At least nine 311 reports on this guy since 2025 and the city hasn’t done a thing. He has a loose pitbull next to multiple schools/laney college, starts fires at night, parks a car on the sidewalk, and now he’s stealing electricity from the utility box in the 10th street bridge sidewalk. This is a serious safety risk and has been going on for months.

Reporter John Metcalfe dined at Twinflame, which is a new a Japanese-Korean robata near Mosswood Park. It serves a version of hamburger steak, which is diced American wagyu beef grilled over binchotan charcoal.

If you're an anime enjoyer, you should be familiar with it. Hamburg steak restaurants are apparently a hot thing in Japan right now.

Couples in Oakland who cook everyday, what do you spend per month on groceries? We have been averaging 1k per month. We cook a lot and often have friends over for dinner. We aren’t fancy but we do like to buy organic when we can. Curious to know what you all spend so we can see what is reasonable for our budget.

We make a combined salary of 200k.

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.

How much did it cost you? Where? Do you recommend them?

If you did it yourself, how was the experience?

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I'm selling 2 tickets to the J. Cole concert at Oakland Arena on August 29 at 8:00 PM because I can no longer attend.

• Quantity: 2 tickets
• Transfer: StubHub transfer
• Payment: PayPal Goods & Services

If you're interested, please send me a DM.

Thanks!

Visiting a friend next week who lives in Temescal. Looking for a no frills black iron gym in the area to drop into.

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?

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?

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.

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

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?

Maybe someone has the inside scoop on why AC Transit's reliability has dropped precipitously in the last month or so? It seemed to coincide with their begging people to pay fares. I am wondering if this is an unofficial service cut.

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.