Word: oaklands
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...California's Jerry Brown, age 68 and ageless, is running for statewide office this year, 36 years after he did it the first time, and the question you have to ask is, Why doesn't he give it up? It's Thursday morning, and Brown, mayor of Oakland, is standing in incandescent sunshine outside the renovated Sears store he calls home. Not much is going smoothly this morning: the city had its 50th murder the night before, adding to a huge spike above 2005; his opponent in the race for California attorney general has just called him soft on crime...
...cover of TIME by 36, served two terms as California Governor, ran unsuccessfully for the Senate once and for President three times, moved to Japan, studied Buddhism, worked with Mother Teresa and was a radio talk-show host--all before diving into the unforgiving cauldron of Oakland politics a decade ago. He is at an age when overachievers in nearly every other profession would start to pack it in. But no man who wakes up at 5 a.m. to read and has been known to keep an eye on Fox News after midnight should be considered a candidate for retirement...
...joke that Oakland has been a city of the future since forever, but that is finally coming true in ways that are good and bad. The city of 412,000 is roughly 35% black, 31% white, 21% Hispanic and 15% Asian. Refugees from more expensive ZIP codes across the bay have fled to Oakland in the past decade, seeking cheaper housing. But the city has long been slow to seize its opportunities, and Brown's time as mayor has been a test of whether even that can be changed. When he was elected in 1998, he successfully led an effort...
...neighborhood known as Jack London Square, a district of noodle factories and produce warehouses on Oakland Inner Harbor, is giving way to dozens of new loft-apartment and condo buildings. That explosion in private investment--although limited to only a few pockets of the city--is the centerpiece of Brown's tenure as mayor, the fulfillment of a promise he made eight years ago to bring 10,000 residents to downtown Oakland. Brown points to building after building, each financed with private capital, opening their doors to tenants or just completing construction. "That is new. That is new. That...
...with street robberies and what the cops call rat packers, gangs of kids who beat up people on buses and then head back to school to brag about it. The local jails are sometimes too full to permit arrests for certain crimes. A local television report recently quoted an Oakland police estimate that one-fourth of the city's prostitutes were underage. Crime has dropped since Brown became mayor, but it's rising again, fast...