Oakland Mayor Keeps Blighted Home
with Fire and Safety Hazards

Oakland mayor Jean Quan and her husband keep a blighted home with fire and safety hazards, while the City code enforcement division is under fire for imposing large fines and fees on other homeowners without due process.

Photographs show the blight at the mayor's house in the well-to-do Oakmore district of the Oakland hills.

• Bushes almost twice as tall as a person constitute a fire hazard. The overgrowth reaches across the sidewalk easement to the edge of the street, a sure cause for issuing a blight citation to any other Oakland resident.

• The dry shingles of the shake roof are a fire hazard. The lower edges show mold or fungus rot.

• A dangling floor plank makes it unsafe to walk a deck.

Click here for photos

A realtor source told ORPN that several prospective buyers of homes on the same block as Quan's house walked away when they see the mayor's eyesore. Neighbors told TV station KTVU that Quan's house has been "disgraceful" for years.

Evidence of the mayor's blight and safety hazards follows a severe report from the Alameda county civil grand jury. It blasted the City of Oakland's building and blight bureaucrats for riding roughshod over homeowners and plundering their bank accounts. The Building Services Division slaps homeowners with huge liens at the beginning, not the end, of its investigative procedures. Acting as both prosecutor and judge, the same division hears homeowners' appeals. Even when a homeowner gets a lien removed, the City charges almost a thousand dollars in "processing fees" for cancelling its unwarranted lien.

Mayor Quan feels free to ignore fire and other safety hazards. Apparently, she is confident that she will not become a target of a City bureaucracy that has converted building code enforcement into a revenue machine, more interested in levying charges than in cleaning up hazards and blight.

The attitude of councilmember and now mayor Quan that she is above the law is not new. A year ago her car was booted; she had run up more than $1,100 in unpaid parking citations. Quan tried to shift the blame onto her husband, Dr. Floyd Huen. Now that Quan is mayor, Huen is known for injecting himself into City policy deliberations. He orchestrates the mayor's office as it moves to block an anti-gang injunction and oppose the hiring of more police. Perhaps Mr. Huen could go home and take care of the family's hazardous overgrowth of brush, dilapidated deck, and fire-dry shake roof.

On Sept. 20, 2011 the city council considered the grand jury report on the City's Building Services Division. Oakland resident Ken Pratt displayed photographs documenting conditions at mayor Quan's house, conditions that have brought no blight enforcement for years. Late that night, according a KTVU TV report, mayor Quan's daughter Lailan Huen sent a gardener a text message asking him to cut back overgrown ivy as soon as possible.

Mayor Jean Quan proudly states again and again that she is the first Asian-American woman mayor of Oakland. But what has she accomplished? Crime has become more prevalent and outrageous than ever because of Quan's persistent reductions of police staffing. Nor did Quan confront the City's structural budget deficit, choosing instead to get by for a year with a one-time accounting trick. Jean Quan is well on the way to an abysmal historical record in the office of mayor.

Mayor Quan's Incredible Speech of Denial

Just two days after KTVU television and other media outlets published photos and video (see above) of the blight, fire, and safety hazards at Oakland mayor Jean Quan's house in the hills, she struck back.

Quan had a speaking engagement in San Francisco at an awards dinner for Chinese media. Here are less than two minutes of audio from her speech:

Click to hear

An eight-minute video of Quan's speech was posted on YouTube.

What an insight into the mayor's mind.

• Quan denied blight that everyone can see, and she glided over the fire hazards on her lot, just a month before the twentieth anniversary of the horrific 1991 Oakland hills inferno.

• Quan played identity politics, currying the Chinese-American media. She said they concentrated on the important news: Newsweek named Oakland the number two "can-do city" in the U.S.! She did not tell you the Newsweek designation means nothing because it used statistics for the Oakland metropolitan statistical area, which includes Berkeley and the City of Alameda – two cities with vastly less crime than Oakland.

Quan might have been correct about one news item. She gave high importance to her meeting about "civil right charges against the Oakland police" with federal judge Thelton Henderson. Indeed, mayor Quan and judge Henderson both gleefully prevent Oakland police from working effectively. Thousands of people in Oakland suffer robberies and burglaries every year, but Quan keeps reducing the number of police. Rather, she and the judge get upset when an officer, trying to detain a burglary suspect who just won't get in the squad car, tells the guy to get the f--- in the car. The shock of that growl often makes the suspect decide to do as required.

No one questions the need for police to work in a professional manner. The problem is that public safety is collapsing in Oakland, but the mayor and the judge concentrate on demanding Miss Manners conduct. They are both elitists who reside outside the Oakland flatlands; they have no sympathy for the suffering of the several hundred thousand people who live there.

Whatever the issue, for Jean Quan it is all about Jean Quan, claiming to be the first Asian-American woman to be mayor of a large U.S. city. (Actually, Eunice Sato preceded Quan by 31 years when she became mayor of Long Beach in 1980.) Nearly every elected official has a large ego, but most of them, unlike Quan, can see that restoring basic safety to the streets, homes, and shops of Oakland really does count for more than whether or not the politician gets the media glow she wants.

Reader Comments

It isn't just the board on the deck that's a hazard. From the picture, it's clear that the ledger below it has rotted out. The whole damn thing will fall off the house in the next year or two if it isn't replaced.

Further, the railing is way below code. Even if it was built quite a few years ago, it can't have an opening bigger than four inches anywhere. There are supposed to be balusters or pickets all along it, spaced no more than four inches apart.

And if that's not bad enough, the railing posts appear to be nailed on rather than bolted. There isn't a single Simpson strong-tie connector anywhere on the thing, either. At that age and state of decay, if a child were to lean on one of those posts, the posts could fall right off.