Rate This City: Day 21 - Oakland
- Thread starter Child_Of_God
- Start date
FruitOfTheVale
Superstar
Damn idk how I missed this thread 
I Been living in Oakland since I was in the 6th grade (‘06) so I ain’t impartial. At the same time, imo it’s objectively a great town. Great food, live music, people, weather, etc. beautiful landscape, tons of black artists & creatives, strong entrepreneurial/independent mentality, strong black activism undercurrent, etc etc.
That being said, I’m not a stranger to the downsides either. High rents, racist gentrifiers, the explosion of homelessness in residential streets, the prostitution/B&E/armed robbery epidemics, crooked police & city council, the typical ignorant shyt, etc.
Oakland’s an 8/10 for me personally.
I Been living in Oakland since I was in the 6th grade (‘06) so I ain’t impartial. At the same time, imo it’s objectively a great town. Great food, live music, people, weather, etc. beautiful landscape, tons of black artists & creatives, strong entrepreneurial/independent mentality, strong black activism undercurrent, etc etc.
That being said, I’m not a stranger to the downsides either. High rents, racist gentrifiers, the explosion of homelessness in residential streets, the prostitution/B&E/armed robbery epidemics, crooked police & city council, the typical ignorant shyt, etc.
Oakland’s an 8/10 for me personally.
Lord Bison
Superstar
Oakland is a GOAT city. If the cost of living wasnt so damn high, id move out there easily
murksiderock
Superstar
Oakland has some of the baddest women anywhere in The States. Its spirit of black culture and black activism is GOAT-level too, and it's natural landscape is gorgeous. Its a beautiful place...
The people are a different bag. Cats exaggerate the hustle spirit of Oakland, because most the cats in Oakland streets are robbers, thieves, and killers. It's a grimy place and I wouldn't put Oakland on my "top hustler city" list or top hustlers in California, but the spirit of hustling is definitely there...
It for sure is unique though, there isn't another place like The Town, though I can lightweight get the comparisons to Baltimore or Newark...
Gets a 7 from me...
A week in The Bay will give you enough time to enjoy many of the top tourist traps, but you probably need double that time, you need time without a schedule, to really enjoy the area casually...
One of my all time favorite songs, I can't lie...
Oakland is dope but the experience in LA would be on a much grander scale. There is no real Oakland/LA comparison because LA is vastly larger, so much so that quantifying an experience equally is a stretch...
I do and have known people who prefer Oakland over LA, but it ain't because they are equals. Myself, there aint a single reason I'd choose Oakland if LA was the other option...
But I do give Oakland a 7, it's far from average and far from wack. A little overrated, like a few other places with high native representation on here, but it's definitely worth a trip at the very least...
100 times better than that other city across the bay, not even a comparison...
Cel 510 kid ados forever
Veteran
murksiderock
Superstar
That's not true at all, that's a myth Bay nikkas came up with decades ago and marketed to people who don't know any better...
Cel 510 kid ados forever
Veteran
murksiderock
Superstar
If you really wanna talk about this we can talk about it, particularly as "hustling" relates to drug dealing, from a firsthand perspective of someone who spent alota time dealing narcotics and have networked/affiliated/associated with cats from a ton of places...
You're bringing up Sac and LA, you're wrong on both, but I can talk about the cumulative spirit and personality of cats from a bunch of cities not just in Cali...
Oakland is not some hustler's pantheon...
Cel 510 kid ados forever
Veteran
lol it's not close bay nikkas got some of the biggest pimps and hustles of all time
like other places dont compare.
I respect them but no.
sac and la gang bang
murksiderock
Superstar
Bruh I don't know what to tell you if you think being gang affiliated prohibits being money motivated...
You ain't spent enough time in either Sac or LA, especially LA, or don't have access to certain circles, if you think cats not about paper in those cities...
Cats in Oakland gangbang too. You can call it "mobbin" or whatever else you wanna call it but the turf wars, block beefs and gang injunctions are all the same...
Hater Eraser
Veteran
Drug expert: 'Crack' born in San Francisco Bay Area in '74
It was a failed attempt to copy something else
Published: Aug. 19, 1996
BY GARY WEBB
Mercury News Staff Writer
THOUGH MIAMI AND LOS ANGELES are commonly regarded as the twin cradles of ''crack'' cocaine, the first government-financed study of cocaine smoking concluded that it was actually born here, in the San Francisco Bay Area, in January 1974.
After comedian Richard Pryor nearly immolated himself during a cocaine-smoking binge in 1980, the National Institute on Drug Abuse hired UCLA drug expert Ronald K. Siegel to look into the then-unfamiliar practice. Siegel, the first scientist to document crack's use in the United States, traced the smoking habit back to 1930, when Colombians first started it.
Translation problem
But what was being smoked south of the border -- a paste-like substance called basé (bah-SAY) -- was very different from what Californians were putting in their pipes, Siegel found, even though they called it the same thing: free base.
Basé was a crude, toxics-laden precursor to cocaine powder. On the other hand, free base (which later became known as crack or rock), was cocaine powder that had been reverse-engineered to make it smokable. When Bay Area dealers tried recreating the drug they'd seen in South America, Siegel learned, they'd screwed up.
Shadowy origins of 'crack' epidemic
Role of CIA-linked agents a well-protected secret until now
San Francisco agent thought she was onto something big
Meneses' trail was getting warm when her superiors took her off the case
''When they looked it up in the Merck Manual, they saw cocaine base and thought, well, yeah, this is it,'' Siegel, a nationally known drug researcher, said in an interview. ''They mispronounced it, misunderstood the Spanish, and thought (basé) was cocaine base.''
Unintentional success
The base described in the organic chemistry handbook was cocaine powder separated from its salts, a process easily done with boiling water and baking soda. It was an immediate, if unintentional, hit.
''They were wowed by it,'' Siegel said. ''They thought they were smoking basé. They were not. They were smoking something nobody on the planet had ever smoked before.''
Using the sales records of several major drug paraphernalia companies, Siegel correlated crack's public appearance with the appearance of base-making kits and glass pipes for smoking it. The sales records zeroed in on the Bay Area.
Study never published
''We were able to show to our satisfaction that they were directly responsible for distributing the habit throughout the United States. Wherever they were selling their kits, that's where we started getting the clinical reports,'' Siegel said. ''It all started in Northern California.''
Pictures of crack cocaine
His groundbreaking study was never published by the government, purportedly for budgetary reasons. Siegel, who said he grew concerned that the information would not be made available to other researchers, published it himself in an obscure medical journal in late 1982.
murksiderock
Superstar
Drug expert: 'Crack' born in San Francisco Bay Area in '74
It was a failed attempt to copy something else
Published: Aug. 19, 1996
BY GARY WEBB
Mercury News Staff Writer
THOUGH MIAMI AND LOS ANGELES are commonly regarded as the twin cradles of ''crack'' cocaine, the first government-financed study of cocaine smoking concluded that it was actually born here, in the San Francisco Bay Area, in January 1974.
After comedian Richard Pryor nearly immolated himself during a cocaine-smoking binge in 1980, the National Institute on Drug Abuse hired UCLA drug expert Ronald K. Siegel to look into the then-unfamiliar practice. Siegel, the first scientist to document crack's use in the United States, traced the smoking habit back to 1930, when Colombians first started it.
Translation problem
But what was being smoked south of the border -- a paste-like substance called basé (bah-SAY) -- was very different from what Californians were putting in their pipes, Siegel found, even though they called it the same thing: free base.
Basé was a crude, toxics-laden precursor to cocaine powder. On the other hand, free base (which later became known as crack or rock), was cocaine powder that had been reverse-engineered to make it smokable. When Bay Area dealers tried recreating the drug they'd seen in South America, Siegel learned, they'd screwed up.
Shadowy origins of 'crack' epidemic
Role of CIA-linked agents a well-protected secret until now
San Francisco agent thought she was onto something big
Meneses' trail was getting warm when her superiors took her off the case
''When they looked it up in the Merck Manual, they saw cocaine base and thought, well, yeah, this is it,'' Siegel, a nationally known drug researcher, said in an interview. ''They mispronounced it, misunderstood the Spanish, and thought (basé) was cocaine base.''
Unintentional success
The base described in the organic chemistry handbook was cocaine powder separated from its salts, a process easily done with boiling water and baking soda. It was an immediate, if unintentional, hit.
''They were wowed by it,'' Siegel said. ''They thought they were smoking basé. They were not. They were smoking something nobody on the planet had ever smoked before.''
Using the sales records of several major drug paraphernalia companies, Siegel correlated crack's public appearance with the appearance of base-making kits and glass pipes for smoking it. The sales records zeroed in on the Bay Area.
Study never published
''We were able to show to our satisfaction that they were directly responsible for distributing the habit throughout the United States. Wherever they were selling their kits, that's where we started getting the clinical reports,'' Siegel said. ''It all started in Northern California.''
Pictures of crack cocaine
His groundbreaking study was never published by the government, purportedly for budgetary reasons. Siegel, who said he grew concerned that the information would not be made available to other researchers, published it himself in an obscure medical journal in late 1982.
What is this supposed to prove? It isn't news that turning cocaine powder to crack rock was started in San Francisco, that has been alleged for a long time...
There really is no way to narrow down crack to one city, the practice was introduced to several markets in the US at relatively the same time. But SF always been mentioned as arguably the first city...
This doesn't prove anything, though, in regards to statements saying cats in Oakland hustle at a higher level than anywhere else...
Hater Eraser
Veteran
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Cel 510 kid ados forever
Veteran
lol u a bay hater.
la and sac nikkaz gangbang they dont hustle too much especially sac nikkaz.
it's no comparison to the bay.
anyone who even questions this is crazy.
bay crack epidemic was crazy In 80's