🌊 Oakland's Political Experiment Gone Wrong

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By Max Towey

You’d be hard-pressed to find an American city that’s had a worse six-year stretch than Oakland, California.

Consider where it was in 2019: Property values were climbing; crime was dropping; and three major sports teams – including the dynastic Golden State Warriors – played there. It wasn’t as rich or relevant as its cross-Bay twin city, but it was green and growing. 

In the period since, all three sports teams have left the city; a crime surge caused an exodus of new businesses; its mayor and DA were both recalled; and now, per a new grand jury report, it’s cruising toward bankruptcy. The only thing it’s gained during this span is a new title: The robbery capital of the US.

We visited Oakland to answer one simple question: What happened?

“This is the result of progressive policies,” Seneca Scott told us as we drove through an RV encampment near his home. He then took us down one of the many alleys where city residents and out-of-towners dump trash. He told us to roll up our windows because of the smell. 

Street after street after street looked like this: Covered in graffiti and peppered with trash. He mumbled in a funereal tone, “Oakland is a beautiful city. What’s happened is a man-made problem.”

Seneca Scott has become something of a villain in Oakland politics. A self-proclaimed “post-partisan community organizer,” he led the successful recall of Oakland’s mayor Sheng Thao in 2024. But he’s by no means a right-winger. 

He came to Oakland in 2012 to lead a chapter of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), one of the country’s most powerful unions. Social work is in his blood; his dad is a cousin of Coretta Scott King, MLK Jr.’s widow. Before becoming East Bay Director for the SEIU Local, he attended Cornell University. In the years that followed, he was a proud “progressive Democrat.” But Covid changed him.

Recalling a mayor is extremely rare. There’s been no successful recall of a mayor in a major city since Ballotpedia began keeping track in 2010. The last one we could find took place in Spokane, WA, in 2005 after allegations were made that mayor Jim West sexually abused young men and hired them in City Hall for sexual favors. One internet sleuth got the mayor to seduce him in a chat room on Gay.com. West went down, making him the lone mayor to get recalled this century – until Seneca Scott came for Sheng Thao.

In 2023, one year into Thao’s tenure as mayor, Oakland’s crime was spiraling to levels unseen in a decade. From 2020 to 2023, total crime doubled. Violent crime was even worse, rising to 174% of its 2020 level. 

2023 saw Oakland become the robbery capital of America, recording 639 robberies per 100,000 residents, ahead of second-place Baltimore’s rate of 556 per 100,000. One out of 10 residents was a victim of a property crime. Yet perhaps the most staggering statistic was this: For every 27 Oakland residents, one car was stolen in 2023.

Editor’s Note

We want to hear your thoughts on today’s story, particularly Oakland readers: What do you all make of the situation in America’s inner cities? Are there any success stories you know of? Let us know by replying here.

Also, looking for some additional Sunday reading? Find our latest below:

• Are We Normalizing Trump? Our Reply

• Sam Altman’s Media Strategy

• Trump’s Subtle Takeover of American Industry

• RIP, Supplement Industry?

• The World’s Most Powerful Woman

And we received a huge number of replies to yesterday’s double feature, including many about whether we are “normalizing Trump.” We can only feature a fraction of what we received, but a handful of representative replies are below:

Bernardo wrote:

Diane wrote:

And Louis wrote:

We’ll be back with more tomorrow.
—Max and Max