Back from Skid Row

If ever a city seemed to be headed toward Skid Row, it was Oakland, Calif, (pop. 367,548), San Francisco's poor cousin across the bay. In 1914 Oakland opened a new city hall, and with that last gesture toward progress, Oakland went complacently to pot. In time, the city developed all the classic symptoms of metropolitan blight: the downtown area declined, citizens who could afford to fled to the suburbs, slums spread and schools disintegrated. But last week Oakland was in the midst of an ambitious rehabilitation program that was rapidly hauling the city back up from Skid Row.

Directing Oakland's revival is Republican Mayor John C. Houlihan, 51, the son of a San Francisco cop. Houlihan's campaign to save Oakland goes back to 1952, when he became chairman of the city's halfhearted planning commission. Houlihan began fighting for public housing and slum clearance against the opposition of the city fathers and the Oakland Tribune, the conservative local paper owned by the family of then Senator William Knowland. But Houlihan was undismayed by the entrenched opposition, got some redevelopment projects under way, eventually won over his critics. Last year, with the backing of the Tribune and Publisher Bill Knowland, Republican Houlihan was elected mayor of Democratic Oakland.

Beyond Building. Taking office last July, Mayor Houlihan found a ready aide in City Manager Wayne Thompson, a persuasive performer who can speak the language of both the sociologists and the politicians. Between Houlihan and Thompson, so many projects are now under way in Oakland that Thompson has to give city councilmen daily reports of the breathless course of redevelopment. Oakland has finished, is building or is about to build projects costing some $750 million. Among them: 40 schools, two stadiums, $30 million worth of harbor improvements, two freeways costing $150 million, three slum-clearance projects totaling $74 million.

But Oakland's fight for new life is much more than a building program; it includes an imaginative effort to solve deep-seated social problems. During World War II, Negroes began to migrate by the thousands to work in the Kaiser shipyards on the Oakland waterfront; after the war, they kept coming. Since 1950 the number of Negroes in the city has leaped from 48,000 to 84,000--or from 12% to 23% of the total population. The swelling Negro segment aggravated Oakland's fever chart. The schools got worse, crime and juvenile delinquency rose, slums spread. The job of integrating Negroes into the community has become the special problem of a city official named Evelio Grillo, 42, the son of a Cuban Negro immigrant. Grillo scoffs at the notion that new buildings alone are the answer: "We've got one housing project in Oakland, a fine one that is all by itself and all Negro. I'll guarantee that if you put your son there he'll be a delinquent in six months--if he's normal. If I took my son there, I'd give him a switchblade."

Ending the Rumbles. Grillo argues that individual welfare organizations often do more harm than good in fighting blight; working independently of one another, they duplicate one another's efforts or, worse still, expend their energies in squabbles over welfare dollars. Grillo's solution is a master plan to coordinate the particular skills of each department and agency in a massive, sustained attack on Oakland's problems. "We've got to do everything at once,'' he says, "and in a coordinated way."

His Associated Agencies is an informal federation of seven city, county and state departments: school, police, recreation, probation, welfare, health and youth. In one brisk display of his integrated strategy, Grillo stopped the rumbles of Negro and white gangs at a high school by getting the cops to seal off school grounds from raiders and persuading parole officers to back up the school staff in disciplining delinquents. So successful has the Grillo method proved that the Ford Foundation recently awarded his program a handsome grant of $2,000,000 for further development in Oakland.

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