Is Oakland Getting Better, or Just Looking Better?

Ask ten Oaklanders whether the city is turning a corner and you will get ten answers, most of them delivered with feeling. So the question buyers keep bringing to us this summer is a fair one. Is Oakland getting better, or does it just look that way from a comfortable distance? The last few weeks handed the optimists real material. The homeless count dropped for the first time in years, the Coliseum sale finally has terms on paper, and home prices are ticking up again. That is a genuine change in the story Oakland tells about itself. It is also worth reading slowly, because one of those cheerful numbers carries an asterisk that matters a lot more to a homebuyer than to a headline.

The good-news summer is real

Start with the number everyone is quoting. Oakland's 2026 point-in-time count came in at 4,410 people, down from a 2024 peak of 5,485, a drop of about 20 percent and the first real decline in years, according to The Oaklandside and the city's own announcement. Alameda County as a whole fell about 13 percent, per preliminary county data. City officials credit new supportive housing paid for by 2022's Measure U and the state's Homekey program. That is the boring, durable kind of progress. Actual apartments for people who did not have them. Supply doing what supply is supposed to do.

The Coliseum has a pulse again too. In late May the county supervisors approved a term sheet to sell the county's half of the 112-acre site to the African American Sports and Entertainment Group for 115 million dollars, with a June 30 target to close, The Oaklandside reported. We walked through what that deal actually means for East Oakland home values when the deadline was set, so I will not relitigate it here, except to say the vote moved the deal forward without finishing it.

And the market has quietly firmed. Oakland's median sale price sat around 884,000 dollars over the three months ending in May, up 2.8 percent from a year earlier, with homes going pending in about 17 days and drawing four offers on average, according to Redfin. None of that is the profile of a city in freefall.

The asterisk on the homeless count

Here is where a careful reader slows down. The 20 percent drop is accurate as the count was taken. Whether it means 20 percent fewer people are actually living outside is a harder question, and the honest answer is probably not quite.

The 2026 tally landed right after the largest stretch of encampment clearing in Oakland's history. The city ran somewhere between 140 and 240 encampment closures a year from 2021 through 2024. Then closures jumped more than fivefold, to 1,212 in 2025, according to an analysis by The Oakland Report. Clear that many camps without adding many shelter beds and people do not disappear. They scatter. National research cited in that same analysis found more than 90 percent of displaced people stay in public spaces afterward, and most simply move down the block.

You can see the scatter on the county map. Six of the fifteen Alameda County jurisdictions counted more homeless residents in 2026 than in 2024, and several East County cities rose sharply, with Livermore, Pleasanton, and Dublin all up by double digits. Oakland still holds more than half of the county's 8,201 unhoused residents. So the fair read sits in the middle. The supportive-housing gains are real and they are the part worth cheering, because building people a place to live is the fix that lasts. But part of that tidy 20 percent is a story about where people got counted, not whether they got housed. Both things are true at the same time, and a city's reputation tends to grab whichever half is easier to tweet.

So is Oakland getting better for buyers?

This is where the neighborhood-first habit earns its keep, because reputation swings treat Oakland as one place and it has never been one place. The hills above Highway 13 and the flatlands near the Coliseum share a city name and almost nothing else about price, schools, or how a block actually feels at 9 p.m. A citywide count going down, or a citywide median going up, tells you the mood is improving. It does not tell you whether the specific street you are standing on is a good bet.

So the practical answer to whether Oakland is getting better is: in parts, unevenly, and you should check the parts. If safety is your first worry, and for plenty of Oakland buyers it honestly is, the useful move is to compare blocks instead of absorbing a headline. That is what our Oakland safety rankings are built for, and why we line neighborhoods up by overall livability and by value rather than grade the whole city on one summer's mood.

A few of the questions we keep hearing, answered straight. Is Oakland safer now? Citywide trends have improved and the count fell, but safety is hyperlocal, so treat the city number as background and the neighborhood number as the decision. Is now a good time to buy? Prices are up modestly and homes are moving in under three weeks, so it is not a fire sale, but it is not 2021 either. Is Oakland a good place to live in 2026? For a lot of people, yes, as long as they pick the neighborhood as carefully as they pick the house. Which is the entire point.

Reputation lags reality in both directions. Oakland spent years with a reputation worse than most of its neighborhoods deserved, and it could easily spend the next few wearing a rosier one than its hardest-hit blocks have earned. Neither the doom nor the boom is evenly distributed. If the Coliseum deal closes and the supportive housing holds, the turnaround gets a little more real, block by block, on a slow clock. Until then, the smart way to decide whether Oakland is getting better for you is the same way we would answer it anywhere. Look past the narrative at the schools, the safety trend, the price, and the transit on the one street you would actually live on. That is the whole reason we built Houseberry, and it counts for the most when a city's story is still being argued over.

Sources

• The Oaklandside: Homelessness drops 20% in Oakland
• City of Oakland: Oakland Homelessness Falls Nearly 20 Percent
• Local News Matters: Alameda County homeless count drops 13%
• The Oakland Report: Swept away, sweeps and the count
• The Oaklandside: Coliseum sale inches forward
• Redfin: Oakland housing market
• The Oaklandside: Good-news podcast on Oakland, the Coliseum, and homelessness