Jerry Brown | Interview 15 | July 8, 2019

Interview #15: July 8, 2019 [in the afternoon]

MEEKER: Today is July 8, 2019. This is Martin Meeker with The Bancroft Library, and Scott Shafer with KQED, interviewing Governor Jerry Brown. This is interview session number fifteen, and I'll let you begin with the--

SHAFER: All right. Well, let's get into your time as mayor. So you dispensed with a cadre of lesser candidates. What did you get in that primary, that first election? Sixty-something?

BROWN: Yeah, 59 percent.

SHAFER: Fifty-nine percent. So--and you, as you prepared--

BROWN: I won in every precinct except two Latino-oriented precincts. I didn't get a majority, but at least I got more than anybody else in all but two precincts.

SHAFER: [Ignacio] De La Fuente got--

BROWN: Two, the only two precincts.

SHAFER: Two, yeah, yeah. So what did you--how did you, going into the job, you had been governor, you'd been secretary of state. How did you think about the job?

BROWN: Well, I thought of it probably in terms of being governor. You know, you have a budget, you have proposals, you have a legislative body called the city council--and then you have the problems. And in Oakland, the problems were an underdeveloped downtown. There are pictures of downtown Oakland in 1946, or before, where it looks very vibrant--and it didn't have that feeling. Where Forest City apartments are now, around Twenty-Third--

MEEKER: Twentieth.

BROWN: --or something, and Telegraph, there was a place, some kind of an old rundown department, grocery store or something. But wherever I looked, it was really the remnants, the remains of an earlier vibrant city. So that, to me, bringing in economic development--and I couldn't conceive of what business I'd 00:02:00bring in. But I did think if we could bring in the people from San Francisco, in effect make it like a bedroom community to San Francisco, we'd have people, we'd have money, we'd have spending. It would give a vitality--by vitality I mean there'd be life on the streets, and it wouldn't all just be--I thought it was kind of dreary.

Now, there were many neighborhoods out there where people were probably perfectly happy in Oakland. But when you go to West Oakland and East Oakland, the houses don't look that bad, but there's a lot of, what should we say, it's not a vibrant middle-class city. It had a lot of poor people, a lot of crime, the schools weren't very good. There weren't the indicia of a normal American 00:03:00city, as I experienced growing up in San Francisco in the forties and the fifties. It all looked very different. So I wanted to restore some of that activity. And also, because I've been in Paris and London and New York City, I thought, "Well, let's get some density here" and I wanted market-rate density. I didn't want to just subsidize people to come in who had no surplus money, because then they would just live in their little apartments and wouldn't have anything, any money to spend, and so there wouldn't be much visible economic activity.

SHAFER: So that was a conscious decision, to not do as much affordable housing, or--?

BROWN: Right. I just wanted market rate. I thought that Oakland already had a lot of affordable housing, which it did, just the nature of it. So that has a different--just to say that today sounds very different than it did in 1999.

SHAFER: Why?

BROWN: Well, because now the pricing has gotten so high that a lot of people are priced out, and they're paying much more--if they can afford it at all, they're paying a much higher sum. So there was a much greater affordability, but it had a lot of downsides, in the sense that it wasn't what I would call a normal, ordinary American city that you would have seen in the fifties in terms of people living in their houses, going to the store--there were many department stores in Oakland. The last one left was Sears, and that's gone now. So there was that outmigration. Anne has this book on Detroit that she's reading, and that started declining way before 1967, and we have it around here. Where we're now sitting is just land for cows that chew on the grass six months out of the 00:05:00year, but there used to be homes and schools and cemeteries--it was a vibrant place. So I think Oakland had some of that demise that we see all over America, and I wanted to try to bring it back or at least create something as good as I thought a vibrant city should be.

SHAFER: And what did you think, you know--and maybe you didn't think, but what made you feel--not feel, what made you think you were the person to do this?

BROWN: Well, I didn't even think of that. I ran for mayor, and there was a problem. There were issues, challenges. I knew something about it. I'd been a governor, so there was something I could do. Why would I think--well, I mean I would have an idea that oh, Harry over here, he should be mayor? I mean that thought never came into my head.

SHAFER: Well, I guess--no, I guess, you know, there are politicians who are 00:06:00confident. And there are people who are--you know, they want to check things off with lots of people to get consensus.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: And I mean--where would you put yourself on that scale?

BROWN: Well, I'd check with a few people. But you know, I don't think of it that way. What was the alternative? I mean obviously there was nobody of any consequence--no one who was at all known running for mayor. I am known, therefore, it was going to be easy. It was just like when I ran for secretary of state. Those offices were not thought of as stepping stones to further political office. They just weren't. People ran for them, and they are minor people to begin with, and they end it as minor people--controller, secretary of state, treasurer. They just weren't important offices. And all of a sudden now they, in the world of politics today, they've become important platforms for people to launch themselves.

SHAFER: And to what extent did you feel like you had to rehabilitate your image 00:07:00at all, in a statewide way, and that doing this, not just for four years but for eight, would do it?

BROWN: Well, I never thought about whether it would be eight--I didn't think it through that much. But obviously, I hadn't won statewide since 1978, so yeah, there was work to be done.

[side conversation deleted]

SHAFER: So, you said you had won several elections statewide, but, you know, as you yourself have said, when you left office in 1982, I think the phrase was the voters were tired of me, and I was tired of the voters.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: So I mean--to what extent did you, as you thought--you clearly thought you were going to run for higher office. You didn't know which ones, but like how did the Oakland mayorship--?

BROWN: Well, in some ways that's a silly question. It's an office. It's an important city. There were important problems. Therefore, it was an opportunity to really do something in the political world.

SHAFER: And did you feel like an obligation again to--because there was all this oh, he's not going to stick around.

BROWN: No, I don't get this obligation stuff. I know people always say that. But people run for office because they enjoy that, they know how to do it, and they run.

MEEKER: Did you consider the potential pitfalls of taking on this job as Oakland mayor? You know, I think about Ron Dellums, and his long-term reputation certainly wasn't helped by his failed one term. Did it seem like a risk?

BROWN: I can't remember. I can't remember.

[side conversation deleted]

BROWN: I'm sure I thought there was risk, because you can have things go wrong. You can have riots, you can have scandals. I don't know. But it didn't seem that 00:09:00daunting to me. So the risk of that whole line of inquiry just--

SHAFER: It doesn't resonate.

BROWN: Not at all, no. I mean the only question was is running for mayor of Oakland, is that--Tom Quinn's critique was, at least--that was definitely something I thought about.

SHAFER: Like it would somehow diminish your image, or--?

BROWN: Yeah, but not that clear. Just--yeah, why? Would you run for mayor of Albany, or--?

SHAFER: Albany, California.

BROWN: Yeah, or Milpitas. But I thought Oakland, because it was right in the Bay Area, was of greater significance, more than its size.

SHAFER: In your swearing-in speech, which was short--I think three minutes--you said, "Everything will be made right." Do you remember what you meant by that?

BROWN: No, in fact that seems a bit of an overstatement. Do you know what 00:10:00preceded that?

SHAFER: No, I don't have the whole text. The city had been, you know--for a long time, the city of Oakland had, many would say, been mismanaged. I mean there was the Raiders deal, the Coliseum. I mean there were a number of things, fiscally, that got screwed up. How did you think about those things? How it got to be that point, and how you would change it?

BROWN: Well, that just is the environment. It opens the way for a challenger. That's the way I saw it. Definitely, it seemed a mistake, bringing back the Raiders and not being able to sell those boxes, and having the City of Oakland and the County of Alameda on the hook. That did not seem smart to me.

SHAFER: Did it seem like, you know, just mismanagement all the way, like up and down the political chart?

BROWN: Well, I see things as more of these larger forces. And Oakland, because 00:11:00of its declining state or economy, the empty buildings that were there, they wanted some boost. And the Raiders was a memory of what people thought were probably better times, so let's bring it back. And it's all of that boosterism that you see in stadiums. You see it with San Francisco getting the Warriors or getting stadiums in Los Angeles. The Rams coming back.

SHAFER: Although San Francisco didn't pay anything. Which is not relevant anyway, but--

BROWN: No, but the same mismanagement. I think it just gets to be, it was just 00:12:00an enthusiasm, a misplaced enthusiasm, and therefore people overlooked the risks. And the ability to look down the road at risk is not a predominant virtue that you see in politics, and it just looked like this would be good for Oakland, in the minds of the people who did that. And then, people like sports. Sports occupies a good part of the time of millions, if not tens of millions, of Americans. So what could be better than getting what we look at every week on television, and then getting it to our Oakland here and getting that boost? So it was a very, kind of traditional boosterism. Let's recapture our former glory.

SHAFER: In terms--

BROWN: In that sense, it made sense. Now, did they miscalculate on the boxes? Well, they miscalculated, but also in the sale of the ticket licenses and how 00:13:00that was all set up. I mean you can get some business team to go examine that, but things just happen. Things aren't as carefully planned out. And people, once they start down a road, you may see some warning signs, but you keep on going. So I think that is a technical point that you really need to have someone give you a technical answer to.

SHAFER: In terms of the housing, you had set this goal of ten thousand new units downtown. And as you say, you wanted to focus on market rate. I mean to what extent were you feeling, hearing criticism from people who say, "Well, what about people that can't afford that?"

BROWN: Oh, I--almost none. Almost none, didn't exist.

SHAFER: Because it was just a different time financially?

BROWN: Because there was so much abandoned buildings, things were so run down 00:14:00that people wanted a boost. And certainly the middle-class people that show up at house meetings, they wanted it. Now, maybe there were some people who were living in the neighborhoods who have adjusted, and the fact there were empty buildings there, maybe it didn't bother them so much--or they wanted it. But the idea that the government was going to pay for the housing for a significant number of people, that's a relatively recent idea.

SHAFER: And that's something even as governor you resisted, I think, to a certain extent.

BROWN: Well, the cost of real estate is in the trillions. And the amount of money that cities can muster up are in the millions, and the state can muster up is in the billions--but that's still a fraction of the fourteen-million units of housing. So it's just one of the anomalies of the capitalist market, that you either had a position of--things aren't doing so well. You have vacant housing, 00:15:00people moving out to--now they're moving in. Now the prices are bid up, and now it overshoots the mark. At least the mark that would enable most people to buy in. And that's the instability of our particular economic system right now.

SHAFER: And how did you think about revitalizing downtown in terms of retail? And--I mean did you have, like a plan? Or was it--?

BROWN: You see, I don't find these plans particularly helpful. I mean yeah, you always need a plan if you're going to build a building. But overall plans--if you were in the Soviet Union, and your name was Lenin or Stalin, you can have a plan and you can carry it out, and the people who don't do it get shot. So that's one thing. But now, when you formulate a plan, and your plan is to invite in capitalists and entrepreneurs, "come in and spend your money here," you're 00:16:00totally dependent on the market. And if the amount of money invested would not bring back a return, it won't be made. So you can write all the plans you want. I was very aware that planning is a small piece of the free-market system, and it all depends on value. Now, I thought that by marketing Oakland as closer to San Francisco than San Francisco was to itself--which is if you get on at West Oakland, you're in downtown San Francisco in less than six minutes. That's certainly better than if you come in from the Sunset or from West Portal--or even from Glen Park. So Oakland had a strategic advantage called location, and I wanted to work with that.

I didn't know how you could bring in stores. I know that depending upon when you're asking me during the eight years--but I remember taking a guy from Trader 00:17:00Joe's, and driving him around to three or four sites. And no, they don't want to do it. I said, "This looks like a good site. Why not?" And finally I got Whole Foods to come, because I knew the CEO and president. He was a supporter of mine, and I convinced him that it would be okay. And it turns out that it is one of their highest-grossing stores in Northern California. But at the time, Safeway was leaving downtown. They had a store in Montclair, but it was very hard. Things leave. If you look at Williams, California, you know, there's not a theater. There were fraternal organizations, grocery stores, hotels, and the flight to the suburbs, or out of these urban environments, whether it's Oakland or Williams or Detroit--this is part of the restless outward push that we see in 00:18:00America. So I was trying to say no, Oakland's different. And by the way, I didn't have a plan--I said ten thousand because one thousand seems trivial, a hundred thousand is not believable. But ten thousand seemed enough. I just came up with that idea, and that's what we did.

I talked to people, but you couldn't get--I got The Gap to put in a store. They wanted to go to one place, and we couldn't get the lease--it was very hard to move Oakland forward, because of all the restrictions, which are now many times more stringent. So I kind of rested on the idea of condominiums and apartments because of the proximity to San Francisco. We didn't need jobs. We had all the 00:19:00jobs we wanted. They were just across the bay, so that was my idea on that. And department stores--I mean even department stores are shrinking everywhere, even in San Francisco, Stonestown. So even then I could tell we're not going to get a Macy's, because I would ask people. Obviously I knew--Anne worked at The Gap. I talked to people. I guess I went to Vegas for some retail operation, and cities would go and pitch their city, and I would pitch it, but I could tell that was a hard sell. So people that had surplus income, that would spend it and could revitalize Oakland--that was my strategy. And I think it was absolutely sound, and it still is. Today you just have this problem that housing prices are bid up so much that it's very difficult for average people to respond, buy in.

MEEKER: What were people, like, for instance, the representatives of Trader Joe's saying? What were their concerns? Why did they not want to move in?

BROWN: Oh, they don't tell you. They drive around and they don't see the market there. They do market surveys, and by their surveys, it doesn't translate to a viable business. And that's only happened when you get more people with disposable income. If you have only affordable housing, and people barely can make it living on Section 8 housing and checks from the government or something, well, then you're not going to get any stores. It's not going to happen. So that's the reason why market-rate housing was so important. And the prices that exist today were absolutely unimaginable back in 1999 or 2000 or 2001.

MEEKER: When Whole Foods agreed to go in, was it based on a projection of growth downtown, these ten thousand people?

BROWN: I don't know. They have their surveys they don't share with me, but they--no. It wasn't based on that. I think they had some confidence in me. And 00:21:00their numbers must have--and it was located enough, there were enough middle and upper-middle-class people that were close by the store. But even there, when they're trying to put in some housing, the local opposition stopped that. They were trying to remove a tree or something, and they couldn't get that out. And I actually called the guy whose house it was and took him out for a cup of coffee and said, "Come on. Will you give Whole Foods the right to go dig under your land?" It wasn't a tree. They had to put in some cabling to anchor their parking lot, and the guy was saying no, and I talked him into it. But the resistance is very, very strong. To do anything--do anything, unless it's some government-funded operation. So there was then, and there's probably far more now, except the money just overwhelms it.

MEEKER: What do you attribute that kind of resistance to additional development in the downtown areas to?

BROWN: People get used to a certain surrounding. They get used to the way things look. They're habituated, and then somebody comes along, and it's going to be more than a change than they feel comfortable with, so they oppose. And when I say they, it doesn't take a hundred. It takes ten or twenty, or even fewer, and they make noise. And they belong to the Oakland Historical Society or the Sierra Club or the Lake Merritt Citizens Alliance, or something--that's not the name. But things like that--and they protest. That's what they do. And not just downtown. They built an apartment on the lake that they all opposed. Now, it 00:23:00passed. One of the local councilmen, John Russo, voted against it, even though--he went to Yale. He's a pretty smart guy. And why wouldn't you want a twenty-story--and the lady next door said it blocked her view, so they had to chop it down a couple of stories. Very few people can block. There was another one. There was an old warehouse for old fire equipment, right on Lake Merritt. It would have been a great place for a building, and they wouldn't do it. "Oh, it's historic; it's the fire department. We can't do that."

So--great resistance. They only reason they didn't resist downtown, because there were not a lot of people living there, and therefore, there wasn't the neighborhood activism. Although after a while people would say, "All you do is talk about downtown. What about the neighborhoods?" But now if you go out to Eastmont Mall, it's still pretty challenged--today. If you want to look at a grocery store, there's one on the other side of the freeway in West Oakland, but not much. And you talk about food deserts. Well, why? Well, you just have to 00:24:00analyze it, but that's what happens in a lot of places.

SHAFER: And just a big-picture question, like politicians come into office. They have ideas.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: They have thoughts about what they want to do. How do you think about like when to push forward against resistance, and when to back away?

BROWN: Well, I thought because, you know, in 1992 I ran for president. There was a big recession. People were very unhappy with George [H.W.] Bush. He went from over 90 percent to in the thirties. And then a lot of that was the economy, and it was prolonged. And then we had that earthquake, and you had downtown buildings that had crumbled. The city hall was vacant for several years. People were in the mood for something that looked like it was working. So it was the time to push. It was. But that didn't last very long, because by the time I was 00:25:00finishing up, the neighborhood people certainly won over Dellums, and I think [Jean] Quan as well, and there was no forward thrust. However, because the market then had caught on, the market just overwhelmed the political, and people were willing to put up with it.

I got rid of the Economic Development Department, and the planner and all the rest of it. I wanted to get projects approved, get 'em going, because there was nothing there. There were thousands of people there, there were buildings, they had various stores, but it wasn't downtown Market St. as I encountered it in the forties. It didn't look like New York City. And I remember telling somebody--and I figured well, you've got to have density. I call it elegant density. I 00:26:00remember being in a house meeting, and I said, "God, look at New York, how vital it is." Some lady with a New York accent raised her hand and said, "Look, I came here to get away from Manhattan. I don't want that here."

Earlier you raised that question, why do people resist? They really resist. And I went and visited one of the women who was on the Oakland Heritage [Alliance]. I went and visited her house. She was a nice lady, she had long gray hair, was probably in her sixties. There were a lot of antiques in her living room. I remember looking at the chairs. There was an old comfortable chair with an antimacassar on it. I know the word antimacassar because I looked it up once. That's the little doily that's supposed to keep from getting oil on the couch. And the lighting fixtures, really old. I said oh, now I get it! [laughing] Now I know why they don't want any new development. This is their reality. This is a 00:27:00lot of what it is. So--that's just one lady, and--

SHAFER: But they want to preserve what they have.

BROWN: They want to preserve. Yeah. I can understand that. I'd like to preserve this. I would not want to look at a twelve-story condo out my window here. [Shafer laughs]

MEEKER: One of the major developments that successfully went in was the Forest City Uptown Oakland development.

BROWN: Yeah.

MEEKER: Right across the street from where Sears is in a redevelopment area. Do you have any insight for us, to tell us how such a major development actually happened? Can you tell us--?

BROWN: Well, the head of Forest City--

MEEKER: Who's that?

BROWN: The head, the president whose name escapes me, but they were from Cleveland. They had a model. He liked affordable housing, because he liked the subsidy. And somehow, they subsidized 20 percent of the units, in various ways. And that's another thing. If you give the very low, low or you give the moderate--it makes a big difference in how much you have to make up for it in 00:28:00the subsidy. So I think his model was to subsidize, and then to get a break from the city on what they call increment financing, and he got $40 [million] or $50 million out of that. But it was very complicated. Nobody could--there was only one guy who worked for me, who worked for the city--he understood it. He was negotiating with them, and very hard and I couldn't understand the financing. And I kind of like projects where people just put up ten condos, twenty condos--much simpler, and took no city money. But this did take giving rebates on the property tax. But it was risky, and they felt they had to have city money or they couldn't make it. Now, it turns out that it's probably a darn good investment now. But at the time, no one was doing that. In fact, many of the people who built large projects, they went bankrupt, and somebody else took them 00:29:00over. Several projects.

And I remember that people would only build stick housing over a garage, and the most you could do with that wooden frame is four stories. And--so that was limited. I said, "We've got to have more than that!" So I noticed that Portland or Seattle and somebody said they had five stories. The importance of the stick housing, the frame, is it's much cheaper before you start going to steel girders and concrete--it gets much more, the price escalates. So I called a big meeting--the fire marshal, the builder, the planner, and we got the guy from Seattle. We were on the phone and I said, "Oh, you can build five stories. It's safe. You can do that." But that took quite a push, to get another story.

Then we had one of these buildings they built in Jack London [Square] after they'd already converted a few old buildings, but this was a brand new building. 00:30:00I think the guy went bankrupt, and somebody else had to come in. And that happened in another building. I'm sure I know of at least four buildings where they didn't make it, so it's very touch and go. And the expenditure to build is very similar to San Francisco. The only thing that's cheaper is the land, but you can't get the high rents. San Francisco rent is much higher. So you have a dilemma, in paying the same price housing, and only the cheaper land, and when the land gets too expensive, then Oakland, you have to--I mean that's just the system of the market. So anyway, I was interested in that form of economic investment.

And some of the people complained--later on, as it gets going--in fact, we had one woman who's a friend of mine. But she went activist, and she was a very 00:31:00attractive lady, and dressed conventionally--and pretty soon she's got a scooter, and changed her hairstyle, and became an activist, and would protest about how we're bringing pollution and destroying the city. But you're talking about a very small number of people. And so that was an insight to me, how much noise, heartfelt opposition, could come from so few, when unlike the governorship, I could make up my own mind.

I could drive down the street, fifty feet, sixty feet, seventy feet--that looks okay to me! And particularly when I lived in Berkeley, and I used to go to restaurants on Telegraph Ave., and you could go from Sather Gate--and have a trolley car and go all the way to the estuary. But in order to do that, you need, to really make sense, you need taller buildings and density. But people 00:32:00really resist that. So we've never done that, and maybe somebody will someday. It's all the pressure now of the market. And a big part of this was Silicon Valley, with all these young people making all this money, and they can come in and they pour money in from the private sector, and the private sector responds with condominiums and apartments.

SHAFER: Yeah, let me read you--I want to read you a quote from 2002, The Nation, you were--so that would have been you were running for reelection probably in 2002, right?

BROWN: Right.

SHAFER: So you said, "Here's the pro[blem]"--

BROWN: Who is it? Who is the writer?

SHAFER: Oh, I knew you were going to ask me that. I could get it for you, but I don't have it. [Marc Cooper, "Mayor Jerry Brown, Take II," The Nation, Feb 28, 2002]

BROWN: Yeah, all right.

SHAFER: But it was from 2002, and you said, "Here's the problem. We're making real progress in Oakland, and the Left simply has no rhetoric for progress." And then you said, "The Left only has a rhetoric for victimization. They can't stand success. Some people are just more comfortable managing misery." What do you 00:33:00make of that?

BROWN: Well, it's pretty damn eloquent, I would say--and to the point. [laughter]

SHAFER: You stand by that.

BROWN: I couldn't add to it.

SHAFER: Can you talk about why you, what it--?

BROWN: Well, that's self-evident, isn't it? That's very clear. I wouldn't change a word.

SHAFER: You think that's still true today?

BROWN: Well, I mean, you know, in rhetoric there's always an exaggeration. The people who are of more liberal, or you'd call left persuasion, certainly can talk about progress. But I can tell you in Oakland--we're not talking about Bernie Sanders. We're talking about Oakland, and people complaining because you're going to exceed the fifty-foot height limit. So that was the Left; this was not a Left that gathers in Washington DC, it was a different world. It was a localized set of players. And I just didn't think the opposition had any real 00:34:00thoughts. That was my thought. Now, today there's new problems, because of the price of housing and schools. But I think there's a lot of truth to that. Now, if you just say it's all the market, then that's pure neoliberalism, and we have a lot of books written about that topic. So I won't go any further than to say as applied to Oakland, in that year--that's right on.

SHAFER: Yeah. I want to talk about the police department.

MEEKER: There are still some things I'd like to talk about in terms of urbanism.

SHAFER: Yeah.

MEEKER: So one of the things that happens downtown, also probably would be considered in the success category, is a number of historical renovations and preservations, the Fox Theatre being an important one.

BROWN: Yeah, right.

MEEKER: The Rotunda Building and Sweet's Ballroom.

BROWN: Right, right.

MEEKER: I think in a lot of these you partnered with Phil Tagami?

BROWN: Well, he did it.

MEEKER: He did it, yeah. Well, can you tell me what, what--like what is the relationship for city government and city leadership in helping those kinds of things happen?

BROWN: Well, Phil Tagami did the Rotunda Building before I was mayor. And he got a good loan from the city, and he put it together. It had been empty for a long, long time, so that's all to the good, and there was no opposition there. Everybody was for that. Remember, you couldn't get any major project without buying it. You had to give people very attractive loans to get them to take the risk. You had to mitigate the risk, lower that risk, or people were not going to put hard-earned money--and besides, most of the money is not them. They have to go to investors and say, "Look, we have a winning investment here." Well, it has 00:36:00to be a winning investment, and these guys very clearly calculate.

The Fox was a totally different thing. I never imagined how we could handle that Fox. I almost consider that a miracle. It had been dark for thirty years. Homeless were living there. There were camp cooking fires inside. It was crazy! And Phil was able to get a lot of money sources, market-rate credits, historic credits--all, he had over thirty sources of revenue, and he put that thing together. So that was something. I mean that, to me that's all good and amazing.

MEEKER: In your conversations with Tagami over the years did you get a sense that there needs to be kind of these synergies happening, where you have an overarching--in other words, to what extent do you think your vision for a 00:37:00revitalized downtown made these other smaller things happen that you maybe didn't have any role in?

BROWN: Well, I certainly wasn't thinking about the Fox Theatre when I ran for mayor. I had to find a place for the art school. That was the Alice Arts Center, and we had to expand, and the Alice Arts Center had some local dance troupes, drummers, or whatever, and I wanted to convert the whole hotel to an artist's--like art downstairs, and artists could live upstairs. They wouldn't buy that. That was politically not on the radar screen, because the people who were there, they're Section 8, they're low income, and they made a lot of noise and that stopped that.

So we had to go to the Fox, and I never thought the Fox was possible to get all the financing for that. I still don't, to this day, quite know how they did it. It's pretty amazing. Well, they had these market-rate tax credits, there was a 00:38:00lot of things. We were going to get some bond money from a Statewide Park [Program] cultural bond, and then we were going to get $5 million--we won it. I actually went up there and made the argument in Sacramento one evening; Phil finally turned it down, because he said it would take three more years and we'd have to pay $3 million. To get the $5 million would delay it, and it would cost a couple million, two or three million to do it, so that was another example. But he did get market-rate credits that Bank of America bought, $22 million, then the city put up redevelopment money. We had redevelopment then. So it was many, many sources, very creative, and I think that Phil really put that together.

MEEKER: Can you talk about your work with the Oakland Redevelopment Agency? Because it certainly comes into play during your time as governor.

BROWN: No--redevelopment is just the city council. They were coterminous.

SHAFER: It was a useful tool.

BROWN: Oh, you're talking about the mechanism?

MEEKER: Yeah.

BROWN: Well, I think for the Fox, that's the main part. What else did we do in redevelopment? They spent a lot of money on the city activities, which is somewhat questionable. They brought in the stadium, the Raiders. That was probably redevelopment.

SHAFER: Did they build any housing?

BROWN: They had to spend 25 percent on affordable housing. But of course I was interested in market-rate housing. That was the problem. Oakland had a disproportionate number of residents who could not contribute very strongly to a growing economy. That's it. So I wanted to balance it off. I didn't ever see that it was going to turn out the way it did, where many people felt they were driven out of Oakland. That's an unfortunate byproduct that I hadn't quite envisioned. And to this day I'm not quite sure, because if you don't have the 00:40:00market-rate housing--and you're not going to get the market-rate housing without the prices going up and up and up. The alternative is you can get subsidized housing, but that's never more than a hundred units a year at the high point. And market-rate housing depends on--market-rate housing, because that redevelopment or--increment, that growth of the real-estate value comes from the market rate. So you just cannot have all subsidized housing, 100 percent. It cannot work. The maximum you get is 20 or 25 percent. And that only depends on the market driving higher and higher, so there's a built-in paradox in the whole redevelopment use of funding for housing. I mean it's a dilemma. I'm not offering the answer here, but--

MEEKER: Can you tell us about your vision for the Oakland Army Base?

BROWN: I didn't have any vision. I mean we were trying to develop it. Retail, housing--I wanted to put a casino in there--anything to get money moving around. Yeah, I was driving by Middletown, which is in the middle of nowhere, south of Clear Lake, and they've got a casino, so why can't Oakland have one? But people didn't like that at all. The liberals didn't like it, the black ministers didn't like it. And we probably couldn't have pulled it off anyway, because of the requirements.

MEEKER: You know, when you're trying to get these projects going, and you mention these different local neighborhood interest groups the black ministers, the liberals. Who do you actually go to?

BROWN: Well, black ministers like some things. But not other things--nobody was unified. It's not a unified Left against the city hall. It's many people--like the preservationists were more an older white crowd, okay? But then if you had 00:42:00some neighborhoods, it might have a racial component to it. It depends. It's a variety of forces that lift their head up. And, you know, but that's part of municipal politics. It's more difficult to navigate now than it was in 2000.

MEEKER: Okay. Summing up a question in terms of the transformation of downtown Oakland: I lived down there at this time and would see you around sometimes. And it was always surprising and nice to see the mayor of the city walking the city streets. You had mentioned this vision you had when you were first elected, of a city that was a bit quiet and not much happening, versus how lively it was in the 1940s. How did it change over the period of time that you were mayor? Did 00:43:00you walk down the street, you know--

BROWN: Well, it just changed through the market-rate investment. Through the rise of real estate in San Francisco. And then that money slops over into Oakland. That's what happened. It is a change, and now I'm a little more aware as I've come to the Mountain House here. I can think back 125 years at all the changes that take place. But I remember going down by the post office. There was a bar called Esther's Orbit Room, and that was, I would say, a remnant. It's closed--been closed for many years. But I used to go in there. I knew Esther [Mabry] and knew the bartender. But it was basically a bar where blacks frequented, but not very many. On a holiday they get a few more people. But it's sad. The building is deteriorating. And that was true of a lot of, a lot of 00:44:00club[s]--a lot of places; they don't die overnight. They kind of slowly wither away. And so that's what I wanted to see. You know, they talked about that area, they had black jazz clubs or something. I don't know whether that was in the forties. So the idea, if you get enough people downtown, then they'll be able to support more activity. That was the idea.

MEEKER: Well, what was your personal experience of walking around downtown, let's say during the end of your two terms?

BROWN: Well, there wasn't much there. It's just not like a downtown. It's not like walking down--being on the streets of Greenwich Village or something. It just was totally different.

MEEKER: What about after eight years of being mayor, how did it feel?

BROWN: Well, there were new places, they had new restaurants. They put a restaurant in the flower market across from the Fox Theatre that never was there 00:45:00before, they've added some up on Telegraph Ave. There were some in Old Town. So you could see the beginnings of revitalization, as I would call it. Other people would call it gentrification. I'd say there are some who said, "No, it's better." I don't know what they would say--it may depend upon where they live and who they are, so there are many different perspectives. Living up in the hills of Oakland and Montclair, that's one thing. Living in West Oakland or living in East Oakland, Sobrante Park--those were all different experiences. I remember talking to a lady in Sobrante, a black woman, and I can't remember how I ran into her. But she said, "As soon as I come home at night I shut the door, and I don't come out till the next morning." There were a lot of people who were prisoners in their own house. So that kind of gets your attention. We need to do 00:46:00something about that. That's why I thought a market-rate investment would be good. Not just downtown, but throughout the whole city.

SHAFER: And was part of that, her comment, was that public safety as well?

BROWN: Oh, no--that was all about public safety. That's what she said. She's afraid to go out at night. And there were plenty of crimes--plenty of murders. I mean the murder rate in Oakland--and we had a hundred murders for 400,000 people--what is that? Is that--twenty-five to 100,000, isn't it?

SHAFER: It's a lot--it's high.

BROWN: Okay. New York was like six or seven, LA six or seven, San Jose four per 100,000. So there was a lot there, and how do you prevent that? Well, I think you have to add more economic investment. I think that helps--a lot. In fact, it's crucial.

SHAFER: You asked earlier who wrote that article. It was Marc Cooper, by the way.

BROWN: Oh yeah, Marc Cooper. He was being positive.

SHAFER: Yeah. So, in terms of law enforcement, I think when you came in there 00:47:00was one police chief, and you changed police chiefs.

BROWN: I did.

SHAFER: How did you approach the police department, because obviously I mean--it's hard to look at it. I mean now there's all kinds of other layers but back then, how did you think about--

BROWN: Well, we thought we needed more data-driven policing. Where was the crime? How do you respond to it? There was a lot of institutional inertia, so I felt we needed a more sophisticated effort to getting at the criminals. And I remember the city manager, Robert Bobb, an African American, and his assistant was African American. I talked about it, I think, in my inaugural speech, about driving crime out of Oakland. He said, "No, say driving the criminals out." I'd 00:48:00never talked about crime in the person of human beings, criminals. And so Robert Bobb, who certainly knew what he was talking about, that's how he put it. But this problem with these gangs, they have a gang--the Nut Case gang. They killed several people.

SHAFER: That was the actual name?

BROWN: Yeah, the Nut Case crowd. And so you have a lot of these little crews up there, in Ghost Town. They've been going on for decades. So you've got to push that out, if you can. As soon as they go to prison they come back. And when there isn't much other activity, selling dope is--on the street corners. And then they have wars and fighting about that, and then you have killing. Most of the killing was done by people who had one kind of a record or another. So that was a, that was something; I wanted to have less crime. When you have four times 00:49:00the crime rate of most major cities, then that's obviously not good, and you've got to stop it.

Now, today you have a lot of hostility toward the police. I was very sympathetic to the police. I've worked with the Oakland Police. I think they did a good job. But what they actually do, and shootings and arrests--we had cases where the police would say they didn't do something, and we'd have to settle the case. We had a number of those. So what they actually do is difficult. We did have the Riders, and they supposedly were guilty of making some criminals fight themselves or planting dope. There were questions. But generally speaking, I supported what the police were doing, because I had this sense that--I didn't have a sense, I had house meetings. People tell me they wanted more police protection.

SHAFER: To what extent did you see the--your goals for economic development linked to getting--?

BROWN: They were tied in, of course. More economic development probably means--when you have very depressed economic conditions, then crime is one of the only businesses that are viable. You can always sell dope, and you can always rob and burglarize.

SHAFER: So, to get the investors' confidence you felt like you had to get that under control?

BROWN: Yeah, and even today there's still a lot of retail theft. You can take those drug stores downtown. They have huge retail shoplifting. It's very hard to stop.

SHAFER: Yeah. A friend of mine is the CEO of Macy's, and he says that they have--I think it's like $15 million worth of stuff stolen every year, just in the Union Square store in San Francisco. It's crazy.

BROWN: Right. Well, I passed a bill to try to deal with retail theft, and that's 00:51:00another issue. There's a lot of crime that's not prosecuted anymore, and people don't know what to do about it. And if it's dope, and they're addicted, then you've got to deal with their addiction. If they're organized gangs, they're very invested in their criminal behavior. So about the only people you can really influence are the one-off thieves who aren't totally embedded in a criminal mentality.

So it is daunting, and right now there's a focus on the police being bad, but my focus was that criminals were bad and we wanted to eliminate--get them in prison, get them off the street. I even tried programs where we brought them into the Oakland jail. We'd let them go, but we'd put a monitoring system on them. We would try to get them job counseling. And then the Corrections 00:52:00Department called me up one day about four o'clock and said "You have no right to put electronic monitoring--that's the province of the prisons." They cut them off, so that ended that little program.

SHAFER: When you thought about the public safety issues and the police department when you came in, you wanted to change chiefs.

BROWN: Yeah, because I don't think he was effective.

SHAFER: Some people, some mayors want to bring in somebody fresh from outside. There's usually the rank and file, and the union hates that.

BROWN: No, the rank and file liked this guy.

SHAFER: Richard Word.

BROWN: Yeah, he was very popular. He was in the union.

SHAFER: Okay, so, so--at that point did you consider somebody from outside?

BROWN: No.

SHAFER: No. For that reason? Or just--

BROWN: Yeah! Well, first of all, obviously, you need the confidence of the men and women, and he seemed like a pretty good guy. I'm removing one African 00:53:00American--we have another one who is a captain. That seemed like a good move to make, and he [Wayne Tucker] was a very good guy--until he ran into trouble with the council, and he got tired and he left. Because it's very frustrating, whether you're running a school or you're running the police department, it's not easy.

SHAFER: Any sense of how that differs in Oakland? How is Oakland unique? You know, like I think San Jose is a fairly easy city. San Francisco, not so much. Where does Oakland, would you say, in terms of getting things done, neighborhood--

BROWN: Well, San Francisco is more effective than Oakland. Oakland's got real problems in their schools. Yeah, I think the crime is much better than it was, but that can be just people moving out. That is something that when people in the--housing stock improves and people move in, there's less support for the criminal activity. If you have only houses that are run down, that does foster 00:54:00an environment where criminals can thrive. And that is just a dilemma, because people will say, "Well, now you're just gentrifying." But if you don't try to improve the housing stock, you leave a lot to the criminals, and that's real too. And people talk about the police, but for the most part the police have a very tough job. They had a tough job. They had a tough time in the schools. The scores in many Oakland schools are pretty bad.

SHAFER: Do you think that that appreciation for the police and what they do, do you think that was something you didn't have as much when you came in as mayor?

BROWN: No, I wouldn't say that. I often was endorsed by rank-and-file police. But I mean the mayor deals with the police chief. Crime is a problem. If you've got sixty murders--sixty-six murders my first year, or eighty, then it goes up to ninety or a hundred--wow, well, you want to roll that back. And you're not 00:55:00going to get Whole Foods to come in and open a store when--well, there was not too far from there a Vietnamese lady that somebody came in and held her up, killed her, shot her. And those things become very tragic, and that doesn't build much of a city.

SHAFER: In terms of the Riders scandal, I think that broke in 2000? And as you said, there were allegations of falsifying reports and--

BROWN: Yeah, but of the three that went to trial, one escaped to Mexico and the three were--they dismissed, they couldn't convict them.

SHAFER: So you think they were exonerated?

BROWN: I wouldn't say exonerated, but they didn't have enough evidence to convict them.

SHAFER: And do you think they were just like four bad apples, and the rest of the--?

BROWN: I don't know what to say about this really. Criminals are not that nice. And I'm not saying some criminals aren't wonderful people in their own way. But they maim, they intimidate, they traffic young girls, they burglarize, they're 00:56:00very violent, at least a very small number, but enough to terrorize a city. So now the police have got to deal with that, and they have more and more restrictions on how to do that. So, I'm not saying that--and there's a lot of feeling in this, but how do you make your city safe? That's a big question, and--

MEEKER: What is your answer to it?

BROWN: Well, my answer is I thought that the police chief from New York, [William J.] Bratton, was good. He had targets; every day they would, or very frequently, they would check how they're doing. They'd measure--

SHAFER: That's very controversial. It was very controversial.

BROWN: I don't know if it's controversial. The fact is, they did an--look at the crime rate in Oakland--I mean in Manhattan. Look at the fare jumping. They were pretty effective. So I do think you need to have authority. Right now, things 00:57:00look a little bit out of control in a number of these places.

SHAFER: What did you mean--when you're talking about Riders?

BROWN: Certainly, if you drive down and you look at all the tents, those weren't there before. I remember one particular corner, that we had to clear that out. We took the benches out, and now it's fully encased, on Grand Ave., near San Pablo, fully encased with tents. It's like a tent city. These are problems. How are we going to solve them?

SHAFER: But in terms of the Riders case, you were saying that there's--criminals are violent, they're nasty. Like how does that relate to what those four--?

BROWN: Well, because it's a war. The cops are under--they're being shot at. And yeah, you've got cops that get the power of the gun, and they're not as 00:58:00sensitive, probably, as say a social worker or somebody who's engaged in psychotherapy. You know, they stop a guy. They might blow their head away. There were four cops who were killed in Oakland one time. They were chasing somebody, and then they'd stopped a car, and the guy killed two Oakland cops. And then they chased him into a building. He was standing there, and he killed two more cops. Well, this is pretty serious stuff, and now everyone says the cops are bad. Well, there's no easy way to get criminals. And there are criminals, whether they're dope crazed or damaged or just plain badass, if you don't handle it right, you can have your head blown off.

SHAFER: But just to be clear, you're not saying that planting evidence and falsifying--?

BROWN: No, I'm not saying planting--no, of course not. That's a crime, testifying falsely, like people say cops do. And cultures develop, and maybe 00:59:00it's hard to get a conviction. You know, the murder rate, I think, in some of these cities, they only solve 30 percent of the murders. So that would say if you want to murder somebody, you've got a pretty good chance of getting away with it. So that's a problem. I don't think people like to look at the reality. And that's why people move to the suburbs, and they get in nice enclaves where they don't need to worry about it. But when you're in the real firing line, where you have gangs that have been there for ten/twenty years, the grandchildren are still being arrested by the same cops, it's a different world. And so I wanted to make the city safe. Without that, where are you?

SHAFER: I'm just wondering, did your dad being DA and then AG, did that have any influence?

BROWN: No, it's just common sense. You know, your own safety is--well, I lived in Jack London [Square]. That wasn't too bad. But my wife, who lived on Telegraph, she'd be harassed walking home from the Gap. I mean, it's not nice 01:00:00down there in the, in places where there's a lot of desperation. And you can give all the explanations you want.

But when you're just there, it's--I remember a lady across the street. And some guy came up to me, and he was giving me a bad time, and she defended me, said, "Don't blame the mayor. It's your problem. He's not doing anything." So this lady, who was a heroin addict, I think. She had four kids. I remember two of their names--Chardonnay and Xavier. There were four of them, and they were yelling and screaming, and somehow they were right across the street from me, right under my window. So I got to know her. And finally, she got out of there and got her mother, who was disabled, and packaged some different kinds of aid and she got herself--and I actually, I had someone drive her out to a new 01:01:00apartment, so I helped her. And then I'm running around the lake or something, somebody slams on the brakes and said, "Hey," what did he say? "Number three," or number four, "is dead." I said, "What are you talking about?" He said this woman's--"The father of Xavier. He was killed this week." I said--okay--I mean it's another world.

So there was another apartment, and this thing was really run down, really pathetic. And then a block away there was another one where they're just dealing. You could tell they were dealing dope out of that. So I had some control of the Planning Department. So I called the owner. He was an Irishman from south of San Francisco. I said, "Hey, clean this damn thing up, or I'm going to have it declared a nuisance and we're going to tear it down. So do 01:02:00something." So he sold it, and the guy did fix it up. This was just two blocks, next door to me, and two blocks down you had two real hotbeds of activity, criminal activity. It is not what you think in your--wherever your nice middle-class dwelling is. This is very different.

SHAFER: I live in the Mission, so--[laughing]

BROWN: Well, the Mission is pretty nice--

SHAFER: So did that give you sort of street cred with the--

BROWN: With who?

SHAFER: With the community.

BROWN: Well, what does that community mean? Do people go to the city council meetings? People I meet when I go to the store? People when I go to a city/a neighborhood meeting? People didn't even know about that. I never told anybody about that. But I did look at the laws of nuisance, and I said, "Can we really declare it a nuisance and just tear the damn thing down?" Well, we never got 01:03:00that far, but I always wondered about that. We had another one two blocks away. Graffiti all over the brick building, empty. We called the owner up--let's get him out of there. Well, there's no owner, and there's back taxes to the county of three hundred grand. So the county says, "You have to pay the three hundred [thousand], or else." He said, "Forgive it." "No."

Well, to the best of my knowledge, it's still there. We're talking twenty years later, because, first of all, this is right in Ghost Town, where there were gangs--probably still a certain amount of it. But you needed to help a developer develop that, like we did Forest City. But this required the county to waive the--they wouldn't do it. So there's a lot of, one issue after another. If it isn't the local neighborhood activists, it's the city, the county--now, when it 01:04:00was just under my watch, I could put pressure on people, and I did.

MEEKER: Oakland's a unique city--

BROWN: The guy next door to me--it had an owner. I knew who the guy was. In fact, he contributed to my campaign. And I think his brother ran it. I said, "Look, you've got to clean this place up. You've got to fix it." He ultimately did, but I said, I said, "We're going to send the police guy who does building inspections, and you bring yourself--money, whatever money you need, and you give those tenants whatever they need to get out." And he actually did, and it came out, as far as I know--he handed out the money and they left. And then he fixed it up--very modestly, I might say. There it is. Well, these places don't have garages, so when you have to park your car on the street, that's already a stress.

Down the road there were several halfway houses--many halfway houses. And I 01:05:00visited--I went to lunch once. I went to dinner at one five blocks from my house, four or five blocks down Telegraph, and I was talking to one guy. And he said, "Oh yeah, I just got out of Pelican Bay." "Well, that's good. How was it?" [laughter] "Good to be out." But, so it's a different world. I mean there were at least three or four parole halfway houses there, and this is where people go. Oakland is the place--they're not going to Forest Hill. They're not going to Montclair. It functions in the larger social ecology, in a way, and then when you try to change that, you're pushing against a lot.

And the police have a role in that. And the planning--there's a lot of slowness. I mean the bureaucracy--I remember Willie Brown called me and says his wife Blanche, who he's still married to after all these years, he says, "She's living 01:06:00in a nice house." She got a condo over at Lake Merritt. "She can't get her building permit." I said, "Let me check it out." "It's been months." I said, "Okay." I went over to the Building Department, and I said, "Who's got the one--?" I had the address. I said, "Where is this?" He said, "Well, it's so and so." I said, "What floor is he on?" "He's on the third floor." So I run up there, march up to his--his desk is a mess, and he's got orange peels and papers all stacked. And I started rifling through, and I couldn't find the damn permit.

So I went downstairs and said, "Hey, let's get this thing going. What's the problem?" And the guy at the desk tells me, "Well, we have an ordinance, and the ordinance is you have to recycle building materials from a--" So, when they remodeled this place, they had a lot of building materials. You have to show that you actually recycled them and didn't dump them. And, for some reason, the builder had not satisfied that requirement yet. So, I told Willie, and we got it done. But I'm just saying--nothing moves. And so I don't think there are many 01:07:00elected officials who take such direct action. Now, it's true it's Willie Brown, but even if somebody asked me, I would do that. I mean I did that with pardons. I'd meet people who'd say, "You know, my son--I need a pardon. It's been thirty years," whatever. I would do it. Because there's a lot of layering, an entourage, and parceling out these functions--and yet things are so complicated, and everyone's afraid of making a mistake, that it definitely slows things down.

So I liked being mayor, because I could walk over to the Planning Department, and I fired all these people and appointed Claudia Cappio, who'd worked in Emeryville. Emeryville, by the way, was growing and Oakland was just totally stagnant, because they didn't have the same oppositional forces. And so this woman I put in there, head of economic development, and we really started doing 01:08:00things. And we were able to deal with CEQA [California Environmental Quality Act]. There's an urban infill exemption of two-hundred-or-less units. We were able to move that. But before that, they weren't moving it.

I lived at Twenty-Seventh and Telegraph, the old Sears Roebuck Building, and I was on the top floor. And we had the first floor, and we had a little balcony outside. That was very nice. And then on my second floor, where the bedroom was, one bedroom--but it was set back. "You know, you've taken five hundred square feet out of this apartment. Why is that?" And the planner said, "It's the setback ordinance." So you want to set it back, it has a different aesthetic. Well, at that point I said, "No, let's get this--this is another five hundred units. You would have brought more money into the city, more--." Why bother? 01:09:00Now, maybe if I went back there and looked again, maybe I'd think maybe the setback was good. I don't know. But at that point, I was looking for jumpstarting things. And so when I would see things like this, I'd say, "Why? Why set it back? First of all, we have a balcony, or we've got a porch. So how do you know it's set back?" You can only see the setback, or if it wasn't a setback--I don't think you would notice it as much.

There are so many--there was another case. Phil Tagami was complaining. We had a guy, our economic development negotiator, and they were arguing about what kind of tile to put on the sidewalk that led from the Rotunda Building into the plaza. And I thought to myself--all this stuff for tile? Why do we need tile--just cement, just put it in there. What the hell difference would it make? And so they're arguing about it, and they spend all this money on stuff. I don't 01:10:00know what I'm talking about now, but Union Square. I thought the old Union Square was fine, and now they redid it. They did the same thing in Pershing Square down in LA. I thought it was fine. No, they changed it. Maybe if I knew all the pieces, I would agree with them. But I can tell you, if you take all these practices--planning practices, police, habituated behavior--and you get a lot of stagnation.

So you may think, well, the police are a bunch of cowboys. Well, it's not about being cowboys, it's about knowing how to deal with criminals. How to catch them, who's going to catch them. You know, by the way, the seniority, the way it works is, the people who go out in East Oakland on Saturday night are the rookies. The guys who've been around for twenty years and know their way around, they're working, you know, during the week.

SHAFER: The football game. [laughter]

BROWN: In the morning! Yeah, so everywhere you look. And I often would say to myself, now, the criminals, they can move from West Oakland to East 01:11:00Oakland--this is asymmetrical warfare. The cops have a post and bid, they've got to bid for their task a year in advance. And then you have a policeman, community policing for each precinct. Well, there's fifty-two or fifty-four precincts, many of them aren't having any crime. You've got to know where the crime is--I thought. Now, of course if it goes too far, then people say, "You are picking on us. You're being disproportionate." On the other hand, you've got to go where the crime is.

So there's a lot of contradictions, that when you are actually in the city--and I'm in the city. I drove my own car. I did not have any guards. I had no driver. And Anne took the BART over to Gap and came to our little apartment, and so we encountered the street. And I would rather have a safer place than a less-safe 01:12:00place. It's just that simple. So I didn't have to learn that from my father or from reading the newspaper. It's just the way--this is what makes sense to me. This was common sense. Now, my grandfather was a police captain. That's true. My father was a DA. So, I thought well, they always said he was such a man of rectitude. My father said that someone brought over a cake or something, somebody, and my mother said, "No, we can't take that." He wouldn't accept any gratuities whatsoever. So I had come from a background which is orderly, which is not the kind of the chaos which I see in parts of urban America. So I definitely would like to make things a little more regular, if I could call it that.

SHAFER: I know that as governor you talked about the fact that the legislature passes a thousand bills, and there aren't a thousand good ideas. You know, the 01:13:00implication being there's a lot of laws we don't need.

BROWN: Well, no question. The bills are there because they're a legislator. That means they make laws. They're in the law-making business, and people think they're trying to solve problems, but they're trying to pass laws. Sometimes they solve a problem; sometimes they make it worse. Sometimes they create their own problems.

SHAFER: One of the big laws was California Environmental Quality Act, which Reagan signed, I think.

[side conversation deleted]

BROWN: CEQA. Reagan did sign that. He did, yeah, probably.

SHAFER: So--you, as governor, I think toyed with the idea of trying to reform CEQA--?

BROWN: Well, let me tell you, when I was mayor I sought a bill that would exempt downtown Oakland, from Lake Merritt to the freeway, and maybe from Twenty-seventh to the Estuary, I said, "I want a three-year period of no CEQA. Just let us do that."

SHAFER: Is that special-interest legislation? [laughing]

BROWN: No, I wanted to do it there because I didn't--now, as it turned out, we were able to, the law, they watered it down so it had no effect. We had a law. They exempted us from a couple of CEQA provisions. But they did it in such a way that the lawyers for the developers said, "We can't be sure that we'll be sued anyway," because there's other parts of the CEQA law that we think could override the exemption that I got. So it turned out to be useless, and I would say that people were scared to death to even put that bill in.

But what I was impressed by was that we have, in Oakland, a Planning [and Building] Department. And when you go in to build something, you've got to show your plans to the Building Department. And you have--what is it, aesthetic 01:15:00element to it--design review. You have to go through design review with the Planning Department, and they invite the neighbors in to criticize your report, the neighborhood. "Do you like this?" I remember when I built my loft downtown the Port printed a thing that said, "There's too much verticality. You need some more horizontal elements." So I had to change the awning, which irritated me, because that cost me more than I wanted to pay. I think it was another $5,000. So that was design review. Then you go to the Planning Commission. The Planning Commission is a design review subcommittee of two or three of the planning commissioners. Then after they go through design review, it goes to the Planning Department, and the Planning Department votes yea or nay. Then if somebody wants to object, they go to the city council. And in the city council meeting, they start renegotiating it.

Now, why do you need CEQA, where you've got a judge in Hayward, so we're going 01:16:00to try the whole damn thing over again, after you've run that gauntlet? So I said to my planning director, the second one--the first one I had to ask to leave because it was too static and stagnant--I said, "Have you ever seen anything that CEQA has improved in our downtown? And she said no. Now, maybe she's wrong on that, but that's what she said, because we have a lot of checks and balances. We have very active neighborhood people, so that's why I thought CEQA could have--it's a very blunt instrument. On the other hand, to deal with climate change we're going to have to reduce car use. We're going to have to do a lot of the damn things that are a lot more powerful than CEQA.

So, do you understand how the CEQA looks a little different than if you're talking about a forest versus--will this development add to traffic? Yeah. If 01:17:00you have more people, you have more traffic. And I said the problem is we don't have enough traffic. Now, maybe it's too much, and I do feel that when I leave Williams, the traffic seems very intense. But traffic was what we didn't have enough of downtown. In Oakland.

SHAFER: Do you think it was almost like too much democracy in this process?

BROWN: Well, that's a whole question--democracy. First of all, democracy is very much influenced by special interests, so democracy is already highly limited. I would say that to allow a handful of people to hold up projects--I don't know how you could say that's democracy. It's not a vote of even three square miles, where you just say, "Well, let's vote on it." So I do think we have a lot of special interests. Now, the biggest special interests are the large economic 01:18:00powers that shape the whole society, you know, whether it's the bailout that went to the banks, but not to the homeowner. But you have, at the local level, you have liberal/left-leaning, that has what they want in their organizations, and they want to stop stuff that they don't want. So sometimes I think they're wrong.

And there's no easy way out, like should you be able to contract out the parking at UC Berkeley? Is that a diminution of good union jobs? Or is that just, you know, an important economizing maneuver that will give you more money for the academic enterprise?

MEEKER: Why is labor even part of CEQA?

BROWN: Oh, labor is part of CEQA.

MEEKER: Yeah, but why is that?

BROWN: Well, I was giving you an example of how an interest group on the left can pressure people.

SHAFER: That's like the environmentalists versus labor a lot of times, isn't it?

BROWN: Well, labor uses CEQA. The pipefitters pioneered this when I was governor the first time--or maybe it was when I was party chairman in '89-'90. They will sue a project. They will sue. And if you give them a labor agreement, a project labor agreement where you have to hire all union, they'll drop their suit, and you'll save a year or two. This is also used by developers. If one competitor is going to come near another one, they'll use CEQA. So it is now a blunt instrument used for totally collateral purposes--union agreements and competitor, trying to block competition. And it's also used to flesh out important environmental concerns, so there's a real logic to CEQA. The problem 01:20:00with all these things is they work, and in some cases they don't work so well--and that's true of everything.

SHAFER: Including the schools, which I want to ask you about. You came in, obviously schools were--I think education has been an interest of yours for a long time. And two of your signature legacy projects--I know you don't like that word, but are the Oakland Military Institute and the arts academy [Oakland School for the Arts]. Talk about why you felt it was important to go that route.

BROWN: Oh, because I couldn't take over the schools. It was obvious to me that that would not make it in a vote of the people, and the only way I could have done that was to [pass] a charter amendment, which people could do today saying the mayor appoints all the members of the school board. I don't think that could pass. So I decided to create some charter schools to deal with the challenges of urban education, with a lot of English learners, people who don't speak English 01:21:00at home, people who are very low income and who are not doing that well in the public school. I wanted to see how I could do, and I must say we're still challenged.

SHAFER: Many people felt that Oakland was an unlikely place for a military academy.

BROWN: Right. Well not, I think, many people. I think the president of the school board, Dan Siegel, thought that, and he had enough people to block it. Yeah, they said they don't want a military--even though America spends more on its military than all its competitors combined, multiplied by two or three. And there it is. And even candidates running for president have very little to say about it. So that's a total disconnect in my mind. You can't have a military school--of which we had many fifty years ago. But we're not even going to talk about--there are so many now, taboos. You can't do this, you can't do that. I mean that's where liberalism is running downhill.

SHAFER: Well, what was it about the idea of a military academy, because you took--

BROWN: Just the structure, the honor, the hierarchy, the competitive quality, the pride, the uniforms--and the marching, the ritual. That's all.

SHAFER: But did you think in some ways it was an echo of your schooling in the--?

BROWN: Yeah, a little bit. We had ROTC. We didn't pay too much--I had three years of ROTC. It was required then. At St. Ignatius everybody--not everybody, but most people, took ROTC. When I went to Santa Clara, in 1956, you took ROTC. There was no choice. But it wasn't about ROTC or the military. It was about creating a structure in a very chaotic world. So it is, it is a good--there are many military--there's not a lot, there's probably forty military schools in 01:23:00America. There's three or four in California.

SHAFER: And who did you see benefiting from the military academy?

BROWN: Kids who are in the Oakland schools doing very poorly. The goal was to have a prep school that they could go to, a first-rate school, where they don't need to--and that is a problem. If you look at the state scores, people in low income--not all low income, but many low-income communities have very low performance results.

SHAFER: Did you see that in any way as a--sort of a supplement or a replacement even for a family structure--or lack of a family structure?

BROWN: Well, it's a different structure. I mean when I grew up, I think there was one house that had what we called a divorcée, a woman who was divorced. One that I know of. Everyone else was two--most had kids, lots of kids. And it was 01:24:00pretty structured. There were no big events. So that was kind of a middle-class environment. Nobody seemed to be particularly rich. No one seemed to be poor. People went to school. Some went to City College because they didn't get into Cal. But it seemed event free.

When I walked through an Oakland school one day, there were all these guys walking around, and I said, "What are they?" They said, "They're hallwalkers." They're just walking around. And then you go up, and I looked at the--I don't know whether it was AP or it was a chemistry class on the third or fourth floor of Oakland High School. And these were mostly Asian people, and this is the--I don't what, it was a chemistry class though. So I see the hallwalkers downstairs. I see the elites getting their chemistry, and they're on their way to college. I thought well, I'd like to combine this, see if I can't create a 01:25:00school that will work for a broader range of kids. That was the idea.

SHAFER: That was the idea, yeah. And do you think that the opposition to it was--and you said it was just Dan Siegel, but you know, there were, I think a bit--

BROWN: No, there were a few.

SHAFER: Yeah. I mean do you think--?

BROWN: Well, because it's military-bad. It's the same thing--soda pop-bad. There's all this bad. And I don't know what it's driven by, but it's not very functional, so why would they say that? By the way, a lot of these people--Dellums was in the military. Barbara Lee's father was in the military. A lot of these successful African Americans had parents who were in the military, so what are they talking about? Was that bad? Do they apologize for their parents? No. There's so many contradictions on the left and on the right. It really does speak to the chaos of our current moment in the West. I won't even 01:26:00limit it to America.

SHAFER: Who was it that said consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds?

BROWN: Yeah, that was Emerson in his book, in his essay, "Self-Reliance." [A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds...]

SHAFER: So that's sort of like just human nature, in some ways.

BROWN: Well, is it? Why would people--I don't know, you'd have to say it--

SHAFER: [laughing] We don't want to go down that road.

BROWN: There is a narrow-mindedness. There just is. In fact, they're so narrow-minded that we can't even talk about many topics. They're too hot. So now we have the right wing going off the deep end, and we have the left wing having its own deep ends. I wouldn't say they're equivalent. But it's troublesome that there not be a more centered body of participation and discourse, that at least on the surface is more rational.

SHAFER: Yeah, and then the arts academy as well [Oakland School for the Arts]. What was your thinking there?

BROWN: Just that the military was going to be more rigid. I thought we needed something more creative. Or more spontaneous, and it is really different.

SHAFER: In both of those, do you think, is there a commentary about teacher unions and the--? Is there, in your embrace of charter schools, was there some, you know, I won't say indictment, that's too strong a word, but an implied criticism of teachers unions?

BROWN: No. First of all, the problems in the schools, I don't think are the teachers union. It's just the school. They keep having more superintendents, new tests. The state tests have changed three times. We've gone from TerraNova, to the STAR test, to the current Smarter Balanced. That's just three. We've had various fads that come every ten or fifteen years and yet these kids, they're 01:28:00two and three years behind, in a good part of urban schools. I don't know about the rural ones. So I wanted to create a school where I could create more favorable conditions. That was the idea. And there is hostility. Even the art school. There was more hostility to the art school than the military school, because they said, "Well, just support the arts program at Skyline," and support it throughout. I said, "No, I want to create an academy where arts is the dominant theme, and attract the best talent we can by using auditions." That is very antithetical to certain views in Oakland, and I presume elsewhere: "That's not right." Now, if it's a football team or a basketball team, then selecting the best is what you're supposed to do. But if you're talking about an academic institution, no. You want to make sure you have enough of every kind that you 01:29:00have what you have, and it doesn't work.

SHAFER: Is that relatively new, do you think?

BROWN: Yeah, well, I think you used to have these unified school districts. Well, the school seems to be--I can't tell over time. These big school districts are impacted by low-performing kids, and they go home, the parents--maybe it's a one-parent family. They don't have the income. The mother/caregiver changes jobs. You've got kids who are homeless, kids who are in foster care. There's a lot of stress that you can understand. So the school is only part of that, and that's what the teachers keep saying. And it's a very difficult job.

And also, now we mainstream, so you've got kids who are emotionally given to outbursts. We have kids with authority defiance syndrome. [oppositional defiant 01:30:00disorder] You have to accommodate that, so you have to be careful what you say to them. And we have one girl who is very emotional. She has an attendant with her at all times, to calm her down. So you put enough of these people in a classroom, and then you say you have to be very careful about the discipline. Well, then you lose control. So I wanted to try to create some schools that would be able to do better. And even then, it's very challenging.

SHAFER: Because the charter schools are exempt from some of those things?

BROWN: Some. Every year they're trying to reel them back in, so they'll be just like the regular public schools. And it's right now the union has taken up that cause. But they all want to regulate outcomes, even though the regulations don't produce the results they want. Not for a year, but for decades. I mean Oakland and Inglewood are back in trouble again. And it's very hard to get--

MEEKER: [crosstalk] What do you mean by regulate outcomes?

BROWN: What? Well, you'd be able to score on the tests--I mean they all measure, now we measure everything. So we know exactly who's in the bottom twenty/who's in the top twenty, what schools. Where are they? So there's a great hunger for more and more data. In fact, that's always been a bill that I opposed, and now they've passed it. They want to get the data from pre-school and follow it through college--and beyond. Now, that's very similar to what they're doing in China, with the social credit card, so they can tell how you're doing. Now, they say that's to close the gap. But we've been measuring, and the gap doesn't close. So what are we going to do about that? So I thought I'd work that out with these two schools, and I find out that even running these two schools, we have some of the same dilemmas. It's not that easy.

So you're talking about a global set of habits, ideas, and ways of behaving that 01:32:00makes it difficult. So if you're in Saratoga or Los Gatos, you're going to have one kind of high school. If you're in Oakland, you're going to have another. Now, I just read an email from this school in East Palo Alto, that is a low-income/minority school that's doing very well. In fact, somebody said, "You ought to look at this," which I will. So there are exceptions, but it's pretty challenging.

SHAFER: To what extent, did you come into office thinking I can really fix the schools, or have an impact on the schools?

BROWN: No, I never--

SHAFER: You never felt that.

BROWN: No. Well, I've been governor for eight years. I've seen it. I was around. I mean I've seen or looked at schools first under a guy named [Roy E.] Simpson, then Max Rafferty came and said we're going to go back to basics. Then Wilson Riles came along and said we're going to deal with culturally disadvantaged 01:33:00youth. And then Bill Honig came along and said, no, we're going to have standards. And then on and on and on--there we are. Jack O'Connell came along and said we're going to close the gap. That was twelve years ago, and the gap is still the same. I mean these are deeply imbedded social patterns.

[side conversation deleted]

MEEKER: Just one last question.

BROWN: What. Well, you're really supposed to have asked about me, not my philosophy of things.

SHAFER: Well, what's the difference?

BROWN: Well, it's a big difference.

MEEKER: Well, this is your philosophy, and that is the application of Ivan Illich's ideas to charter schools and to your approach to improving the schooling experience for Oakland kids. How did you do that?

BROWN: Well, I don't know that I have. Illich is a critic of institutionalization, and he uses it as the example of institutionalization--schools. And the idea that there is a class, usually 01:34:00thirty/thirty-five people, that each day you consume another little package of information, very standardized--he doesn't like that idea. But I'm not sure how to--I'm thinking about it. But it's hard. I think a certain amount of discipline and regimentation is helpful. On the other hand, I think a certain amount of creativity is--that's kind of why I created the art school and the military school. But the art school needs discipline, and the military school needs creativity.

So I think it's the larger--from Illich I take the idea of the danger of institutionalizing people, in a way that standardizes them, from a central authority. What we think we're here, we think--I hear that about China, but more 01:35:00and more, there's standardization. And when I went to school--well, I went to a Catholic school, but we didn't have SATs. I don't think they, they didn't require it then. We didn't have certificated teachers. I think we had a principal and a vice principal, and we had a lady or two in the office. That was it. And now, we have armies of specialists, and of trying to remedy all of the ills of the modern society--and yet these ills continue. So I think Illich is pointing out the danger of institutionalization, you know, like we're all in an army, we're all saluting and marching. I think that's the danger.

And increasingly, you have these regimented tests, and in many ways I don't like the tests, but I feel for some of these kids from low-income neighborhoods, kids 01:36:00of color. They need to do well on tests for them to go further. I remember I had a teacher in English, and one of his test questions, the only question one semester was, "Write your impression of a green leaf." And I've thought a lot about that. What is my impression? My answer was pathetic. This is sixty years later, and I still think, when I look out at the trees--do I have an impression? Am I sensitive enough to even notice, in the way that--I'm sure Van Gogh saw a lot more than I'm seeing. So is there any way I can develop that sensibility? Well, that's a good question, if I can remember it, because that question was given in 1955, and now we're in 2019.

So that's a good--and I remember a question of--well this, I guess, is different, but Sheldon Wohlin had a question, "Explain Marx's theory of power." 01:37:00Now, I looked in his books, and I'm trying to find theory of power, and I read Wendy Brown--so I thought that was a good question. But I still don't--what is Marx's theory of power? Of course Bateson comes along and says, "There's no such thing as power. There's only the idea of power." And the reason why there's no such thing as power is we're all on an interactive system, so you can't unilaterally impact things, because you have to go with the flow of the system that you're--and it's, I don't know. [laughter] So my only point is that stimulating questions are a very important part of education, and if we're reducing everything to an SAT test--but I might be out of sorts.

I mean now the important point is to have as little free time as possible, to have as regimented an education as you possibly can. Going to the schools that are rated, get a rank, know where you are. I think to myself, we have six million kids. If we take the scores, we might be able to rank all six million. 01:38:00So some group of kids will say, "You know what? We're the absolute worst." And then another group of kids, "We're the absolute best." And we rank everybody. And I often ask parents, people, contemporaries. I say, "How many children do you have?" "I have three." I say, "How do you rank them?" And most people can't rank them, of course.

So, as I think Einstein said, "Not everything that can be measured is worth measuring." What is it, "Not everything"--whatever it was, measurement is very important, is the foundation of all science. In fact, I remember that being said in a physics class in 1954. The guy had a big ruler like this, some kind of a measuring stick, and he said, "Science begins with measurement." And what the hell does that mean? So, but I've been thinking about that. So we're in measurement mania right now. So between measurement, and spontaneous creation--you know. I don't want to lose this--and reading the Kafka biography, 01:39:00they had a really mechanical, regimented Austrian education that isn't very attractive, and he certainly didn't like. And the smart people seem to have to--school is not their thing. Right? But you need structure. These are all alive/open questions. That's why we don't need to close the question, because it's still open. But I think we should be on guard against excessive institutionalization in all aspects of our collective--of our lives, and we have a lot of that.