Oakland’s Experiment In Anarchy
3rd November 2026
What would happen to a city if its government effectively stopped enforcing laws protecting public space and private property? Oakland, California, has been testing the proposition. Many have heard about Oakland’s extraordinarily high violent-crime rate, which, despite recent declines, remains roughly four and a half times the national rate and the worst among California’s big cities. But in recent years, the city has also struggled to enforce laws against illegal dumping, burglary, car break-ins, and squatting.
As a result, much of the city is “buried under trash,” according to a recent government report, which found that the city collects some 20 million pounds of illegally dumped debris – 47 pounds per resident – annually. Oakland also has the highest level of property crime of any large U.S. city. It solves these crimes at a rate of just 0.1 percent – meaning that one in every 1,000 property crimes reported to the Oakland police produces an arrest – compared with rates of about 10 percent in San Francisco and 13 percent in Berkeley, respectively. And the city has become home to a shadow industry of “squatter removal services,” including one whose sword-wielding operators promise to help landlords reclaim homes from unauthorized occupants, since the sheriff’s office often takes months to act.
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What explains this apparent paradox? At a macro level, the same thing that explains much of the dysfunction afflicting the rest of California: a kind of resource curse, whereby a state blessed with abundant natural bounty and a booming economy is bled dry by self-serving elected officials, union bosses, and nonprofit activists. Books could be written analyzing this dysfunction, but a handful of statistics will suffice. California ranks at or near the bottom of the country in adult literacy and has more homeless people than any other state. Fewer than one-third of its fourth-graders read at the NAEP “proficient” level, while the University of California is confronting a sharp deterioration in students’ performance in foundational math courses. The state has spent $14.6 billion on a high-speed rail system that has yet to carry a passenger and lost an estimated $20 billion to pandemic unemployment fraud.