Trial By Fire
On a sunny afternoon in San Francisco’s trendy warehouse district, Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf was speaking to a roomful of young tech workers at an industry conference.
“It’s been a long week,” she said, half-smiling. It was only Tuesday.
On that day this past winter, Oakland’s municipal workers were a week into a strike that brought city work to a standstill and closed City Hall, and Schaaf’s new police chief was under fire for assigning officers to direct traffic during a raid by federal immigration officials. To top it off, just that morning Schaaf had learned of the sudden death of her friend and mentor, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee.
It was just the beginning of a week that looked like most weeks in the life of Libby Schaaf. In the three years since she took office as Oakland’s 50th mayor, it seems that just about everything that could have gone wrong has done so. As she begins the final lap of her campaign to win re-election this November, Schaaf has spent the past three years responding to one calamity after another.
The worst came in December 2016, two years into her term, when a late-night fire swept through an illegal warehouse-turned-artist-collective nicknamed the Ghost Ship, in the city’s storied Fruitvale District. The fire killed 36 people, almost all of them artists and musicians in their 20s and 30s who were in the building for a concert. The tragedy surpassed even the legendary Oakland Hills firestorm that killed 25
