Swainland

Great place to live, work, play and eat. Highly recommended and easy access to Manhattan.

I used to live on the 6200 block of Swainland. As a general matter the street is lacking in city services and the infrastructure is crumbling, all thanks to the city of Oakland's budget problems. More important, though, is the fact that homes have been built on this hillside without adequate planning. The streets are about a car and a half wide and there is virtually no way to get by when people park on the streets (which is often). The storm drains are always clogged and there are mass problems with drainage. We had flooding on our lot every winter and it got worse with each year, as more homes were built upslope. The city engineer even admitted that the hillside was unstable and floods and landslides would be common on Swainland in the near future, but since it was all private property it was up to the landowners to fix these problems.

So after the last nearly catastrophic flood in 2003, we sold the house and moved.

Be warned, Swainland is a street that has serious problems with floods and slope instability, in addition to the well known fire problems.