and a pot dispensary gentrify an area (the east side of 980).

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