(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 497: The Real Work of Safer Streets
August 28, 2024
This week on Talking Headways we chat with transportation and planning expert Warren Logan, who is running for Oakland City Council in District 3. Warren talks about the differences in how people perceive government works, the need for more flexible streets, and gives thoughts on housing policy.
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Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of this episode:
[00:01:16] Jeff Wood: Warren Logan. Welcome back to the Talking Headways podcast. Thanks [00:01:20] Warren Logan: Thanks for having me Jeff. It’s great to see you again. [00:01:21] Jeff Wood: Before we get started, can you tell folks a little bit about yourself who maybe didn’t get a chance to listen to episode 229 or actually episode 281? And by the way, 281, which we aired in May of 2020 is a really interesting time capsule. [00:01:35] Warren Logan: Oh, my God, what [00:01:36] Jeff Wood: was going on in May of 2020? [00:01:37] Warren Logan: Oh, wow. I’m now I’m flashing back to like this crazed state of 2020. I’ll set that aside. Um, so for folks listening who don’t know me, my name is Warren Logan. I have been a transportation planner for nearly, I think, 40 years. 15 years now in a number of cities in the Bay Area and a consultant for several other cities across the country. [00:01:59] And I’m happy to say that I work for every level of the government in one way or another. And I feel very confident in my ability to kind of know all the nuances of transportation and land use policy. And I just, I love talking about how to make our streets safer, more equitable and more friendly and joyous. [00:02:19] The other component, since May of 2020. Oh, my God. Uh, is that I decided to run for office. So I’m running for Oakland city council district 3 and for folks are not familiar with Oakland district 3 is part of Jack London all of the port all of West Oakland downtown uptown over to the lake. Adam’s point all the way up to the five 80 freeway. [00:02:43] We are like kind of the center of the universe in my mind. [00:02:47] Jeff Wood: We’ll, we’ll share a link to your website, which has a great map that shares where the district is before you get into some of the transportation stuff. I do want to ask what’s it like being on a campaign trail? I’m loving it. And it’s [00:02:59] Warren Logan: funny because a lot of people on my team keep saying, oh, it’s going to get harder. [00:03:03] It’s going to get rougher. And I’m like, it feels like it’s getting more and more fun, which is great. A lot of the campaign feels like the same muscles I’ve been exercising and stretching ever since being a city planner. It’s meeting people where they are for coffees, for beers, and to understand Like, what their motivations are, and what they wake up in the morning to get done, right, in their lives. [00:03:27] And what’s been really neat about that work is trying to, like, carry all these people’s stories and honor them however they’re given to me, even if sometimes they are pained, or they’re stressed, or they’re enthusiastic about something that’s going on in the city. I think the other part is that, That maybe is the most challenging aspect so far is it’s 1 thing to engage with 10 people about that 1 parking spot that everyone’s upset is going to get lost for the bike lane. [00:03:51] And it’s another to talk with thousands of people about the inertia of a city and all of its complications and all of the different facets. And lastly, to talk with people about. Interconnected issues that they may not have really thought about. So 1 person might want to talk about public safety and we end up talking about trees on the sidewalk, or someone may want to talk about those trees on the sidewalk. [00:04:18] And we end up talking about economic development and sort of really honing in on how we help. Everybody in the city, both our residents, our employees, our visitors, try and see the city as an organism that is living and breathing and that it needs our support or help and our collaboration to make better. [00:04:36] Jeff Wood: What kind of reactions do you get when you start talking about the city as an organism, or at least trying to get people to see things as not silos and interconnected? [00:04:45] Warren Logan: Yeah, it turns out most people see that it’s actually government workers that maybe you don’t see it that way. Uh, it’s funny because I pride myself on knowing all of the different divisions of our organization of our city government and how government works. [00:05:00] And the 1st part of my campaign, I was trying to show people, like, here’s the complexity of this machine and most people. Don’t care, right? Like, that’s not actually important. And in fact, the way that they understand the organism, right, is more topical. Again, when we talk about public safety, some people want to talk about police and others want to talk about lights or pedestrians walking down the sidewalk, right? [00:05:24] And others want to talk about ambassadors and that, I think, As a, you know, former policy director in the mayor’s office, I wanted to tell people, well, that’s this department, that’s this group. And they’re like, I don’t, I don’t care about that. I just want to see the results. And so this, this effort has really been a great learning experience for me to get to the point faster. [00:05:44] Like when do we get to see action? When do we get to experience all of the stuff we’ve been planning on for 10 and 20 and 30 years today? [00:05:55] Jeff Wood: That’s an important point you noted in the past that Oakland and the council seem to care a lot about transportation projects that will improve safety. But as you just mentioned, it’s like the timelines are shot, they take too long. [00:06:06] And so I guess the question is what’s holding back that implementation speed, what’s keeping the city from moving faster in your mind. [00:06:13] Warren Logan: Great question, Jeff. I think Oakland is in a really interesting spot. I think a lot of your listeners are more familiar with council members or board of supervisors or politicians pushing back on transportation improvements saying, you know, let me water this project down because someone yelled at me or I’m going to lose a parking spot or you name it. [00:06:35] What’s interesting in Oakland is that I think for the first time, maybe this council actually said, you know, Traffic safety is a priority. So that was kind of held in great esteem in the last budget cycle, starting in 2022. And many of the transportation advocacy groups said, rejoice, we’ve won. And I had a really challenging, let’s call it campaign, before actually announcing, telling people that that’s not enough. [00:07:03] It’s not enough to say you support transportation and traffic safety and equitable mobility in name only, because then the real work begins. And what that looks like is not just championing, you know, stronger, more effective, protected bikeways or wider sidewalks or, you know, friendlier bus stops, et cetera. [00:07:23] It’s getting down into the nitty gritty of what’s keeping a city like Oakland that, despite its budget woes, is very well funded when it comes to transportation improvements, especially paving, right, from moving forward. On the things that we all say we care about and have the money for because usually, dear listener, it’s either there’s political pushback or there’s no money. [00:07:49] In this case, there isn’t, at least on its face, political pushback and we actually have the money to do the work. So what’s keeping us? And it turns out it’s us. It’s process. So I’m going to just quickly describe how many times you have to go to the city council to ask for permission. To basically create a major capital improvement, many of your listeners are probably familiar with grants like active transportation program grants, which fund, you know, major quarter projects to make things safer for people walking, bicycling, scooting, et cetera. [00:08:20] We’re talking tens of millions of dollars just to accept the money into a city account. You have to go to council to have them say, yes, please. We are allowing you to give us that money. Most people don’t know that, that like you actually have, there’s an action. You have to take just to accept millions of dollars from another agency. [00:08:39] That alone might take months because you have to schedule it, then you have to put it in a committee, then it has to have two votes at the city council, right? That’s multiple months just to process to accept the money. We haven’t even started the project yet. Then, staff come back and say, mother may I please spend some of this money to go get a consultant to design the project and do communications with the community. [00:09:04] Again, it has to be scheduled, it has to go to committee, and then it goes to the council. Again, multiple months. before you’ve even started designing the project. And God forbid there’s any type of change in there, right? So we, we are not even building anything yet. We haven’t even started. And we’re now six to eight months into this, just accepting the money and then saying we’re going to spend it. [00:09:27] By the time you end up with a final design, which everyone knows there’s a lot of hand wringing and political process there and community process, You then have to execute another contracting agreement to spend the money on laborers to build the project. And that’s where a lot of pushback comes in. Not because maybe your council says, oh, I don’t want to build this project, but because now we’re having a labor conversation. [00:09:53] Which contractor do I want to get 10 million in construction project money? And now, we’re not talking about transportation, we’re talking about political support, we’re talking about spending millions of dollars on maybe a union that you really care about, right? Or this other group that you care more about. [00:10:12] Again, we haven’t built anything. And we’re now multiple years into this. Just in process, so the solution that I’ve been really pushing for is to cut that process out to have the council say by accepting this money, we are assuming we’re going to spend the money. So go ahead and do that. Please keep us abreast of the design and the engagement, but at least work in parallel. [00:10:37] With the city council and your process, don’t stop the work to come back to me to ask for permission to continue forward because otherwise there’s no sense in accepting the money in the 1st place. If you are going to delay the project by upwards of 4 to 5 years, just for people to check in. And say, is it cool if I keep going? [00:10:56] Jeff Wood: I mean, that’s a great idea. It feels like also having that many years tagged onto a process, like you said, adds other issues. And it’s not just the politics and labor. It’s just like, whether people sour on a project or not, or if you give people in the opposition enough time to organize and push and, you know, change people’s minds. [00:11:12] And I don’t think that that’s totally a negative thing that people might change their minds. But if you don’t do a project and you could have. A save lives or B tried to get something done quickly and actually done something your constituents asked for. You’re just waiting until the next shoot dropped. [00:11:26] And that’s frustrating. I think for a lot of people too. [00:11:29] Warren Logan: When I think you lose trust in the lay public, right? Like people have short attention spans. Most people have other things going on in their lives besides weighing in on capital improvements for a project. And so when you rally people to have a bigger conversation about what are we going to do about this major road in the street? [00:11:47] I think that people expect that soon after that conversation, a decision will be made, money will be spent, and construction will start in some way or another, good or bad for them, right? But right before I came to you in May of 2020, so let’s rewind to the fall of 2019, Which feels like yesterday, I had a number of very challenging meetings with some business owners on a street called 14th street. [00:12:13] It runs across downtown. It connects sort of interstate 980 to Lake Merritt. It’s kind of like, right through the civic center area and the black arts business movement district. And a number of businesses said, you know, hell no, over our dead bodies, are we going to have a protected bikeway through our community? [00:12:32] And this was at a time when the city had a number of residential high rises and mid rises being built all along that street. And I can understand from their perspective, like, How are you thinking of adding more construction to this area when there was literally a crane shortage that year? That’s how many buildings were being built in downtown and most of them were along 14th street or like just off of 14th street. [00:12:57] So we were having this conversation as if any moment, the city of Oakland is going to add another project. And, lo and behold, it’s 2024, for those listening, and we only recently started this bikeway project. And, like, not a peep, now, from that group, because it’s like a completely different scenario. And I’m like, we didn’t need to have this argument if we weren’t going to start this project for four more years. [00:13:24] And so, as an example, like, those people are now like, why did we even talk about this for four more years? Right? Or, couldn’t you have told us that then? Like, it just, the whole thing is so confusing for people who are like, why would you come to me asking me for permission over something you’ve either already decided, or you haven’t decided but we also don’t need to talk about it right now. [00:13:47] So that’s the example that I give you about 14th Street, at least. [00:13:50] Jeff Wood: It seems like expectation kind of management, right? So in a process that you, you know, would want to create in the future, you would set the expectations that, you know, this project is going to be on the doorstep in a couple of months or whenever that might be versus at the time when people didn’t really know that the project was going to be four years out because they didn’t understand city processes or the city processes were broken such that you had to wait that long. [00:14:15] Warren Logan: Well, and I think the tough part too, from a community engagement standpoint is that. A very different group of people live in that area now in a very short amount of time, you know, who I think have opted into a denser transit rich, you know, mobility forward lifestyle. Great. Wonderful. And yet there’s this irony that I think we are reinforcing. [00:14:35] This underlying narrative that bike lanes are not for the people who are there right now. And that’s a really hard thing for me to say as someone who’s so pro bike pad. Right. But I remember. A number of people in this meeting saying, this isn’t for us and me saying, no, like it is for you. And I worry that kind of sometimes prove people right accidentally, perhaps, but that now looking at when this project will ultimately be done. [00:15:05] Be finished, which is probably through next year. The folks who I was talking to are out of business. Now they’re not there anymore. And so, you know, you’d asked me earlier, Jeff, about, like, what it’s like to run for office and have I learned anything? Right? And it’s. This perspective is very, um, it’s interesting to kind of see full circle. [00:15:23] Now, kind of the history of my city planning effort. Intersecting with all of those different stories and then now seeing with time, Oh, wow, like maybe you were a little bit right on this, but there was something maybe I could have done to have either protected you, not from this project necessarily, but from the bigger picture of what cities are doing and changing into. [00:15:46] What does that protection look like? That’s something we’re working on, right? Because on one hand, I want us to build housing desperately. And I think that some of that protection looks like creating cultural districts that support historic businesses in neighborhoods of the city. And the city needs to provide basic functionality for its businesses. [00:16:07] A lot of business owners I’ve spoken to are incredibly frustrated that when they call 911 because someone has broken into their shop twice in one day, And no one has showed up to help them, they kind of were like, maybe I should just pack it up because no one is here to help me. That’s a bit of what production looks like. [00:16:23] I think the other part, though, is that it can look like supporting merchant festivals. And it’s funny because the last time you and I spoke, I think we were talking about slow streets, and I hadn’t yet launched our then flex streets program that streamline the process for small businesses to take over the public right of way, whether for parklets, ultra merchant activity, or to, you know, take their whole street and say, this is our street. [00:16:48] Now we’re going to make this sort of an outdoor festival space. And so it’s funny in hindsight that I wish we had, you know, you can’t reorder time, right? But it would have been interesting to have been able to have provided that level of service and care and opportunity to the businesses along 14th Street that wanted to, like, claim space for the community with a program that, like, ultimately doesn’t exist in its [00:17:16] Jeff Wood: same format now. [00:17:18] I worked at 14th and Broadway for eight years, and I feel like a lot of the roads in Oakland are kind of like over large, there’s a lot of space, all of them, there’s so much space there. And there’s a discussion, I think that is happening nationally too, about like, how do we allocate that space? It’s public space. [00:17:36] And it can’t just be for cars. And especially if you have too much of it for cars, then what do you do with it? And I think that kind of edges towards what you’re talking about is like maybe rethinking how people can take that space or allocate it to highest and best use, which might be a street festival, or it might be a business use. [00:17:53] Warren Logan: That’s right, and I think what’s so exciting about Oakland’s situation, just to your point, is that so many of our roads, at least in District 3, are way too wide. Not like, a little too wide. You can take away multiple lanes, and traffic just flows on through, and it’s funny because the streets that cut perpendicular to 14th Street, Franklin and Webster, I’m thinking of, they’re two way bi couplets, which means Two streets that are running one way in opposite direction. [00:18:23] They each have three lanes, plus parking, plus a bike lane. That’s over, the entire right of way is almost 80 feet. Don’t ask me why I know that math so quickly. Uh, and at times, oh right, and this happened actually right after I spoke to you. Part of our engagement for 14th Street was we looked at how to add some pretty significant bulb outs on those cross streets. [00:18:48] Not for just traffic safety, but to provide like gathering spaces for the restaurants that were on the corners of the street. So what my team and I did was we grabbed some breakfast burritos and we took one lane away where Webster meets 14th street on the northeast corner, which is next door to my whole all in case anyone’s looking for really good burritos and, um, traffic just moved on through. [00:19:13] Then we took a second lane away and again, free flowing traffic. And it was funny because we had people come over and say, like, Hey, what are you doing? You know, we’ve got our little orange vest on and we said, Oh, you know, we’re thinking about putting a plaza here basically. And some folks said, Oh, I want a plaza on my corner too. [00:19:30] So like that actually changed a significant portion of the design because we’d done this kind of like. Yeah. Yeah. Little quick build, if you will, pilot for all of a couple of hours just to see if it was possible. But to my point, because Oakland streets are so wide, we’re not just having a conversation about one mode over another. [00:19:49] I think San Francisco gets into this a lot. Like if you take a lane from cars and give it to bicyclists or people riding bikes or people walking, then someone is giving something up, right? And that the hope The theory behind this is that people will transition from driving to biking and, you know, which makes sense. [00:20:07] In Oakland, we could take a lane away, give it to bicyclists and still have extra lanes, right? And still have too much space. And so it means that we have to have a conversation happily about streets as space where people can just be and not just streets as thoroughfares that you could have major plazas now and gathering spaces for community assembly and maintain mobility for every mode. [00:20:39] And that is, I think, an enviable place to be as long as you have a team willing to make, like, even more innovative designs beyond, I think, what people are expecting. [00:20:50] Jeff Wood: Is delivery e commerce and all that stuff, is that stressing the system at all or not really? [00:20:56] Warren Logan: I mean, it is insofar as Every so often you have several FedEx trucks all in one spot, but it’s not the same way in San Francisco. [00:21:04] And again, most of our issue is double parking, but you can address that by having protected bikeways, having loading areas as well. It’s, it’s not the same. [00:21:14] Jeff Wood: We’ve had a number of folks on the show to talk about taking like a more of a public health approach to traffic safety, including thinking about safe systems approaches, thinking about public health as it pertains to people on the streets. [00:21:24] And I’m wondering where you see cross pollination in the process of not just transportation projects, but city governance and focusing on improving the life of residents overall. [00:21:32] Warren Logan: Absolutely. There’s cross pollination there. And I think while the conversation might start at traffic safety and traffic violence, You know, reducing the number of people who are either seriously injured or killed on our streets, whether because they’ve been hit by cars or hit a pothole and damage their body. [00:21:50] I think I really want us to extend that conversation into the mental health space because our streets are what we also experience. And you probably have heard me say this before, Jeff. Our streets need to provide people with dignity and joy in addition to just like mobility and access. And I’ll give you a couple of examples that I think a lot of your listeners will understand. [00:22:13] Imagine most bus stops in any city and think about what we are telling the riders of that bus system about what we think about them based on the condition of that bus stop. I’m thinking of The bus stop around the corner from my house, or even the one in front of my house. It’s a pole. It’s regularly blocked by cars. [00:22:38] There is right now a bumper from a traffic collision that happened two days ago that’s just sitting there in the bus stop. I think we are telling bus riders That we don’t care about them and that they are just cast away and that that also is public health. That’s mental health is how you feel about yourself and your well being or your basic dignity as you move through space. [00:23:03] The other part is I’m assuming you’ve walked around the lake. Lake Merritt. So, for those who haven’t, Lake Merritt is five kilometers around. It’s beautiful. And we’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars making it that way. Great money well spent. And when I ask people, have they ever walked around the lake? [00:23:20] Most everyone’s like, of course I’ve walked all the way around the lake. It’s beautiful. It’s easy. It’s fun. And when I tell them that that same distance from the corner of the lake, the Northwest corner of the lake, which is Grand and Harrison. If you take five kilometers in any direction. But if you just go on West Grand, you would get all the way to Maritime Street, which is through downtown, through West Oakland, to the foot of the bridge. [00:23:47] That’s the same distance. If you were to take Adeline from Embarcadero, 5 kilometers north, You are in Berkeley. If you take San Pablo from its genesis at City Hall North, you’re in Berkeley. Five kilometers in many directions ends up in a totally different city in Oakland. And most people have never walked that distance on those streets. [00:24:12] And they will tell you the reason for it is because they feel unsafe. You feel undignified. It’s not fun. It’s not joyous. It’s very uncomfortable. And I share that just as an example with you, Jeff, to say that I think a lot of folks, when they talk about transportation and safety and public health and mental health, they think about distance. [00:24:28] How do I shorten the distance from point A to point B? And I would challenge that thinking to say, maybe we can’t shorten that distance, but can we make that distance more enjoyable, more dignified, more useful? More social because that probably is cheaper for starters and has all these added benefits when it comes to public health as well. [00:24:52] Jeff Wood: How would you do that? I’ve walked a number of those streets before and I’m so sorry. I mean, as a distance runner in my past, my thing was always, you know, exploring places and I knew every street within 10 miles of the University of Texas in Austin. So it was something that I did. So I might be an outlier in this, but how would you do that? [00:25:11] How would you, you know, change a street to be more joyous and create an atmosphere of feeling inclusive? Uh, I’m so happy [00:25:17] Warren Logan: you asked Jeff, because this is literally what my master’s degree is in is urban design. This is what I went to school to study was not just mobility for mobility sake, but. Streets as places. [00:25:29] And so there’s a theme called sticky places or sticky streets. Not everyone calls it that, but instead of thinking of a street is like, how do I get people through here as quickly as possible? Think of it more like a living room or a park. Parks have places to sit. Parks have trees. Parks have landscaping. [00:25:49] Not just like that little median strip. I mean lush landscaping and varied landscaping at that. They have activities, right? Plazas have activities. They have vending. They have gathering spaces. And so, when you consider a street, especially as wide as most of Oakland’s streets, and say, you know what? We’re not going to have a conversation about changing lanes from one mobility to another. [00:26:17] We’re changing use altogether from mobility to gathering space. That is a very different paradigm that I think most people are not used to having a conversation with. But I’ll give you a really solid example that I’m pretty sure most San Franciscans will understand. Right now we’re continuing to debate whether or not to maintain the center running bikeway on Valencia. [00:26:40] Yeah. And before that, we were talking about protected bikeways, and before that, it was buffered bike lanes on the same street over and over and over again. But there was this brief moment during the pandemic, where we said, what if the street wasn’t for mobility, but it was a gathering space? The city and county of San Francisco closed off multiple blocks of Valencia. [00:26:59] And I would argue Along with probably thousands of other people that that was the best, if I would call it a trade off between mobility and gathering space, that actually, if this is, if this just isn’t a street anymore, it serves us better than trying to balance everybody’s mobility needs. And so fortunately, in Oakland’s case, our streets are much wider than a lot of San Francisco’s, and have far fewer travelers on them, that I would challenge our Department of Transportation, our Planning Department, and really our Parks Department, to look at our streets as an opportunity to expand public park space. [00:27:35] And prioritize that effort before mobility in a lot of cases, because incidentally, when you slow cars down and narrow streets, you end up with safer streets, even before you’ve added the bike lane, you’ve added the protected bike way that whatever it’s that just having narrower streets gets you half [00:27:54] the [00:27:55] Jeff Wood: way there. [00:27:56] I feel like in Valencia, they should just, like you said, they should just go all the way and make it an open street because we’re having this discussion, but really Valencia has always been the designated quote unquote bike street, right? There’s three streets that are parallel to each other. One is the transit street mission. [00:28:11] One is the road street Guerrero, and one is the bike street Valencia. And so, you know, why not just make it the bike, walk, roll, skate. Street that everybody can hang out and they do it fairly often where they cut off, you know, parts and segments and everybody seems to enjoy it and have a fun time. And I think that it’s frustrating that people can’t really see it, right. [00:28:31] It exists and it happens on Saturdays, but you can’t see it for like a permanent fixture in your life, which is kind of strange. Thing for me as somebody who lives in the neighborhood. [00:28:40] Warren Logan: When you know, it’s funny too, though, Jeff is that I think a lot of times we talk about permanence as I’m going to put this thing in this capital improvement, and that’s how it’s going to be. [00:28:50] And I think one of the things that we learned in spades directly following May 2020 was that flexibility is probably the thing that should be permanent, that a street can always be a little bit in flux. And I’ll give you a couple of examples. Of some projects we had planned on, you know, back in May, we didn’t know how long it was going to last. [00:29:11] So we started spinning up more versions of slow streets for 2 years, which was fun. But 1 thing that we had thought about with our parks department at the time was doing a summer streets program where we said, you know, neighborhood streets. During the summer, a lot more kids on them who want to be playing out in the road and that that is not the case in winter and in the fall when kids are in school. [00:29:36] And that maybe a bunch of our streets didn’t need to be slow streets all the time. They just needed to be like that during seasons. Right. Similarly, there are other countries and other commercial districts throughout even this country. That from Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon, they’ll just close the streets and so it’s not that it is always closed. [00:30:01] It’s that during peak periods of different types of activity, the street transforms into something else. And so, as an example, in downtown Oakland, I would really like to see Telegraph From 20th street down to 15th, where it ends, which is kind of our main bar district closed from Friday to Sunday, people are coming and going from several bars. [00:30:26] They’re spilling out from the Fox theater, and they have no place to spill out to, and it frankly to, you know, you’d asked about e commerce while we don’t have that issue, you know, we have the Oakland school of the arts is right there next to the Fox theater. And it’s funny because every day. All of these kids, like, just spill out into downtown to go to lunch, or to go to, you know, their classes across the street, or to hang out with friends. [00:30:50] They are also the same people who patron the Fox Theater late at night. And there’s this question now about what, like, what to do with all these kids. And I’m like, I think it’s great that 15 year olds want to hang out in downtown at 11 or midnight. Like, make that safe for them, right? The fact that you’ve got adults saying, I don’t feel safe going downtown, but you’ve got all these kids who are like, let’s hang out! [00:31:11] It’s, it’s a, it’s a blessing, right? And that I look at our streets, namely Telegraph in this way, as emblematic of something we should be thinking about for other, at least commercial districts, that we can be flexible, either throughout the day, or throughout the week, or throughout the year, with what that street needs to do for the community. [00:31:29] And then instead of trying to spend millions of dollars on a fixed infrastructure improvement that commits the street and its space to one use that we might think about putting in infrastructure that is movable, whether it’s bollards, whether it’s seating, but that. What’s permanent is every summer we’re going to put the bollards up and this area is now a plaza during the summer [00:31:55] Jeff Wood: that also gets to something that, um, we had on a zebra on the show recently to talk about her book when driving is not an option. [00:32:02] And one of the numbers that she gives is that basically 30 percent of people don’t drive or don’t want to drive or don’t have the opportunity to drive. And part of that 30 percent number is young people. And a lot of folks kind of poo poo the number because they’re like, oh, well, they don’t count. Right. [00:32:16] They don’t matter. And so to hear from you that, you know, obviously they do, they do matter. They can’t vote for you, obviously, but you know, it’s something that I think is really important to think about the kids here in San Francisco the other day, the hill bomb and the discussion around that. Right. And so these kids, they want to have a place to go and, you know, and it’s eyes on the street. [00:32:35] Right. [00:32:35] Warren Logan: Yeah, I totally agree with you. I would add that just because people are driving doesn’t mean they want to drive. Yeah. And I think that oftentimes we look at the stats and say, well, 90 percent of people drive to work. So that must be the thing that we need to accommodate. And it’s like people drive because they have to. [00:32:52] But not necessarily because they want to, I think the other thing to think about is, what does driving provide that you might be able to accommodate in another way? And I’ll give you an example. In fact, from San Francisco, but this is true in Oakland and across California, a lot of cities. But San Francisco specifically have school choice models, which means that your kids are no longer going to school in their neighborhoods. [00:33:14] They’re going across the city to get to high school, let’s say. And so in San Francisco, there’s a study that the San Francisco County Transportation Authority conducted several years ago now that showed the travel behavior of San Francisco parents driving their kids, you know, seven miles in one direction, seven miles back. [00:33:31] Right. And one of the questions that we asked of those parents was like, Why, you know, like, how’s this going for you and a number of the parents responded in ways that we didn’t expect and this again gets back to my dignity, you know, the social aspect, the joyousness where one of the questions was, if we provided basically the yellow school bus again, would you want your kids to take that instead of having to drive them to school? [00:33:57] And then you drive the other way to, like, get your Silicon Valley job or whatever. And they said, no, I wouldn’t choose that. And that was very surprising. And the underlying reason. Right. That many reported was because driving their kids to school was the only time of the day that was uninterrupted social activity with your kids. [00:34:16] They weren’t doing their homework. You weren’t on a call. You know, you’re not working. They’re not working because by the time they got home again, kids are doing homework. They’re doing sports. You didn’t have that special bonding opportunity. That was every single day with your kid. And so I think a lot about that kind of answer when we talk about Because other people might say, I like driving because it’s my opportunity to listen to my favorite podcast, the overhead wire. [00:34:46] Right? Or it’s my opportunity to learn a new language. I worked with a guy in Berkeley who drove to work every day. And we were like, really, man, like you designed the bicycle facilities. And he’s like, yeah, but this is my, he learned multiple languages over the like decade that he worked for the city. [00:35:02] Because every day he’d drive kind of from a distance and he had almost an hour, both directions, to just listen to tapes to learn a language. And so I think about how other modes of travel can offer these same types of activities to people maybe even more efficiently. That if you are walking your kid to school safely in a space that feels a lot like Lake Merritt, that you might enjoy that even more than driving. [00:35:31] Or that If spaces are quiet and not filled with the sound of Dodge Chargers specifically that you can enjoy your favorite podcast, right? But the more that we are able to think about all of the other reasons why people drive other than, oh, it’s just the convenient option. I think we start to chip away at how we transition people away from driving and into any other type of mode. [00:35:59] Jeff Wood: I think also for me personally, and I always try to shy away from anecdata, but when I worked in Oakland, I was always listening to my sports podcast on the way and on BART. And it was just, you know, a nice quiet time to like kind of get away from home and kind of transition my mind into going to work. [00:36:13] And now that I’m working from home, I don’t really have that transition. I walk from the kitchen to the front room and then my office is always here. Right. But I’ve also heard from folks that they really enjoy, you know, the active transportation commute with the kids because they can actually look them in the eyes instead of having to look at them in the rear view mirror in the car. [00:36:29] I do want to ask you about safety a little bit. I was thinking about this. I was sitting in jury duty a couple of months ago, and I was thinking about why we have a jury of our peers for. Criminal adjudication, but we don’t have that for thinking about other things that might happen in the city. Like if there’s a traffic safety issue and we have to decide on a project to move forward with, whether that’s a bike lane or closing a street to cars or whatever, why would we not have a jury of our peers come and sit in and listen to the evidence and decide something rather than a few squeaky wheels. [00:37:03] And so something along those lines just got me thinking of like, are there better ways to think about. the process of, you know, getting things done in the city that would be helpful to the most people. [00:37:14] Warren Logan: Yeah. I think there are a couple of different ways to a address public, you know, traffic safety, let’s say, but also like have a representative democracy at the same time. [00:37:25] And on one hand, here, I say, as I’m running for city council, elect people who are able to make those decisions But for traffic safety and not just for the squeaky wheel. That’s that’s option 1 is that that body exists, but we have chosen a group of people who are not maybe prioritizing those types of issues. [00:37:46] So that’s that’s 1. the 2nd is a lot of cities have like, bicycle and pedestrian advisory commissions again, like, that’s a group that’s appointed from, you know, like, Your city council, let’s say, or your board of supervisors, and the issue with that group is that they’re just advisory, right? They don’t really have authority to adjudicate the issue that you’re talking about. [00:38:05] So one option is to just make a committee or a commission, you know, whatever you want to call it, that has some level of authority between I’m just giving you advice. You deal with it and the city council or your board of supervisors. That’s like, yes or no. And the squeakiest wheel gets the vote. Right. [00:38:24] And what that might look like is something kind of like a planning commission, not maybe San Francisco’s planning commission, but maybe Oakland’s right. We’re like Oakland’s planning commission. It is required to have, like, architects on it, for example, and that their terms are split similar to council, but there’s 3 years, not 4, so it doesn’t get caught up in the same waves as political cycles. [00:38:46] What’s neat about that structure, let’s call it a transportation commission for a second, is that you have a body of people who slowly but surely will change over time, but are also experts in a way, or can become experts instead of, and I don’t know if this is what you’re describing, Jeff, but Just plucking people out like jury duty, who are then faced with like, well, if the question is this today, then this is my answer. [00:39:13] Goodbye. Right. Um, which I would worry is maybe not quite as robust a solution. I think the other part, though, is we need to have our cities adopt policies, your city council, your board of supervisors need to adopt policies that provide a firewall against. The wanton, like, debates. And you see this a lot actually with housing, where cities will say, oh, you know, since this person was upset about shadows, I have to say no to this affordable housing project, but that same representative will actually encourage their state representative to tie their hands to saying yes to those types of projects, so that then they can say, okay. [00:39:57] Well, I have no choice but to adopt it. I have no choice but to adopt this more, you know, dense development because the state told me so. And while that may seem a little bit cowardly, it is a way of doing business with politics about, oh, there’s this external policy that is forcing me to really make the right decision. [00:40:18] And so it can insulate your elected officials from Those random, I can’t believe you removed my, my one parking spot or, you know, that tree in front of my house, you name it. At the same time, though, I think there’s a lot of political courage that we need for people to just say, I’m not doing that. Like, that’s, that’s a bad idea. [00:40:37] And that even though you’ve complained today, two weeks ago, someone else complained. And what if they complain the exact opposite way? And in fact, I’ve shared this with a number of my constituents who have said, well, you know, I hope that you listen to me and only me. I’m like, What if someone else said the exact same thing to me, except the opposite of what you wanted? [00:40:57] Should I listen to them or you? And they’re like, Oh, well then you’d need to balance it. I’m like, correct. That’s what this looks like. So I think that there are a number of models. I’m excited to kind of work on this transportation commission idea, you know, and thinking about it with the number of advocates that are working on it with me and kind of take it to the local experts, take it to the community and say, is this the right way to advance traffic safety while also keeping local representation in mind? [00:41:21] And I think maybe isolating transportation, especially in Oakland from some of the other rigmarole, uh, that our city is dealing with right now, whether a deficit or otherwise, [00:41:34] Jeff Wood: I do want to ask you about housing. Uh, you mentioned it when you’re talking about 14th street, but I want to get kind of an idea of where you’re at on housing in Oakland and maybe as it pertains to what’s happening in the Bay area in California in the country. [00:41:47] It’s such a huge topic, obviously, but I’m curious in your thoughts. I have lots of thoughts on housing. [00:41:53] Warren Logan: The 1st is that we need more of it at every level of affordability. Oakland is in this really interesting spot and specifically district 3 again. That includes West Oakland and downtown mainly because we built a lot of housing, like, almost 10, 000 housing units in 1 spot in downtown. [00:42:09] And what happened was we got to prove to people. What happens when you build a lot of housing on vacant land now, instead of people in line for 1 unit in 1 apartment in 1 neighborhood, you have hundreds of units that are available. Across a district that is, you know, right next to transit next to jobs next to resources and opportunity and our tenants are now calling the shots. [00:42:36] If you want three months free rent, that’s available in pretty much every new building in downtown, which is phenomenal. When I moved to Oakland, I stood in line for one apartment and I was like fifth in line. And the only reason I got it was because I had already run a credit check on myself. And I was like, here you go. [00:42:55] And so that’s one option, right? Is to build at the top of the market. At the same time, though, our city desperately needs to be providing affordable housing as well, and that comes from taxes and tax revenue, right? It costs the same amount of money to build an affordable unit of housing versus a market rate unit of housing, and it’s nearly a million dollars. [00:43:14] So that means that either way, someone has to pay for it. And happily, the city of Oakland has a assessment on our property tax called Measure U that actually helps pave our roads and build affordable housing. What’s interesting about my district is that, you know, it extends all the way into West Oakland, which is one of the only neighborhoods in the city where we can build townhomes that can be sold at a reasonable amount of money, and the Prescott neighborhood is this other sort of Incubator where we all get to kind of talk about what does it mean to build market rate condos in a way that young families of all creeds can purchase because I think a lot of times when people talk about housing in the bay, we’re really just talking about lowering the rent and I’ll, I’ll say just for the record, the rent’s too damn high. [00:44:03] Like, I know that, you know, that we all know that no one, no one here Thanks. Oh, it’s so affordable. Everything’s so easy. No one said that. The only people who are saying that are billionaires, but at the same time, one of the things that I’d like to inject into the conversation is how do we increase access to ownership opportunities because. [00:44:23] I own my home. Well, Chase Bank owns my home and I’m paying Chase Bank back. But it does provide an opportunity for wealth building and for stability. And while obviously we need to be providing wealth opportunities and stability for renters, I’m not going to try and upend the entire economic model of the country. [00:44:42] Like, I think we can all acknowledge that capitalism has a lot of faults. And I don’t believe that 1 city council member in 1 city of a relatively small city across the country is going to, uh, turn that over in a 4 year or even an 8 year 2 sets of terms. But I think that there’s plenty of things we can do with housing, whether it’s building market rate, housing, really entitling market rate, housing, building affordable units, rehabbing at risk units, and also providing for purchase opportunities as well, like, across the spectrum, I think that’s what we should be doing. [00:45:16] Jeff Wood: On our Monday show, I talked about this program in Colorado. It was really interesting. And I don’t know if you’ve heard about this, but basically what they’ve done is they’ve taken state income taxes and they’ve allocated a bunch of it to affordable housing. And what they do is they take that money and act as a bank and lend to lenders. [00:45:31] And then instead of taking the profits and keeping them for themselves, or, you know, the interest rates would be higher. They actually give that money back to renters who pay their rent on time as kind of a An incentive or like basically a homeownership like system where they get value out of living in a place. [00:45:48] And I think those types of models and trying out new things we can look into as ways to kind of not get away from capitalism because we’re in the system and like you said, it’s not going to change in eight years, but work with the system to try to make it better. And so I feel like there’s like lots of little things out there that are possible and people are trying stuff, which is really interesting because if you don’t try it, you don’t know whether it works or not. [00:46:11] Warren Logan: One Jeff, I will double down on your point and say that, and it’s funny because we kind of had this conversation, not you and I, but the country during Obama’s first term where everyone was saying public option, right? And we’re talking about healthcare, but what’s interesting is that you could apply the words, but the model, a public option to nearly anything. [00:46:30] And suddenly you have a richer dialogue. So let’s use housing as an example. In the case of a public option, most people are thinking about either projects. Where, like, the state, capital S, owns housing. And I think that, you know, that has a lot of issues, especially from maintenance and operations. And so I’m going to set that aside for a second. [00:46:50] Then you have a public option light where the city or the county might work in partnership with a non profit organization to operate and build a deed restricted affordable building. What you’re drawing on, though, and this is not exactly the Colorado model, but I’m going to take it a step farther, is that One of the major reasons building new housing is both variable and unstable in the bay, like where we go through a boom and bust cycle, like anyone who’s lived here for more than about five years knows that like the waves come and crash. [00:47:20] And by extension, the reason that housing is so expensive is actually in part because Your rent is, in part, paying back the interest on construction loans. So I’m gonna say that slowly again just so that people are capturing this. When you build a new building, a developer takes out a loan from a bank. [00:47:42] And it’s a hefty loan of hundreds of millions of dollars to build that structure. And that loan has a steep interest rate. Like more than a mortgage, more than a mortgage interest rate. And once the building is built, the developer then sells that building either to a long term holder or at least refinances their construction loan to a long term building. [00:48:04] Now that it’s built, there is something physical to secure the money. The issue though is that to pay themselves back and to pay that mortgage back, Your rent is covering a significant portion of all of that interest. So why does that matter? From a public option standpoint, if a city or really a state were to come in and say, We’re gonna offer better interest rates for the construction of housing, That is one of the most upstream ways to address both the volatility of construction itself, but ultimately the downstream impacts of higher and higher rents. [00:48:43] So as an example, if the construction loans are about 10% Then you, Jeff, living in a new high rise, let’s say, not that you live there, but let’s pretend for a second, I know you don’t, but, like, are paying part of your rent back to a bank that is collecting a lot of interest. But if you inject a public option in, A, you’re able to build at a cheaper rate, and it also means that you have competition in the market to draw those rates back down. [00:49:11] In the traditional banking model and that’s something that truly only like a state like California, but by extension the federal government should really be playing out like a city can’t really take that on because you just need a lot of money to make that work. But the funny thing is, if you do it correctly, it can pay for itself because you’re lending the money out. [00:49:31] And then you get the money back, you’re letting the money out, and then you get the money back. And that is something we have not explored as a country or as a state in a serious enough way. And I think that we really should. [00:49:44] Jeff Wood: There’s some examples in, I think it was Virginia. It’s been getting really popular in terms of discussion. [00:49:48] I can’t remember if it’s Alexander or wherever, but they’re, you know, basically doing that kind of process and they are getting paid back. In units, right at the end. And then they’re using the payment back to make those units affordable. The building developer, the rental developer, whatever, they have the building, but in order to, you know, keep the rents low, the city’s like, well, we’re going to give you this construction loan at this rate and et cetera, et cetera. [00:50:12] And then these are our units, right? The city’s units. And so we’re going to keep those rents low instead of taking like. The interest bonus that the banks would usually take. So there’s lots of good examples [00:50:22] Warren Logan: of this. It is. And what you’ve just described for folks who want to Google at their computer is a combination of an infrastructure bank and social housing. [00:50:29] And those two things go very well together. Whereas. A lot of folks right now in the Bay are talking about social housing, which like is a great concept. It’s just that the government owns enough units at varying levels of affordability to like impact the market. Wonderful. The challenge is that for the government to own those units, you either have to purchase them or like somehow receive them in kind. [00:50:54] And so to your point, Jeff, by combining it with an infrastructure bank, you’ve caused them a machine to. Like make someone else build the units and then the way that they pay you back is in not in cash But in housing units, which is really smart. [00:51:09] Jeff Wood: Well, so you’re running for office. That’s right What do you hope folks will kind of take away from your potential [00:51:17] Warren Logan: election a number of things one? [00:51:20] I want people to know that you can elect leaders who know how the government works and That’s not a joke. I mean that sincerely that You We’ve all heard of people running for office that start with, I don’t know how to do this, I’ve never worked in the government, and that’s why you should elect me. And I think that Oakland especially has to stop doing that, because we have some pretty significant problems that are not going to fix themselves. [00:51:49] And I am championing, like, elect an expert who knows how to fix this problem. Most people who get to know me even just a little bit are like, Wow, I think this is who we should be electing. Like, that’s correct. Like, you know, when they hear about my education background and my experiences, they’re like, Oh, so you know how to do this? [00:52:04] Correct. You should elect people who know how to do their jobs. I think the other part is that, I’m really excited to see people coming up for election in Oakland and across the country. I think we’re really pragmatic. We’re able to kind of understand what the North star is, especially from a progressive model that I think a lot of us in the barrier champion will also recognizing that. [00:52:25] While we are at A and we want to get to Z, we need to figure out how to get to B first, and then C, and then D, and then F. And that having someone like me who’s able to kind of march us through those steps, and know where we can jump over a few even, is really critical. But I think one of our greatest challenges in California is that While, while I think many of us all agree on where we should end up, very few are guiding us along the path and saying, oh, watch your step there, you know, here’s where the rope is and so on. [00:52:56] I think the last piece is I want people to know I’m really accessible. I give out my cell phone number on my card when I meet with people because I want them to know that you should have a regular relationship. With your city leaders, and it turns out that most people don’t take me up for coffee, but I always, you know, say, like, I’ll meet you wherever you want. [00:53:14] And every so often I get messages like, is this really Warren? Like, yes, that’s really me. But to your point earlier about, you know, having people who are not just listening to the squeaky wheel, or, you know, how do we get more people who are more invested in traffic safety? I think by having someone who’s constantly listening to the stories around them, instead of only at times when something’s coming up. [00:53:35] It means that. Your elected officials can do a better job of representing you if they know what your issues are at all times and not just every four years when they want to get reelected. So, again, that’s expertise and accessibility. [00:53:50] Jeff Wood: And I’d say anticipation as well feels like you can see things before they happen because you already heard from folks before it gets there. [00:53:55] And I think I feel like that’s where a lot of political trouble comes is when the unexpected happens when you didn’t see it coming. [00:54:03] Warren Logan: Well, that’s exactly what city planners do, right? Like, it’s sort of interesting to me. Bad things happen in cities, and when you ask city planners, we’re like, yeah, like I, I am trained to look five and 10 years ahead and to project out. [00:54:18] If you make this decision, what is the impact? What’s the ripple on the rest of the universe? And I like doing that. And I think this is what ultimately prompted me to run, was that I got really tired of seeing things coming and saying, Hey, watch out. And then no one is veering away from the cliffs. So, [00:54:37] Jeff Wood: yeah, I figured why not throw my hat in the ring. [00:54:40] It’s a good idea. Well, where can folks find out more about your campaign and what you’re up to? [00:54:45] Warren Logan: I welcome everyone to visit my website, warrenforoakland. com, four is F O R, not the number four, and then my Instagram at warrenforoakland. And then my Twitter, Warren4Oak, because we shortened it. So they’ve got pretty much every option you can find. [00:55:02] Um, what’s really exciting about my Instagram lately is we’re doing all these videos and carousels about different questions that people are asking along the way. And so that’s pretty fun too. [00:55:10] Jeff Wood: Awesome. I love it. Well, Warren, thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time.
Warren Logan: Yeah. Thanks for having me.
