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San Francisco 
Oakland
(Victorian townhouses in Alamo Square) The bay area is a place any black professional could fall in love with at first sight.

[[image - photograph of Painted Ladies]]

San Francisco is a city that prizes its small-towns charm and big-city vistas. Familiar to residents and tourists alike are its Fisherman Wharf, cable cars, quaint boutiques, Chinatown, the Golden Gate Bridge and a Pacific Ocean view of boundless horizons. San Francisco is a city so alluring it's easy to forget that it's major center of commerce, finance and banking. For instance, it is the headquarters of the Bank of America, the nation's largest financial institution. And a few miles south, gleaming in the distance, is Silicon Valley with its computer empires and high-tech fiefdoms. 

For anyone with an appetite for good living, San Francisco and the Bay area, including the predominantly black city Oakland, offer the best of both worlds: the accessibility and affordability of Oakland's attractive bedroom communities with the economic and cultural strength of San Francisco proper. It's a place that any black professional could fall in love with at first sight, just ask Charles Hardy. Hardy, 31, now a reporter with the San Francisco Examiner and living in Oakland, remains smitten with the Bay area. "It's just beautiful I know it sounds trite, but its physical beauty was a big part of why I came here," he says. 

"If San Francisco is the prettiest town in the country, then Oakland comes in second. From Oakland Hills you can see the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate and the same red sunsets you see in San Francisco," says Oakland native Wilner Ash. Ash 30, grew up in the flatlands of East Oakland and went to the University at Berkeley and has since lived and traveled both in the United States and abroad for several years. Now a resident of the Lake Merritt community of Oakland, he is a tax accountant for Cooper Laboratories and also hosts a weekly show called "Money Talks" on economics and finance over the local cable TV system. Ash believes that Oakland affords him a measure of professional attainment and mobility that he would never find in other cities. 

MAYOR LIONEL J. WILSON was born the oldest of eight children in New Orleans, LA. At the age of 4 years, his family moved to Oakland where he attended public schools and graduated from McClymonds High School. During World War II he served in the European Theater of Operations as First Sargeant, and was honorably discharges in 1945. 

Lionel Wilson received his Bachelor of Arts Degree in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1939, and his Juris Doctor from Hastings College of Law in 1949. Shortly after his graduation from Hastings, he began the practice of Law in Oakland, California. 

In 1960, Governor Edmund G. Brown, Sr. appointed Wilson to the Oakland Piedmont Municipal Court, making him the first Black Judge in Alameda County. Judge Wilson was serving as Presiding Judge of that court when Governor Edmund G. Brown, Sr. elevated him to the Superior Court in 1964. He became Presiding Judge of the Alameda County Superior Court in 1973. 

Lionel Wilson's judicial career was distinguished by his service as the Chairman of Presiding Judges of California Superior Courts, four term as the Presiding Judge of the Criminal Division of the Alameda County Superior Courts, and one year as the Presiding Judge of the Appellate Department of the Alameda County Superior Court. He was at the time, the only Black Judge to serve as the Presiding Judge of a Superior Court in California, or of the Apellate Department of a Superior Court, and as Chairman of Presiding Judges of California Superior Courts. 

Mayor Wilson's distinguished judicial career is matched by an equally distinguished career of community service: He is a past President and founding member of the Board of Directors of the New Oakland Committee, an organization composed of business, minority and labor leaders of Oakland. He has served on the advisory committee to the Alameda County Council on Alcoholism and the Alameda County Mental Health Association, as a consultant to Far West School, Chairman and Pesident [[President]] of the Oakland Economic Development Council Inc., the Oakland Men of Tomorrow, and the Charles Houston Law Club. Mayor Wilson has also served on the Board of the Oakland and Berkeley Branches of the N.A.A.C.P., and was formerly Chairman of the Legal Redress Committee of the Alameda County Branch of the N.A.A.C.P. and the same committee of the Berkeley Branch, N.A.A.C.P. As Chairman of Oakland's Anti-Poverty Board, Mayor Wilson successfully led the fight to make that Board one of the few municipal anti-poverty boards in the nation which operated independent of City government. While serving in that capacity during the years 1964 through December 1969, he organized and chaired the first formal pre-trial release program in the metropolitan bay area, known as the Oakland Bell Project. He also organized and served as the first Chairman of Oakland's first on-the-job training program - all of those activities occurred while the Mayor carried on his duties as a Superior Court Judge. 

Throughout his career, Lionel J. Wilson received numerous awards including:
-the N.A.A.C.P.'s West Coast Region Merit Award;
-The Northern Californis Medical Dental and Pharmaceutical Association 

Of San Francisco's 3 million residents, 400,000 (12 percent) are black, and 39.5 percent of the black families are comfortably middle class. The median income for a black family is a healthy $15,146, and the city's consumer price index for an average family of four is $247. The annual cost of living is $24,704 for a family of four, and only Washington and New York are more expensive. In one crucial category, however, San Francisco takes top billing, and that is housing. The average price of a home, says a recent Wall Street Journal report is $128,500. The median value of a home in the greater San Francisco area, median mortgage payment and median rent, are repectively [[respectively]] $99,000, $445 and $269. 

By choosing to live in East Oakland, Hardy was able to save between $35,000 and $40,000 as against the price of a home in San Francisco proper, and he is still only 25 miles (30 minutes by car) from the city. But Hardy admits to still another reason for wanting to live in Oakland, "Within 50 miles of San Francisco, you can find pretty much anything you could want," he says, "and Oakland represents the black aspect of that. It's a community with a strong focus on black identity."

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