Brown's newest cause close to home

Friday, August 22, 2003 - OAKLAND -- Mayor Jerry Brown has a new neighborhood, and a new cause.

Since moving in April into a loft in the converted Sears Building on the down-and-out stretch of Telegraph Avenue by 26th Street, he has been prowling the neighborhood with his not-so-fierce black Labrador, Dharma, chat-ting up drug dealers, business owners and addicts alike.

When he doesn't like what he sees, he picks up the phone and gives bureaucrats an earful until something gets done.

So far, the mayor has helped get two buildings condemned, talked the housing authority into canceling its Section 8 contracts with one building owner, increased police patrols and helped the owner of a bar he frequents obtain a permit for karaoke.

He even has witnessed the aftermath of a shooting.

Brown says he wants to use the area as a test case for turning things around, then replicate effective methods elsewhere. He insists his new neighborhood is not getting special treatment, and he will do the same thing anywhere he hears of a problem.

"I'll do it in every other neighborhood.

When I get phone calls or e-mails, I act on them," he said.

"I see it staring me in the face every day (in the neighborhood), so we are getting it done. I'm rolling up my sleeves and getting involved."

Brown said he took similar action in his old neighborhood, near Jack London Square. Brown took a strong interest in zoning issues during the building boom that occurred soon after he built his warehouse there.

In his new neighborhood, the issues are crime, drug use and blight -- although there are some new condominiums going up nearby. Brown moved in with his longtime girlfriend, Anne Gust, who leases the Sears loft.

Some residents and business owners are appreciative of Brown's efforts, especially of the police patrols. The area is part of police beat 8X, which has the second highest rate of serious crime in the city.

"It's good for the neighborhood. He is cleaning up the street and bringing in more police," said a man who works at the African Heritage Center on Telegraph and would identify himself only as Peter.

But some question the mayor's motives, noting they had seen little action in the previous 41/2 years Brown occupied the mayor's office.

"It's hard to say how much he is helping the city and how much he is helping himself because he lives here now," said Andy Choi, owner of Andy's Cafe, diagonally across the street from the Sears lofts.

Choi, whose father is pastor of the nearby Korean Community Christian Church, has been in the neighborhood 15 years. He opened his cafe a year ago, but now wants to sell.

"Things have been really up and down," he said.

Korean businesses -- including bars, pool halls, salons and markets -- have been proliferating in the neighborhood, which has turned into Koreatown. But there are still plenty of boarded-up buildings and street drug dealing.

Tenants in the most recent building to be shut down, the 16-unit structure at 2445 Telegraph, say they will be happy to move. They say the building is infested with rodents, roaches and drug dealers. But they want relocation assistance, which the city has promised to give and bill the building owner.

Tenant activists held a press conference Thursday to make sure the city keeps its word.

Donyell Lacy, who has lived in the building six years and pays $375 for a studio, said there have been four deaths there the past two years. A man overdosed in her hallway and the 103rd murder of 2002 occurred next door. The year before, there was another overdose, and another man was dead in his apartment for weeks before he was discovered, she said.

The city has inspected her unit several times, Lacy said.

"It took a while," she said. "(Brown) was downtown and wasn't really concerned about the conditions down here until he moved in. Now that he's in the neighborhood, it's a big issue. He should have been concerned about our safety before."

Rose Franklin, who has lived in the building six years, says she frequently sees the mayor out front talking to people. He has even been in her apartment, where she complains of a hole in the bathroom ceiling from which mice and water emerge when the tenant upstairs takes a shower.

"They should put a big dumpster next to this building and bulldoze it," she said.

Yet Franklin, who is virtually bedridden, said she needs help finding a new place to live. Otherwise she'll be out on the street Sept. 13, the deadline for tenants to vacate.

Organizer Adam Gold of Just Cause Oakland, which is helping the tenants, said Brown's actions will just push people from the neighborhood.

"Our concern is that a lot of times revitalizing a neighborhood, even if it means getting rid of dilapidated buildings, people won't find housing close by," Gold said. "So gentrification continues. If we hadn't gotten this building organized, they would have scattered and been living in a worse location without any relocation payments."

Brown said tenants will receive payments of twice the fair market rate for their size of unit, plus $200 for moving expenses -- at least $2,000 for occupants of studio apartments. He said there is little doubt the building needed to be condemned.

Though it was recently painted and looks fine from the street, the units had repeatedly failed housing authority inspections. The police department's Beat Health Unit had been monitoring drug activity there for years and code compliance had been there repeatedly.

"This was a den of narcotics use," Brown said.

Since 1999, police have visited the building 475 times and made 112 arrests. Since April, 18 residents have been arrested, although not necessarily at the building, according to the mayor's office.

Many of the tenants are on probation but unsupervised, Brown said, so he is trying to coordinate city actions with the probation department.

Brown said he convinced the housing authority to cancel its Section 8 contracts with building owner Michael Heeney of Burlingame. When the housing authority hesitated, Brown said he called the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development's regional head, Richard Rainey, to ask whether the Bush administration wants to subsidize crack houses.

Joseph Villarreal, the housing authority's Section 8 director, said the agency was already looking at the building and had planned to cancel two tenant contracts. He said the mayor's interest "brought more focus" to the investigation.

In addition, the housing authority is scheduled to discuss a policy change Monday that will allow it for the first time to cancel contracts with owners, not just with tenants.

Building owner Heeney has an unlisted number and could not be reached. He owns four other properties in Oakland. Brown said he recently had drinks with Heeney and tried to convince him to clean up the building, but he "just laughed, because he is making so much money on it."

The Telegraph Avenue building is the second to be condemned with the mayor's help. A building at 509 Sycamore, just a block from the mayor's loft, was vacated in July. The police department's Beat Health Unit -- which focuses on blight and drug nuisance issues -- had been working on the building eight years. It had been declared substandard in 1999.

But it had been through a succession of owners, and never brought into compliance, said Ed Reiskin of the City Manager's Office.

"Both of these buildings have been problems for a long time," Reiskin said. "But there is no question that the mayor is stimulating action."

Police Sgt. Bob Crawford, who heads the Beat Health Unit, said the buildings would have been closed down without Brown, although it might have taken longer.

"I can't say we are acting differently than we are in any other neighborhood," he said. "But when the mayor shows up, people tend to pay attention."

Police Chief Richard Word said he has had extensive discussions with the mayor. More police patrols have been added, he said, but they've been added elsewhere as well.

"If we can find the answers there, we can do it in the rest of the city," he said.

"You simply can't have the police go in and shut a place down and move people out and assume the neighborhood is better," Word said. "There is a role for probation, the housing authority, social services. We are calling a meeting of all of these agencies so we can work smarter."