Oakland neighborhoods in the news

The questions of what a neighborhood is and where people consider it to be has long interested me. Clearly it interests other people, too, because my Oakland neighborhoods map post is by far the most popular post on Our Oakland, garnering 30 times the page views of most posts. (And of course, this post linking to it will further skew the imbalance.)

It's also interesting to note what the press, both locals and outsiders, refer to a neighborhood as. For a while I tracked stories to note how they refer to Oakland neighborhoods in an attempt to help answer the nebulous question, Where is East Oakland? In general, the stories refer to Oakland, downtown Oakland, some wealthier neighborhoods, but if about crime, mostly 'west Oakland' and 'east Oakland'.

So I was interested to read a story on SFGate, Longfellow a neighborhood key to Oakland's future which nicely sums up some of the issues facing Oakland. If the city can't reduce crime everywhere in Oakland, people will leave.

Justin Berton's article is mostly about the Longfellow neighborhood, which some folks call JAMMI - Just Above the MacArthur Maze Interchange (sadly, the JAMMI blog hasn't been updated in over 3 years). But it also mentions that not all residents think of their neighborhood as Longfellow; some think of it as Santa Fe (which is just north of Longfellow) because of the school there. It also refers to the nearby Golden Gate neighborhood (though it says it's to the northeast instead of to the northwest). I do wonder a bit about the reference by one resident to "the flat bottoms of West Oakland". Village Bottoms perhaps?

In any event, it's an interesting article, and nice to see reference to other Oakland neighborhoods, even if it is about crime.