Realty Reality

"There are good neighborhoods and bad in Oakland," our real estate agent told us as we drove around town, looking at houses to buy. "You can go down one street and feel completely safe, while just around the corner, you might be thinking 'uh-oh.'" And so it went as we went from one side of the city to the other. We began to understand this feeling as we continued out tour. We understand it even more fully fourteen years after we bought that house.
Across the street from the park where the urban spray paint and candle shrine still rises out of the sidewalk once or twice a year to Edgar, an upstairs apartment burned early Sunday morning. I was out on my morning run when I came across the crime scene tape. I stopped to ask the officer who was standing next to his cruiser if anyone was hurt. "We're not sure yet," he replied.
I went home to check on Al Gore's Internet. The tenant who was renting the apartment was in jail, so it couldn't have been him, but there were two bodies found inside. Signs pointed to the pair being left for dead after the fire was started. Witnesses saw someone leaving the building with gas cans. Firefighters suggested that the victims may have suffered trauma before the fire was set. An investigation is underway.
Meanwhile, around the corner, life continues. Down the hill from where the gunmen holed up in his apartment. A few blocks away from where the shoot out with the DEA agents took place. Just a little further down the road from where the kid ran past me shooting at a passing pickup truck. In the town where the homicide rate clicks on up toward eighty for the year. There are good neighborhoods and bad in Oakland.