Oakland Developers, Housing Advocates Eye Mayor’s Race

The Oakland mayor’s race is heating up this winter as 13-term U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee announced earlier this month that she would run for the job, which was vacated by former Mayor Sheng Thao after a recall in November. Thao was indicted last week on federal charges related to an alleged bribery scheme involving city recycling and housing contracts.

Lee is likely the frontrunner in the special election scheduled for April 15 to serve out the rest of Thao’s term, but some developers wondered whether she would make the hard choices they think are required to turn the city around.

“Somebody is needed now who wants to be in the role for the long term, will rip off the Band-Aid, make large cuts where needed, bring city workers to work [in] the office five days a week and create a path to long-term sustainability,” said Danny Haber, CEO and founder of Oakland-based multifamily developer oWOW.

Haber questioned whether that person would be Lee, given that at the end of serving the two years left on Thao’s term she would be 80, and 84 by the end of another four-year term if she won re-election.

Lee did not reply to a request for comment but told KRON-4 in an interview that while, “there’s nothing I can do about my age,” her history of leadership and solving problems meant that she had helped the city’s quality of life during her lengthy federal tenure.

“If I haven’t worked to earn voters’ vote, then they won’t vote for me,” she said in the television segment. “I hope they know, though, that I have a lot of experience and experience matters at this point in time in Oakland.”

Ideology in action?

Whether or not she’s the best leader to take on Oakland’s various woes — including losing the last of its major league sports franchises, concerns about crime and a central business district office vacancy rate of nearly 35 percent — Haber said that Lee had both the name recognition and union support to put her in the frontrunner position the moment she officially declared her candidacy earlier this month.

Isaac Abid, founder and managing partner of Oakland-based office and retail developer Lakeside Group, agreed that Lee carried the name recognition that helps with voters, especially in a short election cycle. He also said Lee, a well-known progressive who cast the lone vote against going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11, would benefit from focusing on practical improvements to city operations and revenue growth rather than hewing closely to ideology — advice he said he would give any candidate in Oakland after the successful recalls of the city’s mayor and district attorney, as well as moderate victories across the bay, in November.

“Layering in ideology necessarily complicates a city government’s execution of its essential functions, and I think that’s what a progressive base of voters in San Francisco conveyed in the most recent election,” he said. “In Oakland, I believe the new mayor and City Council would be well served to focus on a more limited role of local government to provide the basics and help foster growth in the tax base.”

As far as housing production goes, YIMBY Executive Director Laura Foote said Lee’s reputation for supporting housing stability and subsidized affordable housing is positive, but that the organization didn’t know enough about her support of building more housing at all price points. Still, Foote said, she was optimistic that Lee would “support necessary changes to legalizing housing, streamlining permitting and fixing broken incentives that encourage people to say no to new homes in their communities.”

Opposition candidate

Foote said YIMBY also sees potential in former councilmember Loren Taylor, one of Lee’s top competitors as he narrowly lost the 2022 mayoral race to Thao. Taylor announced that he would run for the mayoral post again in November, but didn’t officially file his candidacy until about a week after Lee did.

Taylor did not reply to a request for comment but said in a campaign video posted on X last week, and viewed over 23,000 times since, that the city needed “fresh energy” and that the same “political operatives who installed our recalled mayor, they want us to once again trust their pick.”

“If we keep voting for more of the same, we will get exactly what we’re voting for,” he said over images of the FBI raid on Thao’s home.

He also said in the video that he was “at 100 percent” after recovering from a rare disease that put him into organ failure in December.

Since Taylor has been in the race longer, Foote said housing advocates had a better sense of his housing platform than Lee’s and that there is “a lot to like in what he’s saying for housing advocates.”

“Taylor is speaking clearly in his policy platform about the need to build more housing and hit our regional housing goals,” she said.

Haber also said he liked what Taylor has had to say about making “larger structural changes that will be painful to special interest groups but necessary to both balance a budget and bolster public safety, which is on the minds of every small business owner.”

In the end, said Foote, voters will also weigh in not just on each candidate’s agenda, but their ability to make those goals a reality.

“Hopefully we’ll have two candidates saying loudly that Oakland needs to continue to build more housing, and the campaign will center not around whether that’s the right goal, but who has the greater ability to get it done,” she said.