My point is, and I think you seem to be agreeing with it, that Oakland NEEDS to start turning over some real estate and making the undesirable desirable. And the place that should be happening is in the worst spots there is.

Where other cities come into that is my experiences in said cities, watching them trying desperately to improve even the foulest of places.

For example, Cincinnati had a dire riverside area that consisted of slag heaps, barges, parking lots, ghost town downtown areas, race riots and homeless people. They pegged on a sales tax to pay for a pair of massive state of the art stadiums, and not only are their sporting teams bringing in huge crowds, but that area is starting to turn the right way. People are coming back into the downtown area, and the ballpark is incredible.

In Sydney, they had a similar situation downtown where a whole load of industrial dockland areas were run down and not being developed because the owners wouldn't sell or put money into it, so they passed laws demanding that the properties be kept at a certain standard of taken under eminent domain. Almost everyone then decided to sell, and they turned it into an entire suburbn of retail, restaurants, entertainment, hotels, a casino and transport systems. Now Darling Harbor is the place to be, not just for tourists, but also for locals.

Take a walk through Nashville, or spend a day in downtown Memphis - both cities were slums until about five years ago when the cities in question decided to start bulldozing shitville, and building facilities that people could enjoy with their families. The Memphis Redbirds ballpark is, quite simply, the best stadium I've sat in - ever - and the city doesn't just own it, but also owns the team that plays there. The citizens are shareholders. And the city has sprung up from that to boomtime.

So what I'm saying is, to not jump at the chance to embrace Lew's ballpark village is insane on not just one or two levels, but many. It could turn Oakland's worst areas around, it could give them a stadium on the water, it could give them justification to improve the hitherto unimproveable, and it could mark Oakland not just as a city with some sporting teams, but as a place to go for ten million tourists a year that visit San Francisco.

Because right now, it's barely a place to go for locals. And while it may be slowly getting better, every other city of similar size is getting better WAY faster.

• No, I don't feel any disconnect between being a progressive and feeling that areas that have become slums should be cleaned up. However, I think you'll see from comments I've made elsewhere here, that Oakland should be ensuring that such developments include low income housing, not just high end condos. Diversity is important to an area, and that includes diversity in wealth levels, not just race. If you're honestly going to tell me that providing new housing for low income people is not as good as leaving them in crumbling neighborhoods, I'd be baffled.
• I don't doubt Oakland has added 10-20,000 units of housing, in the last decade, but that works out at just 2,000 units (by your most best case estimate) per year. If Oakland is indeed booming, where do the rest of the people flocking to the area end up living?
• As far as the profit levels of gazillionaires, I have no issue with rich people becoming richer if they're building infrastructure in a city filled with middle to lower class folks. To my mind, it would be much easier for Lew to simply gobble up real estate, bulldoze it, and make brand new housing units without any need for a ballpark. Or he could move to Vegas or Portland and have whatever conditions he wanted met by the cities in question. But instead, he's trying to build a suburb around a ballpark that will actually add to the city in ways financial, infrastructural, and cost-free to the taxpayer. Again, if you ahve a problem with his behavior, I'm baffled by the fact.