Jerry meditates on urban dynamism, contract law and anger management

I'll give a very simple answer to how you revitalize downtown: get people with money to spend it in your city. With the incredible growth of wealth in the Bay Area and the dot-com explosion, there was so much money that even though Oakland had been avoided for 20 years, capital just started flowing in. Of course, I helped some--to attract the investment; I take credit for that. But it's never an unmixed blessing. One person says, "Gee, these buildings are rundown, a real slum," while another person says "Wait a minute, you're not gentrifying this place, are you?"

"Slummification" or gentrification. Have to find the golden mean.

There are so many lawyers in this room. I enjoyed listening to the workshops and hearing how the law is up to its old tricks again. That what purports to be isn't quite what it purports to be. I especially enjoyed the workshop on Civil Code 3110.5.

This reminded me that no matter how things change, they stay the same. If you look at the history of contract and how it emerged from the twelve tablets of Roman law and through Germanic law and through the common law, you find that the earliest recovery in contract was based on the obligation of surety. We can trace back surety to hostage-taking. That's what came to my mind this morning as I listened to the learned interpretations of recently enacted California Civil Code 3110.5. This most recent legislative exercise in effect requires developers to take hostages in connection with any significant California project. Literally, this latest legal protection says, you need a letter of credit or a bond or must be worth at least $15 million to build your project.

My mind goes back to that innocent period in 1975 when I began as Governor of California. From that day until this, 25,000 new laws have been put on the books of California. I had the privilege, or the pleasure or the torture, of signing almost 10,000 of them. If you think my 10,000 bills were out of the ordinary, you are wrong. All the governors after me signed about the same number--1,200 bills a year.

You usually veto more bills your first few years and by the time you've been there a while the legislators are so mad at you that you've got to sign their bills--even if you don't like them. That's what I did; I learned it a little sooner than Davis did. He's still vetoing. A lot of the rules say you can veto, but if it's a member of your own party you can't veto it. If it's a member of the other party you can veto it, and I'll tell you why. When I was in Sacramento the Republicans were the minority, so they couldn't cause much trouble as long as the Democrats were protecting you. However, as soon as the Democrats decide they're going to go out and get you, the Republicans always are only too happy to join in. So it doesn't take much dissension on the part of the majority party to pretty soon take away your office, block your bills, stop your appointments, make life miserable. So you've got to keep your own party happy. The other thing is, you don't look like much of a leader if your own party doesn't follow, because they always say, "Well he can't even get along with his own party! What's wrong with him?" But if you're fighting with the other party, you're showing leadership, because you're fighting for what you believe in. So that's just one of the institutional reasons why Democrats veto Republican bills and Republicans veto Democratic bills. More or less, all things being equal.

What I find interesting about all of these bills is that they keep coming back. The beauty or the perversity of the legislative process is it never gets finished. No matter what problem you solve, the same problem will reoccur, and if you wait long enough you can provide the same solution. People won't remember it was already presented five years before. I signed a bill in 1978 when I was running for re-election against a man named Alan Younger. You probably don't remember him anymore, he was a nice Republican. No, he was a nice Republican. By the way, I'm a "declined to state," so don't take it if you're one party or the other, I'm just trying to be neutral here. But I say Younger was a nice guy, he voted for the confirmation of Rose Byrd. You tell me where you're going to find another Republican who's going to do that. Of course, Deukmejian got elected by saying he was going to get rid of all my judges, at least the liberal ones, which were most of them, and he did get rid of a number of the people on the Supreme Court.

If you go back in history, you'll find that every governor since Earl Warren has left office with a majority of the people disapproving of their performance. With one exception: George Deukmejian. George Deukmejian was the governor that preceded Pete Wilson, and succeeded myself. He ran against my liberal Supreme Court and campaigned vigorously for capital punishment. On everything else he kept a fairly low profile. So now that he's gone, and he's a nice guy, in case some of his friends are here, I want to pay some tribute. He succeeded, unlike my father, unlike Reagan, unlike myself, unlike Wilson, unlike Davis, of actually going out of office after 8 years and having almost 60% of the people approve of his job. The reason for that is they couldn't really remember what his job was, other than the fact that he was against my liberal judicial appointments. Politics is not necessarily good government, but at least you've got to understand the rules, if that's what you are aspiring to, because there are rules and they're pretty definitive. I just mention that. I've been observing all the people who've left office--what offices people leave popular and what offices people leave unpopular. There is an office where everyone who's left is always popular, I'm not going to tell you what it is, but you might figure it out.

Anyway, this business of all these laws. There's a law we passed while I was running for reelection against Alan Younger. Gary Hart, the State Senator from Santa Barbara passed a bill that said every high school will establish strict graduation standards, and no student can graduate without meeting them. So I took out an ad. In those days ads were pretty cheap; for half a million bucks you could get three or four weeks

advertising. The ad said we solved the problem of standards and slack performance in schools, because now we have graduation standards put into place by this particular bill. Well that was 1978 and of course, Deukmejian had an education program, Wilson had something, Gray Davis has these exit exams and now even George Bush has a Œno-child-left-behind' with the same kind of idea: standards examination. The point I want to make is that if you've got a problem, you can milk that thing a long time. I don't want to sound cynical, but I do want to just expose to the naïve some of the thought processes that go into the legislative process. If you're at it a while you do have to develop a certain insensitivity to the more delicate natures of people.

These laws keep coming back; The crime laws . . . in fact when my father was running for District Attorney of San Francisco in 1943 when I was 5, he had a slogan for DA. The little card had his picture, it said: "Crack down on crime, pick Brown this time." I tell you I've been using that slogan, I find it still works. Everybody keeps making similar claims, "...if you elect me youŒre going to crack down on crime", and so it continues. Between reducing crime and improving education, you can keep that going a long time.

Now in Oakland we had a little problem. The Oakland Unified School District made some improvements and they did a pretty good job, but they spent $100 million they didn't have. So you know, we don't have a surety, we don't have a 3110.5. But we do have a legislature; we do have courts that say you have a right to an education. So now there's a bill and the school district's going to get $100 million. So when someone says, "What do you think about this horrible thing?" I say "What do you mean? We spent $100 million we didn't have and now we're getting a fresh 100 million to start all over again and we get to throw the superintendent out and get a new one, called the state administrator. And we don't have to have a school board." So I figured that's a win-win for everybody. Except the school board, which is lobbying against the bill. It's local control. So I just wanted to establish my principle here: laws after laws after laws on the same subjects doing essentially the same thing but always ensuring that there will be the same need for the same legislation year after year reaching out into infinity. So that's why the political class is not in favor. It has to pretend it's solving problems, but what it's actually doing is, how can I describe this, it's not solving problems, it's making legislation. It's continuing the process, that's really what it is. What's interesting is that there's so many new solutions all the time. There's new things that I never heard of.

You've probably heard about anger management. That's a big thing, anger management--a lot of courses on anger management. In fact, this is a continuing education. Now I remember I always had a thing about continuing education. I was a little concerned, I didn't like all these new ideas. I remember I had a real estate director. He said "We've got to improve the quality of the real estate profession." It was only 9 hours of continuing education. We've got to up that to 24. I said, "Hell no. What does that mean? You have the real estate association in Sacramento, then you get charged 1000 bucks for the course, it's just a money machine. And besides, by the end of the day are they going to be that more ethical? Are they going to change the world?" And so I always vetoed all continuing education programs. As a matter of principle. Now maybe that wasn't right, but now you have to have 34 hours as a real estate broker. And it will continue, and pretty soon real estate brokers and lawyers will have to take anger management classes like you have to take ethics classes. And I know when Jonathan Salisbury introduces sexuality courses, you might have to take those. I mean there will always be a problem and the legislators will always find a response. But you can be sure that whatever the response is, the problem won't go away; it will just take on new depth and complexity and require more lawyers to work it out.

OK, so that's the legal framework which all of you luxuriate in, or suffer, and don't worry, it can only complex-ify. It will not simplify. I promise you that for the next decade or whatever, there will always be 1,200 new laws. Now, that's the bad news. But the other thing: don't worry too much; many of the laws are empty and meaningless because they start out as something and because the lobbyist is getting paid, and the legislator has to get so many bills . . . If you don't have a bill then they do an ad against you saying "this guys been up there for 5 years, he never had a bill with his name on it." So you've got to get a bill with your name on it. And what you want is to name it something good, like "The Crime Reduction Act of 2003," "The Educational Improvement Act of 2003," or "The Environmental Protection Act." Everything always is a self-validating, utopian, wonderful thing that will not occur because of the passage of that bill. That always brings me back to the fundamental principle that a man named Korzibsky announced a long time ago. He said, "The map is not the territory, the name of the thing is not the thing itself. Or the menu is not the meal." You've got to keep that in mind. When you go to Sacramento, remember, you're not dealing with territory and you're not dealing with the meal. You're dealing with a lot of menus. You're dealing with a lot of names. There's a lot of naming going on. But now what the names actually point to in the real world is something a little different. When you learn that difference you're ready to function in Sacramento and you'll do very well, because you know you're in the name business and you'll bring back bills that . . . there's less there than what meets the eye. That's really what I want to say.

But even despite that there's still a lot of difficulties, and that's what I experience in trying to develop and revitalize the city. Just take one example. It's interesting, the City of Oakland's an old city, not as old as Los Angeles, but it was founded in 1853. A good part of the city was built before anyone had heard of zoning. In fact most of these historic buildings, the ones that they all want to preserve, were built before zoning came into be. I had a meeting with my planning department the other day. I said, "OK. Now when did zoning start?" Somebody said, "In Oakland it started in 1932." I said, "When did the general plan start?" General planning started in 1961. When did CEQA start? That was 1972. When did design review start? That started in 1991. Well now you've got the framework. We've got design review, we've got the California Environmental Quality Act, we've got zoning, and we've got the general plan. And now you've got to mush all that together. Now every time we had a new general plan we called it "General Plan Congress" and we spent years on it. And finally we get a new general plan, and then a couple years later we get all these maps, and we color code the whole city, with lots of different colors. Then we overlay that and we find that it's inconsistent with the zoning. So now we need what is called a "zoning update," and we're going to do the zoning update. It started in 1998; they said we've got another five years to go. So I said, "Well wait a minute, if we're living with it, why do we need it? Especially since we're laying-off librarians, policemen, and firemen. Maybe we could lay-off some zoning update people."

So anyway, interestingly enough we hardly consulted and they did do a zoning update, but then it wasn't adequate and then the staff has to do it again. But actually the real answer of why we continue with zoning update is we have a little fee that we charge for old building permits for the zoning update. And if we don't do the zoning update we can't charge the fee. So that'd be pretty bad. So I'm trying to find a way that we can charge the fee but not do the zoning update. And I think I can do that because I know that as you become very facile with this, I don't want to say manipulation, but with the use of names we can have a zoning update, but it may not be what you call a zoning update. I might have someone, you know, a half a day, once a month, do a quick little zoning update. And the rest of the time we'll do other things that we'll call zoning updates. Every time we have to do building inspections we'll call it zoning update, because we're doing the empirical. We're laying the empirical foundation for our zoning update. In fact, I can probably do the whole city, I can run it as a zoning update rubric. So, anyway, that's what I got from Yale Law School. I learned how to use words in ways that were not expected.

So the problem with the city is . . . People say "So what's the best thing we like about Oakland?" We say "diversity." I say, "Do you like diversity of ideas, diversity of race, diversity of class, diversity of gender, diversity of wealth?" Diversity has a lot of ideas, I mean, a lot of differences. And when you have a lot of differences, it creates a lot of debate. And every week at the City Council people come by. And anybody, and I mean anybody, can speak for a minute on anything. In any language, in any form of expression, you know it's pretty incredible. And then when people really want to get riled up they fill up the place, filling the place is maybe 350 people, say 400. There's 400,000 people who reside in the City of Oakland, so you figure out what 400 represents of 400,000. But in that room, imagine there are 400 people, everybody gets all riled up, and you create what I call a "micro-universe of unreality." For that moment is more real than . . . it is the reality. You're in it and you're absorbed, you're caught up in it, and in that world you pass resolutions, you pass ordinances, and you carry on your business. And then when they walk out it's gone, but it's in the books now and then you march ahead. So really what I'm saying is any 400 people can push almost anything. And they do. And that's one of the problems. The other problem is it's not just one thing, because for every 400 people there's another 400 people that think something else. And so you have a very contested territory about things.

For example in the downtown if you want to build under our general plan we have some phrase that almost sounds like "the construction shall

create no unreasonable shadows." So what I thought is, I'm going to put out an RFP for anybody that can build a building without creating any shadows, we will pay for the whole thing. So you can't get any unreasonable shadows. The next thing you can't do, I guess that's the general plan conformity, you want to keep within the character of the neighborhood. So the way it is is the way it should always be. That's another thing. And a third thing is if any building is more than 50 years old it's eligible for registering, putting on the historic register. And you have a local one, we've got a state one, and we've got a federal one. And each of them has varying kinds of measures, and I mean it's complicated.

There's six different levels to historicity when it comes to property. And in addition there's actually a seventh and it's called contributor buildings. So if you create an historic district as distinguished from a mere historic building, then you can include non-historic buildings, and they're what we call "wannabes." And they create this district, and once you get that district then any time you want to change anything you have to do a full board environmental impact report. Now, who's responsible for that? I'll tell you who. There's two Republicans: Ronald Reagan signed the Environmental Quality Act, of course it was Stan Dumas that extended it to private projects in the Friends of Mammoth case, so I don't think Ronnie envisioned that. But the second one was Pete Wilson signed a bill in '91 that added the word "historic resources" to CEQA. And historic resources then became the equivalent of the spotted-owl or endangered species. So once you're an historic resource, that's a rather abstract word, then that gets the same level of protection as any other endangered species, even though it may just be an ugly old place where I built a loft. We have an historic wholesale produce warehouse. It's ugly as sin, and somebody wants to build eight stories of condominiums and everybody's been fighting it for the last few years. And I live in this district and I built a loft, they're all little old nice warehouse kind of stuff, bricks here and there, warehouse-looking things, so I built a kind of modern building and put it with corrugated metal and there's all corrugated metal outside, and a lot of the neighbors said this is nonconforming. But I had a little clout, and I pushed it through. This was before I was mayor. Of course now 300 buildings have been built and now they're copying me and now they're saying this is becoming the norm. And you better build it with corrugated metal on the outside or you may not get approval.

But in addition to that I was gerrymandered out of my own historic district because they just carved me out because my neighbors . . . I didn't realize, these were all my friends, these are progressive people, but they get pretty angry when it comes to changing the local landscape, and

people are all, we all are, we're all very much uncomfortable with change. In the urban environment it's all about dirt and land and restructuring and changing, and if you want to change stuff then everybody sits there and creates some resistance. And so I used to think when I was governor I created an urban strategy. By the way the reason why I called it an "urban strategy," it used to be called a "comprehensive urban plan" but I banned the use of the word "plan,"or "planning," during my eight years in office. So instead they came up with the euphemism "strategy" and that's where that came. At the time people didn't talk as much strategy as they do now. Anyway, the urban strategy said, "build in the infill." And then they got a new name, they call it "smart growth." But when you go to do this smart growth, you run into the fact that a lot of smart people live where you want to build, or next door. And they have a lot of time to cause you a lot of trouble. So if you have to decide between smart growth in an area with a lot of smart people who can hassle you forever or just go out east of Manteca or 50 miles east of Redlands you can find a lot of dumb cows, and they don't know the difference. You can give them another pasture and they're just as happy as they were before. And that's why you're going to get sprawl. So I think it's going to be easier to build a very comfortable car automatically driven down the freeway with all of your computers and all your needs taken care of than it will be to really achieve the goals of smart growth because of all the smart people who don't want unreasonable shadows, do not want wannabe or real historic structures modified, altered with and you've got to do an EIR every time you move in downtown. So I said I think I'm going to exempt downtown Oakland from the Environmental Quality Act because it's just too much of a hassle. Well it is. And we don't have any bears walking around down there, we don't have deer. I'm not talking about it in the mountains, I'm not talking Mount Claire, I'm not talking neighborhoods, I'm talking downtown. You know, we've got some SROs (single resident occupancy), they're an issue, but basically we've got a lot of cement. And if we put in some nice condominiums, bring in development, bring in people, we know what's going to happen. We're going to get congestion, we're going to get pollution, we're going to get traffic, you get noise. We'll have a parking problem. Ok, so fine, just say it and let's get on with it. And what I say is, I look over at San Francisco, they have all these restaurants, they have all these tourists, and you can't find a place to park. Its traffic, it's congested. And they're building all these lofts which they call yuppie-scum kind of housing. So I say, I say, the problems of San Francisco are the solutions to Oakland. So bring me your problems, then we can deal with them.

Well, I'm glad Oakland is as popular as when I went in. These things are highly polarizing. There was a guy in Sacramento named Randy Collier. He was the father of the freeway system, so he claimed. He was there a long time, and I was in my more exuberant time when I was running for Secretary of State back in 1970-- I was there and I was attacking everybody and calling everyone corrupt and . . . just really causing hell. And he came up to me one day, he's a Senator from Yreka, he said, "Son, let me tell you something. I've been around a long time. I want to give you a piece of advice: never take a position if you don't have to." Now I think there's a lot of wisdom to that, and I don't take as many positions as I used to, but I do take a few.

So how do you revitalize downtown? With a lot of political will. A lot of money and a lot of argumentation with a lot of howls of execration directed at you and you've got to learn to enjoy that. Well you know I had to be called the "moonbeam," I got a little tired of that so now I'm becoming a bulldozer or something. Whatever. It's not easy, I think. There are a lot of issues and there is inequality and there is homelessness; there's the whole thing of race and ethnicity and different levels of society, all sorts of problems. The answer really is not 1,200 new laws every year, but that's the one they're going to give. What's amazing about law is, the reason why you want more laws is because we don't have enough good character. See they used to talk about schooling as forming good character. They don't do that anymore. So what we lack is character, and we lack custom. You don't just shake hands on any of these complicated agreements, expecting everyone to live up to some internal constraints that are the reflection of the standards of the community. No, we want to particularize every possible risk and guard against it. Then that means you don't need good character and you don't need customs-- when you're going to hire a good lawyer. And you're going to hire a good legislator.

So this process will continue, and the more laws the less character, the more law the less character, less custom, and the more complicated it gets. That's the bad news. The good news is that in our automated society with all this technology, there's not a lot of real work left. Most of what people do, in fact I'd say 85% and everybody here is, overhead. I'm sorry to tell you you're all overhead. Remember, there is no good business that can't cut it's overhead by 10%. But anyway, we're overhead, so all laws, all these programs like anger management, they're so politically correct I don't even want to mention them because you'll think I've become conservative in my old age. We're proliferating what I call very sophisticated welfare for college graduates and professionals. Now I say that with some degree of derision but also with a great deal of respect for the creativity of our economy that it can keep evolving apparently meaningful work in the face of no need whatsoever other than that which is created by the own desolation that is proliferating at every turn. So that's kind of the dark side to the decline and fall, but there's also the upside that at least wherever we're going, we're all managing it. In fact that's kind of the idea that in America everything will be made somewhere else and we'll just kind of manage the rest of the world, sitting on our computer, talking to our lawyer and our accountant and our investment banker. I don't know if that's going to work, but it seems to be the trajectory.

Take it back to a city I want, because I want to say seriously you can build a city. We tried for 25 years in Oakland to attract retail. Finally I figured out, forget retail, if you don't have Walmarts and free parking forget it. So we want people. We want to crowd a bunch of middle-class people in downtown Oakland, like sardines, but in order to get them there we call it "elegant density." So it's good to rub shoulders, and that's what I've been promoting because I decided when I was governor I built, well I didn't build it but I authorized, the freeway link through Oakland which was going to build the regional shopping center starting in 1982. Never happened. Rouss and two other people tried it, always failed. So here's what we want to do. We want to build housing, and we want to have people. And why do we do that? Because of the location. See, the key to Oakland is it's next to everything else. Next to Silicon Valley, it's next to the water. We have 18 miles of waterfront, it's fabulous. We're now transforming that. So with that location, in fact I say Oakland is closer to San Francisco than San Francisco is to itself. From my office at City Hall it's a two-stop BART ride right into downtown, to the Financial District, you can be there in 12 minutes. So why live in Pacific Heights or Forrest Hill or St. Francis Woods or wherever? You should live in Oakland because A) the weather's better, B) the prices are cheaper, C) the view is better because you're looking at San Francisco, and D) it's a lot closer. So for all of those reasons this city's on the move and it is on the move because we're a little grittier, that's what I call it, grit, true grit, and it's exciting. And if that scares you, then move to Manteca or Redlands or wherever those cows used to be out there east. But if you want the urban dynamism, the excitement, the proximity, the risk, that's what I say. I like it, it gets you up in the morning and if you don't have some stress the body doesn't react and you begin to become . . . whatever. Anyway, you can build a downtown LA, but you have to sell it on a different basis than you do Beverly Hills or Pasadena. You have to come up with another vision, and there is a vision because people do like to live with one another, they do like to go out and they like that bumping into and mixing with people who are different. Because if you don't you grow old pretty fast. So I say the urban environment . . . it is for the pioneers, it's not for the faint of heart, it's not for the cocooning type. But it is for an awful lot of people in this country. And that's why I think downtown Oakland and downtown Los Angeles and all these others cities should come back and are coming back and I think that's great because I think the city's the place to be. Thank you very much.