September 2015
Big Ideas for Oakland’s Downtown Mostly Exclude Artists (Op/Ed)
Retaining the character, flavor and cultural identity of Oakland should be a Big Idea. But in an urban planning process which appears to be completely run by developers and consultants, apparently with the blessing of the pro-development administration of Mayor Libby Schaff, broadly diverse voices of the artistic and creative community may have been all but shut out of that process.
plan downtown flyerAs CRP previously noted, the development community has already taken aim at the arts, by filing a lawsuit this past July which claimed that the city’s percent for art program violated federal civil rights guidelines. This was followed by the Mayor’s Task Force on Affordable Artist Housing and Work Spaces, which held its first meeting August 6. In her invitation, the mayor noted that “local artist communities have contributed to making Oakland a dynamic and vibrant city that is now attracting new interest and investment. We need to ensure that they are able to remain in Oakland as the City continues to grow and change.” She went on to identify affordable housing and work spaces for artists as “part of my larger policy agenda.”
However, a follow-up email obtained by CRP reveals that the task force invitees consisted of only a handful of actual artists and members of arts-based organizations. The overwhelming majority of those invited were developers, architects, attorneys, and city staff; some members of the arts community were added to the email chain only after they bum-rushed the original meeting without an invite. (Despite Schaff’s stated intent, the creative community has reason to be skeptical of her true motives: she is reportedly opposed to re-forming Oakland’s Cultural Arts Commission, which would bring some community oversight to the city’s overly-bureaucratic arts development process, and she reneged on a promise to arts advocates to allow for “tweaking” of the percent for art proposal to make it more community-friendly.)
Then, on September 3, a Miami-based development consultant group presented the “community kick-off event” for the Downtown Oakland Specific Plan (DOSP) – a new master urban planning initiative similar to the West Oakland and Chinatown-specific plans.
CRP Executive Director Desi Mundo attended the meeting and posted some of his observations on social media. He noticed that very few, if any, members of the artist community were present, and said he received no answer when he inquired about community engagement specific to the Malonga Center’s tenants. The people who did attend again represented a heavy concentration of developers and city staff, along with some business owners and CBD staffers. There were several references to the creative community, but most of them amounted to lip service.
Throughout the report’s 72 full-color pages, it loftily floats several “Big Ideas” and 30 smaller recommendations, only one of which is directly connected to the arts: “downtown should also integrate art into public spaces. This is an opportunity to make strategic use of Oakland’s public art fee,” the report states, even though the lawsuit could delay implementation of that fee for several years or eliminate it altogether.
http://crpbayarea.org/2015/09/11/big-ideas-for-oaklands-downtown-mostly-exclude-artists-oped/
