On Loving The Town I really love Oakland. I love Oakland in the way that I didn’t love San Francisco, in the way that I appreciate-but-don’t-still-love where I grew up in the San Joaquin Valley. There are all kinds of reasons to love Oakland, and if you stop an Oaklander on the street to ask for a list of them, they’ll...well, they’ll probably tell you to kindly leave them alone because they usually have better things they need to be doing. But they probably do have a list, and if you catch them in a moment, they’ll tell you all of the things there are to love about Oakland, as well as about how it’s not like it used to be. They might even plead with you to not move here, because this place has changed too much already. And it has. Folks who grew up here can talk about the different waves of change, and if you have lived here for any period of time you can spot the changes coming and lament them even before they arrive. When I first moved here, downtown had just begun to recover fro