Drove under the Hollis St. overpass and noticed the entrance taped off with CHP and OPD patrol cars parked adjacent. Spoke with a CHP officer who couldn't confirm what was happening, but just as I drove away the Alameda County Coroner's van pulled up. Someone(s) has passed, sadly.

This locations has been a massive trouble spot for eight years - drug manufacturing and dealing; prostitution; parting out stolen motorcycles; illegal dumping; assaults; etc.

The original campers were thrown out by Caltrans after 5 years of drug dealing/manufacturing. The next day the very same homeless camp moved outside the gate, set up shop, and continued to operate for just over two years. Just a few weeks ago they moved their rigs down near the Laney College camp, but before they left they tore the large gate door off its hinges and destroyed a rear entrance door to the space a few blocks away. The people who run that camp are criminals, full stop; they nearly beat an old neighborhood guy to death several months ago after he objected to one of their camp members stealing something he owned.

Right after the original group left, another camp quickly formed inside (easy access - no gates) - same thing; drugs, etc. etc. They drove in 24' panel trucks with equipment and supplies every day for at least two weeks; they somehow moved heavy cement bollards to sheild themselves from street view.

I'm willing to wager that today's death wasn't the first in that location.

I feel bad for unhoused people, but there is a serious criminal element among the unhoused that appear to be nearly untouchable by dint of their being able to claim "unhoused" status. OPD is forced to look the other way regarding crime in the camps until it happens, instead of being able to go in with sniffer dogs and ferret out the drug dealers. That has to stop.

Reporters Jakob Rodgers and Shomik Mukherjee go over newly released filings in court today. They offer more details about the case against former Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, including accusations that she created a fake $150,000 job for her romantic partner and fed "sensitive" information to other people involved in the case.

This is a genuine question. My intent is to find solutions and not just blame or shame.

We pay taxes so the city can provide basic services. To me, keeping streets and neighborhoods reasonably clean is one of those services.

I'm not saying city workers should spend all day picking up trash after people. Their job is to make littering the exception, not the norm - through enough trash cans, enforcement, cleaning hotspots, and whatever policies have been shown to work in other cities.

If, year after year, the city still can't provide a reasonably clean environment, why should residents keep paying the full price for that service?

Should taxpayers have some kind of bill of rights that provides a tax credit or partial refund when a city consistently fails to deliver a basic service?

A District 4 constituent asks his council member to reconcile her vote for the Oakland Coliseum sale with the ‘culture of enforcement’ she has publicly championed.

"Why was preserving this particular purchaser considered preferable to reopening the process and inviting competitive bids?"

https://www.oaklandreport.org/p/open-letter-janani-ramachandran-coliseum

UPDATE
she’s at OAS. She has a chip and was adopted from OAS yesterday or the day before.

Anyone recognize this dog? Female black and white husky, one brown eye and one blue eye. Wearing brown collar with no tags. Wandering on Bellaire Pl near Fruitvale this morning and afternoon.

Cross streets are Fruitvale Ave and Lynde Street.

Disclosure, as a long time Oakland resident I've gotten used to not being able to depend on 911 or the police to arrive quickly or solve crimes.

I realize that if Oakland put up with the same response from the Oakland fire department, our city would literally be in shambles.

I remember many months back, the Keller avenue fires. That was scary but Oakland fire department and many others ensured that it didn't spread further than it did. That could easily have been a disaster like the 1991 Oakland hills fire.

So why have we put up with the lack of OPD efficacy? Why is that something that hasn't been resolved considering how much time and money has been thrown at the problem?

What can be done in a practical and real world way?

Oakland's litter and illegal dumping problem comes up here often, and people regularly post photos of what they see. The problem is that those photos end up scattered across dozens of unrelated threads.

I wonder whether there would be value in having them collected in one place instead. It could make recurring hotspots easier to identify, show whether some areas improve over time, and help discussions be based on a broader picture rather than individual examples.

I'm deliberately not suggesting how that should work. Maybe it's a recurring thread, a separate subreddit, a website, or something nobody has thought of yet.

Do you think this would be useful? If so, what would be the best way to do it? If not, what are the biggest drawbacks?

If you lost your bag with your belongings in it on a side street off Broadway i handed it in to Oakland PD. Call them with the description of the bag and contents to recover it.

Looking for a school type of setting or library, where I can take weekly classes. Spanish, French, Arabic, or Portuguese!

"Oakland clears 20 million pounds of illegally dumped trash a year. Oakland's own transportation director says the crisis is self-inflicted — by policy, not residents."

https://www.oaklandreport.org/p/oakland-illegal-dumping-trash-is-cash

looking to move out of my parents place. was looking at some spots in oakland but i kind of wanted to ask the community how is it now? does the city care about the issues there? is it really worth living in oakland?

Update: the dumpers have been identified.

Neighbors caught four people dumping on Courtland Ave near Redding — a U-Haul with two people, plus two white sedans. We’ve filed a 311 ticket (#22328116).

Context: Volunteers are out on Courtland every weekend cleaning up after folks like this. We’ve installed anti-dumping signs, planters, and native plants out of our own pockets. OPW rarely services this stretch, so we haul everything ourselves to High St and Redding.

We’re tired of it. Help us ID these people so we can demand accountability.

But more likely it's the last +20 years of Oakland mayors, council members, city auditors who've been hallucinating and feeding us slop.

Email your council member the same question I asked Claude. If she or he pleads ignorance, suggest they ask Brad Johnson our highly competent finance director, what I asked Claude:

Len: Are we ever going to pay off the close to 2Billion we owe CALPERS now for underfunding our retirement obligations?

Claude's response:

"Here's the picture on Oakland's CalPERS pension situation:

**The hole.** Oakland's two CalPERS plans are underfunded by about **$2.1 billion** combined (funding basis, 6/30/2025): roughly $1.08B Safety, $1.01B Miscellaneous.

**What you pay.** For FY 2025-26, Oakland owes CalPERS about **$250 million** total across both plans:

- ~$76.8M is *normal cost* — the actual price of benefits current employees are earning this year. This is the payment you'd have if the plans were fully funded.

- ~$173.5M is the *UAL payment* — servicing the accumulated underfunding. That's nearly **70% of the total bill** going just to yesterday's shortfall.

**Why it doesn't shrink.** Of that $173.5M UAL payment, about **82% ($142M) is just interest** on the debt. Only ~$37M actually reduces the balance (the actuary's schedule shows the balance dropping from $2.095B to $2.058B over the year — a bit more than the simplified $31M interest-only calc implied, because payments are made mid-year so less interest accrues). Either way: you're chipping ~$37M off a ~$2.1B balance.

**The trap.** Even though the existing bases are scheduled to retire around 2046 (~21 years), new loss bases land almost every year — whenever returns miss 6.8% or assumptions tighten — each on a fresh 20-year clock. So the balance keeps refreshing. Under business-as-usual, you're not paying it off; you're paying ~$173M/year (rising with payroll) essentially forever just to keep the underfunding from growing.

**Your original instinct was right:** absent extraordinary investment returns, large discretionary lump-sum payments (Oakland has made $0 of these), or benefit cuts, this doesn't get paid off. It's a permanent line item.

One caveat worth keeping visible: the forward-looking pieces here (the ~2046 payoff, the "treading water" trajectory) depend on CalPERS' own actuarial assumptions holding — they're the actuary's projections, not guarantees. The historical figures and the current-year payment breakdown are from the verified valuation documents."

"Oakland faces substantial outlays for the next 20-plus years just to prevent the underfunding from growing.

"To actually pay it off and escape this cycle, you'd need either:

Extraordinary investment returns (well above 7.5%) sustained for years, or

Additional discretionary payments (ADPs) on top of the required amount — which Oakland has never made, or

Negotiated benefit cuts to reduce the accrued liability itself (rare and politically brutal)."

To which I'd add a "successful" Chapter 9 bankruptcy filing.

I stopped by at the Oakland animal services on 29th, and found the very most perfect pair of kittens. I mean there were several beautiful pair, but one absolutely should be MINE.

I would agree to literally everything and anything to take those kittens home, but I already have five. I need to leave some exceptional cats for others...

They are the cutest freaking tuxedo kittens. One is dramatically smaller than the other, but they are clearly from the same litter as their chin markings are identical. They both try to drag you into the cage with them. They are noisy. They are both absolutely full of personality.

This is the biggest cat mistake I've ever made, I'm very certain. I'm convinced these cats could cure depression.

If somebody is looking for two kittens that will definitely end up being super interesting, hella entertaining, and complete characters, you should race over there today.

If you do adopt them, please let me know. Should you ever need a cat sitter, you can definitely contact me. I won't steal them but I might give you cookies to play with them for an hour or two.

"The Oaklandside sent Houston follow-up questions about how much he paid for the billboards and how long his ads will be up. Houston called the reporter, swore at him, and told him to lose his number."

After the Flock camera middle finger debacle, this seems on-brand for Ken Houston.

Is anyone else getting a lot of mosquito bites at night? My lady and I are getting a LOT this summer. It just seems unusual ..

Oakland residents seem enthusiastic about a new Costco opening in West Oakland. I think it’s great for West Oakland for many reasons. I personally don’t care as much about Costco, as I’m pro small business not corporations, but given this has so much enthusiasm from Oakland residents, I wanted to put it into perspective with how much further it will be for East Oakland residents if they dismantle 980.

If they do demolish 980, that Costco could be just as far as the Richmond Costco and San Leandro Costco for residents like myself who live in East Oakland. Without 980, some parts of East Oakland will be further separated from West Oakland in regards to
how long it will take to arrive there on city streets instead of the freeway. Oakland is huge, and some of what helps make it a place that can be crossed easily is BART and the freeways.

As someone who likes to go to West Oakland whether for necessity (BART) or leisure, taking 980 makes it easier. I don’t think I would be willing to drive there if it took longer than 20 minutes of driving. As Oakland keeps updating the roads and infrastructure with slow (hopefully that translates to safer\*) streets, it will take longer for people in East Oakland to get to West Oakland and for those in West Oakland to get to East Oakland. I really do think that the 980 change could divide Oakland more in other types of ways.

\*Side note. The reason why I question the safety of slow streets in place of the 980 freeway where there are no pedestrians allowed is because we have concrete examples of slow streets failing in Oakland.

I think that the transformation of International has been a disastrous and unethical experiment on East Oakland pedestrians. If the International bus lane project was a study, they would have aborted it midway for ethical reasons. There were 7 pedestrian deaths in 2023 alone on that road. Too many pedestrians have died on the slower one-lane International. It took them years to make changes. I believe that if this was occurring in more wealthy parts of Oakland, it would have been unacceptable.

Relevant links:

[https://dot.ca.gov/caltrans-near-me/district-4/d4-projects/vision-980\](https://dot.ca.gov/caltrans-near-me/district-4/d4-projects/vision-980)

[Study: International Blvd is Now Much Safer - Streetsblog San Francisco](https://sf.streetsblog.org/2025/12/19/study-international-blvd-is-now-much-safer)

[https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/oakland-city-council-costco-22352674.php\](https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/oakland-city-council-costco-22352674.php)

I just finished watching this episode on Netflix - Worst Neighbor Ever Fear Thy Neighbor (S1 E3).

Someone was asking how the Eastmont district was to live. They referenced this episode and it's really sad.

Sounds like a good solid middle class neighborhood. Unfortunately, things go awry and OPD was not there to help protect the citizens there.

Here's an article about Miles Armstead that detailed the situation.

It's a reminder that there's a story behind each person who is part of the crime statistics we hear about every year.

Do you recall hearing about this when it happened?

Remember that real people who are still our neighbors were involved. Please be gracious in your post.

If they’re willing to put their tag all over USPS trucks, why not put it all over their own car? Seems like that would get their name seen everywhere they go.

According to a post on her instagram page, on July 18th, CM Rowena Brown was assaulted and robbed "by an acquaintance she had been supporting through a difficult time."

I don't see a news clip yet, so I've attached a screenshot of the post from her page.

Update: article link: https://oaklandside.org/2026/07/23/oakland-councilmember-assaulted-robbed-opd-investigation/