Oakland is a town often misunderstood. As someone who’s lived in the city and still spends a ton of time there, I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly.
And yet, there’s no place like it.
People who know the real Oakland — the ones who’ve explored neighborhoods from Chinatown to Fruitvale to Temescal, who’ve caught sunsets over the entire Bay from the Oakland hills, who’ve admired art in downtown and watched films at the historic Grand Lake Theater — will tell you there’s so much more to “The Town” than it gets credit for. During her post-Olympics homecoming at Frank Ogawa Plaza, figure skating gold medalist Alysa Liu summed up Oakland with one word: “Soul.” Locals beamed. With her unapologetically funky style, zen-like confidence and YOLO mentality, this athlete had clearly been shaped by the city.
Located on the eastern shore of the San Francisco Bay, Oakland is a midsized city with an outsized reputation, having long served as a pressure cooker for grassroots activism. The Black Panther Party, the hyphy subgenre of hip-hop, official U.S. wildlife refuges — they all started in Oakland. Visit the city and you’ll find that it’s slower-paced than San Francisco but has all the cultural diversity. Its food scene is endlessly innovative — try the handcrafted zaru soba at Soba Ichi or some of the best Indigenous food on the West Coast at Wahpepah’s Kitchen. And for those wanting to explore the outdoors, there’s Lake Merritt in the center of town and redwood forests in the hills.
Oakland is far from perfect; while crime is reportedly down, it’s important to be street smart (or as locals say, to “keep your head on a swivel”). But I’ve seen many changes to the town over the years and have a renewed appreciation for its vibrancy. Here’s just a sampling of ways you can enjoy the cultural bounty from this city by the Bay.
Just past noon, a young man appeared on the north side of San Vicente Boulevard, a block west of Hauser, and eyeballed the flow of westbound traffic.
When he saw an opening, he slid across to the median strip, where he waited for eastbound traffic to let up before crossing over to the south side of San Vicente to pick up some takeout food. And then he retraced his steps across the 150-foot wide thoroughfare that knifes through the heart of the city along what once was the Red Car line of the Pacific Electric Railway.
He should have used the nearby crosswalk, but there aren’t enough of those on the boulevard, so pedestrians routinely skitter and scoot across the street like they’re in a game of Frogger.
I watched this drama the other day from Dam Good Coffee, where I met with two guys who live in the neighborhood and, in their spare time, have been doing a lot of thinking. They’re fine-tuning a pitch to reengineer the boulevard, reduce traffic, improve access to two new transit lines and transform the Mid-City portion of San Vicente Boulevard — from the Beverly Center on the west to just past La Brea on the east — into a 3-mile, 30-acre linear park.
Ambitious. Outlandish. Insane.
From left, Catherine Geanacouras, Oren Hadar and Michael Wacht of the San Vicente Park Foundation have a plan to turn a stretch of San Vicente Boulevard into a greenway.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
It’s all of that and a longshot undertaking, given the countless obstacles that can derail their dream. But Oren Hadar, a sound engineer, and Michael Wacht, an architect, are serious, along with a small coalition of neighborhood believers.
“One of the things I always say is L.A. needs to get back into the business of taking big swings,” Hadar said. He is motivated in part by the fact that his two young kids don’t have a nearby park to play in.
The big swing comes at a time when Los Angeles has just fallen from 90th to 93rd in terms of park acreage, investment and accessibility in the annual Trust for Public Lands ranking of the 100 largest cities in the U.S. You’d think a city with great weather and thousands of apartment dwellers with little or no outdoor space would fight its way into the top 10 rather than settle for sinking to the bottom of the heap.
“What if L.A.’s next great park was already here, hiding in plain sight?” a narrator asks in a video that appears on the group’s San Vicente Park website.
Local resident Jo and her dog Elle carefully cross San Vicente Boulevard in Los Angeles on Wednesday, June 17, 2026.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
Sun-baked asphalt would give way to turf. Pedestrians and cyclists would have more breathing room. There’d be far less traffic.
“You can put in micro forests,” Wacht said. “You can do farmers markets. You can do growing areas. You can do fountains. Playgrounds.”
Catherine Geanuracos, a CicLAvia board member who was an advocate for turning the Silver Lake Reservoir into an aquatic park, joined our conversation and called the idea “eminently feasible.”
“I think this is what makes L.A. great,” Geanuracos said. She’s lived in New York City and San Francisco and thinks there’s greater opportunity here for engaged residents to advance their civic improvement ideas.
The advocates said they’d gotten some encouragement from Councilmembers Heather Hutt and Katy Yaroslavsky, whose districts include the area of the proposed park. Hutt’s office sent me a statement saying she supports “effrorts to create more walkable, green communities.” She said she has encouraged the group to keep exploring the vision, and she looks forward to hearing input from various other neighborhood groups.
Hadar writes a blog called The Future Is L.A., which is part love letter to Los Angeles and part lament on unmet potential.
“Just about every other major American city has a policy and research think tank dedicated to pursuing ideas that could make the city better,” Hadar recently wrote, calling for L.A. to have its own.
I don’t want to say the park idea’s chances are slim, but let’s look at a few hurdles.
Traffic passes through the intersection of San Vicente Boulevard and La Brea in Los Angeles on.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
L.A. city government has trouble managing existing parks and even the open spaces around City Hall, so how can it build and care for another 30 acres of greenery?
The cost would be in the millions, and the cup does not runneth over.
And then there’s the biggest pothole of all on the road to pastoral wonder:
Creating the park would mean squeezing off one or two lanes of traffic in each direction of San Vicente. That would dump more cars onto surrounding streets and set up another road diet clash that pits car culture against growing demand for a city that is safer and more inviting for those who walk, bike and use transit.
All of this would be examined in a feasibility study the advocates are raising money for. But the supporters claim San Vicente is lightly traveled compared to Wilshire, Pico and Olympic, so stealing traffic lanes wouldn’t be catastrophic.
I mentioned that I’d think twice about sending kids to play in a median strip park. But the supporters said San Vicente would become more of a neighborhood service street than a thruway, with safer crossings into the new park, which by the way already has plenty of full-grown trees.
When I took a walk and polled people on the park idea, I got mixed reactions.
“That’s a bad idea,” said a man who was walking along the median strip. He said he thought that after the addition of bike lanes a few years ago squeezed vehicular traffic, San Vicente became more dangerous, and the idea of a park between lanes of traffic sounded disastrous to him.
Miguel Lopez looked like he was trying to bring the park vision to life. He sat on the median strip reading a book and smiled when he was shown a rendering of San Vicente Park.
Blanca Vanburian practices tai chi in her yard along San Vicente Boulevard on Wednesday.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Blanca Vanburian, who was doing a variation of Tai Chi on the lawn outside her apartment building, had several good questions, including one about whether the city could be trusted to maintain a new park. She said a lot of residents would be concerned about new traffic flows through side streets, and she wondered if the park would attract more homeless people.
Hadar told her the feasibility study would probe all of that, and the more she heard, the more Vanburian came around to the idea of the park.
“It’s up to us how we use public space,” Wacht said, looking out on a particularly unattractive stretch of roadway that generates so much exhaust and serves as a barrier, dividing two neighborhoods. “I get disappointed when I see so much of it devoted to this, and it’s keeping us from being more of a cohesive neighborhood.”
Margaret Free walks three basset hounds, named Bob, Doris and Ruth, along San Vicente Boulevard in Los Angeles on Wednesday.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Margaret Free was walking three Basset hounds — Bob, Doris and Ruth. She said she and the dogs could be counted as four votes in favor of the park.
A woman named Jo safely managed a Frogger crossing with her dog, Elle. Jo said she was absolutely in favor of a park and doesn’t think losing lanes of vehicle traffic is a bad thing, but she feared backlash from drivers who disagree and asked me to withhold her last name.
Joshua Mock, owner of Dam Good Coffee, said everyone would benefit from the park, especially neighborhood children. “It’d be dope,” he said, “and good for business.”
Mayor Karen Bass ran the table in South Los Angeles, Spencer Pratt found strong support from his Westside base, and Nithya Raman racked up votes in Echo Park and other neighborhoods with a concentration of renters, according to a Times analysis of partial precinct-level results from this week’s primary election.
The Times analysis, based on an estimated 62% of the ballots counted so far, found that Pratt was favored in many of the same neighborhoods that voted for mayoral candidate Rick Caruso in 2022, while Raman made inroads in progressive areas dominated by Bass four years ago.
Bass found support in neighborhoods along much of the Harbor and Santa Monica freeway corridors, along with central San Fernando Valley communities from Van Nuys to Arleta.
With much of the vote left to be counted, a map prepared by The Times showing how neighborhoods voted represents a snapshot of an election still very much underway. Bass garnered enough votes on election night to qualify for a Nov. 3 runoff, the Associated Press determined, but votes are still being tallied and it’s not yet clear if she will face Pratt or Raman.
Early returns show Pratt with a significant lead over Raman, but some analysts expect the remaining ballots to lean Democratic, as many left-of-center voters held onto their mail-in ballots until the last minute as they waited to choose between Democratic gubernatorial candidates.
Not surprisingly, Pratt did well in the Pacific Palisades, where his home burned down in the 2025 fire, garnering 60% in one precinct. The next closest candidate there was Adam Miller at 14%.
A registered Republican, Pratt also led in many of the more conservative neighborhoods that were dominated in the 2022 mayoral primary by Caruso, a former Republican who switched to being a Democrat before running for mayor. Pratt was ahead in much of the Westside and the West Valley, the analysis found, including much of Woodland Hills, Encino, West Hills and Chatsworth — just like Caruso four years ago.
“The Pratt vote mirrors a tremendous amount of the Rick Caruso vote: geographically, demographically and ideologically,” said Dave Jacobson, a Democratic consultant and co-founder of J&Z Strategies.
Certain Valley neighborhoods that supported Caruso didn’t go to Pratt, though, as Bass made inroads in areas including Northridge and North Hills, extending her support farther west into the Valley than she did in her last primary.
At the same time, Pratt appeared poised to win some neighborhoods that Bass carried in 2022. He was leading in Studio City and Hancock Park, according to the preliminary returns in areas where Bass led Caruso after the primary.
Bass’ stronghold in South L.A.
Bass’ support eroded to some extent since 2022, when she secured 43% of the vote in the primary against Caruso, then-Councilmember Kevin de Leon and leftist Gina Viola, the analysis based on partial returns shows. Even so, Bass outperformed her 2022 primary results in many areas south of the Santa Monica Freeway, though the precincts are slightly different than they were four years ago, making direct comparisons difficult.
In one precinct in Gramercy Park, Bass picked up 82% of the vote so far — up from a similar precinct where she won about 75% of the vote in 2022. Part of Bass’ dominance in the area could have to do with the fact that Pratt and Raman didn’t perform as well as Caruso did in many of these South L.A. neighborhoods.
Still, in some parts of the neighborhood, Bass underperformed 2022, though she still won more than half the vote.
In a Baldwin Hills neighborhood precinct where she won 77% of the vote last time, Bass was down to about 64% this year so far, as Raman took 20% of the precinct and Pratt had 9%. In 2022, Caruso won less than 13% of the area.
Bill Carrick, a longtime Democratic consultant, said it was unsurprising to see Bass’ support continue to be strong in South L.A.
“She’s been in the community there, lived there a long time and represented them in various capacities,” he said. “She’s a pretty well-known figure. She’s tied into all the networks.”
The Raman factor
The partial election returns show Raman leading the pack in precincts known for their progressive politics, particularly those with younger people in renter-heavy neighborhoods stretching from Hollywood to Highland Park.
Every neighborhood that Raman won was taken by Bass during the primary in 2022, though Viola, a leftist candidate that year, also did well in these precincts compared with other parts of the city.
On the Westside, Raman found few spots to lead, taking Sawtelle and Palms by fairly narrow margins, although those margins could possibly increase as more votes are counted.
She also dominated the Westwood precinct that includes UCLA, winning 56% of the vote in one precinct, compared with Bass’ 19% and Pratt’s 10%. And in a Los Feliz precinct in her council district, Raman so far has 58% of the vote, far ahead of Bass and Pratt.
Still, as of Wednesday, Raman was trailing in 54 of the 66 precincts in her own council district.
Zachary Donnini, a data expert with the nonpartisan group VoteHub, said he expects to see Raman’s numbers rise as the county continues to count late-arriving mail-in ballots, which he says tend to skew younger and more Democratic — which is Raman’s base.
“All the areas that are good for Pratt are going to become less good for him, and all areas that look less good for Raman are going to look better for her,” Donnini said.
Too close to call
Across the city, certain battleground precincts were so tight that no single candidate had a lead as of Wednesday’s count, on which The Times’ analysis was based.
In two adjacent Koreatown precincts, Bass and Raman were tied, with 117 votes in one and 187 votes in another, with Pratt trailing not far behind in both.
Bass and Raman also split a downtown Los Angeles precinct with 199 votes each, though Raman carried much of the rest of downtown, which Bass won in 2022.
In the Valley, it was Bass and Pratt who split precincts. In one Sun Valley precinct, the two each took 151 votes compared with Raman’s 80. They also tied in an Encino precinct.
In the race for Los Angeles mayor, incumbent Karen Bass secured a place on the November ballot. But who will challenge her is yet to be determined, as votes are still being tallied.
With 62% of the expected vote counted, reality television personality Spencer Pratt sits in second place and City Councilmember Nithya Raman trails in third. Although Pratt has declared victory, the Associated Press, which estimates the expected votes in, has not called the race.
This story is based on a snapshot of precinct-level results provided by the L.A. County registrar on Wednesday. The Times analyzed the 525,326 votes processed so far. This story will be updated when winners are finalized in early July by the secretary of state.
This map shows the margin and density of votes by precinct. Areas where a candidate leads by a wide margin, such as Brentwood for Pratt, appear darker on the map. More densely populated neighborhoods — such as Bass strongholds in Baldwin Hills and Hyde Park — appear in brighter colors. As of Wednesday, an estimated 710,000 ballots were yet to be counted, according to L.A. County officials.
More votes per square feet
More votes per square feet
More votes per square feet
The preliminary results show narrow margins among precincts on the Eastside, with some precincts showing an almost 30% split across the top 3 candidates.
Bass retained a strong lead in precincts across South L.A. compared with her 2022 race against Rick Caruso. Pratt has garnered heavy support from his neighbors in Pacific Palisades, as well as precincts in Bel-Air and Shadow Hills.
Raman, who represents Los Feliz, Hollywood Hills, Sherman Oaks and Encino on the city council, has so far underperformed in her home 4th District. She led in 12 of the 66 precincts, particularly in parts of Los Feliz. A few precincts in East Hollywood swung heavily for Pratt; but Bass led much of CD-4.
Karen Bass
Percentage of votes
Bass had strong support in South L.A.
Spencer Pratt
Pratt won half the vote in wealthy Pacific Palisades and Bel-Air precincts
Nithya Raman
Raman underperformed in much of her own council district
To win the race outright, Bass needs to secure at least 50% of the vote. She currently holds 35% of the vote and a five-point lead over Pratt. A Berkeley IGS poll released last week found that Bass and Raman would likely defeat Pratt by double digits in the event of a runoff.
Mail-in ballots with a June 2 postmark will be accepted by county election officials through Tuesday.
