Five Futures forOakland

Five policy paths. Oakland’s 113 census tracts. A decade of cascading effects. Each scenario shifts budget allocation across education, safety, housing, and economic development. Taller blocks on the map mean better outcomes for that neighborhood. Press play and watch ten years of trade-offs compound in thirty seconds.

Oakland’s median household income is $94,389. That figure places it above 93% of American cities — comfortably upper-middle-class by national standards, solidly middle-class by Bay Area ones. A household earning the Oakland median can, in theory, afford the city’s average rent (the rent-to-income ratio sits at 23.5%, below the 30% threshold that defines housing burden). Median home values are $883,800 — high, but not San Francisco high. Unemployment is 4.5%, roughly in line with the national rate.

By these measures, Oakland is a functional, reasonably prosperous mid-size city. Its port handles 2.26 million shipping containers a year and supports nearly 100,000 jobs. Its civic engagement is among the highest in California — residents show up, testify, and fight for the city they want.

But by several critical measures — public safety, fiscal health, and basic service delivery — Oakland is under serious strain.

The violent crime rate is 2,716 per 100,000 residents — roughly seven times the national average, though the trend is improving: the city’s Ceasefire violence-prevention program and focused deterrence helped cut homicides by more than 30% in 2024, the sharpest single-year decline in decades. The Oakland Police Department fields 535 operational officers against a recommended staffing level of 877, and it is losing a net five officers per month. The available fund balance peaked at $708 million in 2023, then fell to $22.8 million by 2024 — a 97% drawdown in a single fiscal year. The structural deficit over a two-year budget cycle is $360 million against a $2.2 billion annual budget.

We scored Oakland across four dimensions — education, public safety, economic prosperity, and housing affordability — using data from ten federal and local sources. Three of the four scores fall below the national midline of 50.

Safety, at 31.2, is the worst. Education scores 36.2 — shaped by a school district in its own fiscal crisis. Oakland Unified operates 87 rated schools with an average quality score of 4.8 out of 10 and a pupil-teacher ratio of 22.1, both below state norms. OUSD has spent years under state fiscal oversight, closing schools in underserved neighborhoods to balance its books while the city struggles to balance its own. Prosperity lands at 47.4 — close to the median but dragged down by the crime-economy spiral. The lone score above 50 is affordability, at 54.1, and even that carries an asterisk: Oakland looks affordable only because its neighbor across the bay is San Francisco. Relative to the nation, Oakland is expensive. Relative to the Bay Area, it is the cheaper option — which is a different kind of problem. Cities whose primary affordability pitch is “at least we’re not them” tend to attract residents who leave when they can.

The question worth asking is not whether Oakland is struggling. It is. The question is why a city this wealthy is struggling this badly — and whether the answer is fixable or structural.

Start with the money. Oakland collects roughly $2.2 billion per year. The backbone is property tax — $309 million, reliable and growing modestly with assessments. Sales tax brings in $64 million, but that figure has been declining as retail migrates online and foot traffic thins in commercial corridors. The real estate transfer tax, once a windfall in a hot market, is down 26%. In December 2025, the city issued $335 million in general obligation bonds — borrowing against the future to cover the present.

The deficit is $360 million over a two-year budget cycle. That number is structural, meaning it does not close on its own. Oakland is unlikely to grow its way out at current revenue trajectories, and it cannot cut its way out without gutting the services that keep residents and businesses from leaving. This is the fiscal trap: every cut risks accelerating the revenue decline that caused the cut.

Start with the pension overhang. Oakland, like many California cities, carries unfunded retirement obligations that consume a growing share of annual revenue. Pension costs are contractually fixed; they do not shrink when the economy does. Revenue is cyclical; pension obligations are not. Over time, the gap between what the city collects and what it has already promised to pay widens by a few million a year — until, in a downturn, it widens by a few hundred million.

Revenue is also structurally capped. California’s Proposition 13, passed in 1978, limits property taxes to 1% of a property’s purchase-price assessment, with annual increases capped at 2% — regardless of how fast market values rise. Oakland’s $309 million in property tax, its largest single revenue source, grows steadily but slowly.

The second is the crime-economy spiral. Oakland’s violent crime rate deters business investment, which depresses commercial tax revenue, which constrains police staffing, which worsens crime. This feedback loop has operated for decades. The current iteration is acute: OPD’s 342-officer shortfall is the widest in at least fifteen years, and the department cannot recruit fast enough to close it. The departure of the Oakland Athletics after more than fifty years at the Coliseum sharpened the signal. The broader message — a professional franchise choosing to leave — reinforced the narrative that Oakland’s operating environment drives investment away.

The third is political. Oakland’s council is ideologically committed to equity-first governance — affordable housing, violence prevention programs, environmental justice in the flatlands. These are defensible priorities. They are also expensive ones, and they compete directly with the public-safety spending that businesses and moderate residents demand. None of these explanations is wrong, and they reinforce each other.

The budget drawdown makes every policy argument a zero-sum fight. Oakland’s available fund balance peaked at $708 million in 2023, then fell to $22.8 million by 2024. To put that in proportion: the city drew down reserves equivalent to roughly $1,566 per resident in a single fiscal year. In December 2025, the city issued $335 million in general obligation bonds — the sale was oversubscribed, with $638 million in demand from 26 firms, a sign that investors still believe in Oakland’s fundamentals.

We analyzed transcripts of 134 Oakland City Council meetings, scoring each for topic frequency, speaker sentiment, contentiousness, and policy outcomes. The aggregate contentiousness score — 4.0 out of 10 — masks significant variation. Meetings on housing and policing routinely spike above 6.0; meetings on infrastructure and administrative items sit below 2.0. The average is moderate. The distribution is bimodal.

Housing dominates. It appeared as a primary topic in 10 of 13 closely analyzed sessions. Oakland’s Housing Element requires 26,000 new units by 2031. In the previous cycle, the city overproduced market-rate housing by 90% while underproducing affordable units. The pattern tells a familiar California story: market forces deliver what is profitable, and mandates for affordability lag behind — not because they are ignored, but because they are expensive and slow.

The simulation is a model, not a prophecy. It cannot predict what Oakland’s council will do, how Sacramento will intervene, or whether a single large employer will relocate to or from the city. What it can do is clarify the trade-offs — to show which investments produce returns on which timescales, and where the constraints bind hardest. Four patterns hold across all five scenarios.

Oakland’s paradox — wealth and dysfunction, ambition and insolvency — is not a riddle. It is a compounding-interest problem. Small structural deficits, deferred over years, become large ones. Modest police attrition, ignored for a decade, becomes a 342-officer gap. A housing target set in Sacramento, met with political resistance in Oakland, becomes a 26,000-unit backlog.

The data does not tell Oakland what to do. It tells Oakland what it is choosing between — and what each choice costs.