Oakland Mayoral Candidate Profile: Nancy Nadel

Apr. 26 - KGO (KGO) -- Schools, crime and economic development are the key issues confronting Oakland. With the mayoral primary election just six weeks away, Dan Ashley continues his profiles of the major candidates with the third in his series of exclusive interviews.

Nancy Nadel is in her third term on the Oakland City Council, but believes she can get a lot more done as mayor. She took an unusual path to public life. But like other challenges she's faced, the woman who used to dread public speaking, has found a voice.

ABC7's Dan Ashley: "Are you a bit of a hippy?"

Nancy Nadel, Oakland mayoral candidate: "Am I a bit of a hippy? I was a hippy years ago."

As a young wife and mother, Nancy Nadel never cared too much about money or material things.

Dan Ashley: "Do you still carry with you some of those values perhaps?"

Nancy Nadel: "Yeah, I do. I live very simply. I have a very simple house in West Oakland. I recycle and have an organic garden and try to bring all of those values to my neighborhood as well."

We met in the neighborhood she's lived in since she moved to California from New York. They chose West Oakland because she and her husband thought their mixed-race family would be accepted. She was right.

Nancy Nadel: "They value each other and community very highly and that's really what I wanted for my family."

Sadly, her husband died of pancreatic cancer when their daughter was only 12. The grief was familiar. Nancy's father died when she was six. With no man in the house, she, her mother and sister, learned to fend for themselves. Once, there was the broken light switch to deal with.

Nancy Nadel: "We were so proud of ourselves after finding the fuse box and the right fuse to unscrew and getting the right equipment and the right tools and we fixed our light switch and the light went on. And that's sort of the way I've approached everything in my life -- that you know, you can do it."

That life lesson, tackle something tough, would be repeated many times. Her late husband taught her to take apart and rebuild the engine of a car.

Dan Ashley: "What, Nancy, would you say makes you tick? What are you passionate about?"

Nancy Nadel: "Art and science, actually. I have a very unusual education. I have a undergraduate degree in art and then I went back to school and studied geology and geophysics. So I exercise both sides of my brain."

An ability, she believes, will help her run a city facing new opportunities and old challenges. Topping the list -- the troubled school system. As mayor, she hopes to address what she calls the economic segregation in the city.

Nancy Nadel: "One of the strategies I've been working on is integrating incomes in every neighborhood. Making sure that we bring in market rate housing in low income communities without pushing the existing people out, which is very difficult. And then making sure that we have affordable housing in other areas that have previously been only high end housing."

As for crime -- more cops, more prevention programs and more community policing. Officers who spend a large part of their careers in one neighborhood building trust.

None of it is easy, but Nancy compares the mayor's role to the symphony maestro.

Dan Ashley: "So the engineer side of you wants the city to hit all the notes, but the artistic side of you wants the city to&"

Nancy Nadel "& to be creative and do it in a beautiful way so that it really raises the quality of life of our citizenry. It's my conceptual art project."

It all takes money, of course. She wants a better balance of housing and business coming to Oakland, including new incentives and help for entrepreneurs like the worker owned grocery and the bank in her neighborhood.

Nancy Nadel: "We don't wait for godot here. If it doesn't come to us, we figure out ways to do it here ourselves."

Dan Ashley: "You fix your own light switches."

Nancy Nadel: "Right, exactly."

Of course, Oakland needs more than a few new light switches. That's why Nadel has outlined a wide-range of specific solutions in her campaign.

Click on the video links above to see our complete and unedited interviews with all three Oakland mayoral candidates.

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