We Believe?

But today, the people of Oakland have noticed a coincidence. The A’s are good. The Warriors are good. And it just so happens that, right now, Oakland matters again.

Quan likes to use the term “renaissance.” We’re back at the sports bar, and the mayor is nestled in a corner booth with her husband and Dobbins and Save Oakland Sports vice-president Bryan Cauwels, rattling off Oakland’s attributes like she spent the past week trapped inside the visitors’ bureau.

“We have the best weather in the country … We’re the hottest place in the country for food … One of the greenest cities in the country … Most walkable, most bikeable … “

She says this in between bites of onion rings, occasionally interrupted by bites of a grilled crab sandwich, pausing once to cut off a piece of her husband’s steak. After a pause to chew, she mentions the big one, courtesy of real estate company Movoto: “We’re the most exciting city in America — it’s true.”

It is true. Oakland is having a moment. Long considered the Brooklyn to San Francisco’s Manhattan, Oakland has absorbed the members of the creative class who’ve been driven across the bay by soaring rents. But as much as experimental cuisine and modernist galleries have helped to revitalize downtown, the restaurateurs aren’t the ones putting Oakland in the headlines. Activists are.

Occupy Wall Street may have started in New York, but the movement found its truest home in Oakland. Never mind that there are no major banks headquartered here. Never mind, either, that the only Fortune 500 company within a five-mile radius is Clorox. Oakland’s tradition of radical protest (and, perhaps just as importantly, its yearlong good weather) made it hospitable in 2011 and 2012 to Occupy protesters.

Except, that is, when it wasn’t. Police raided the protesters’ encampment twice in the fall of 2011, both times on Quan’s watch. The protests continued, attracting activists from San Francisco and across the region, prompting a New York Times Magazine article: “Oakland, the Last Refuge of Radical America.”

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