It’s a hot summer day in Oakland. Ron Dellums stands on the steps of city hall , surveying the gathering crowd. Dark-suited, white-haired, and imposingly tall, the new mayor is possessed of a lion-in-winter gravitas, part kindly grandfather and part drill sergeant. He is on hand to unveil a citywide HIV-testing initiative, the sort of thing that doesn’t make the news but saves lives.

“We’re gonna educate each other, so we will embrace the idea of Oakland as a model city,” he says, “of Oakland as a city where every single human being has a right to a healthy life. We’re 400,000 people—big enough to be significant, but small enough to get our hands around the problem.” He’s used this line dozens of times over the past few years, but if anyone in the crowd is tired of hearing it, they don’t let on.

Spend some time listening to Dellums, and you’ll hear a lot about this “model city” and his quest to forge a progressive metropolis from the tired bones of the former one. At the risk of stating the obvious: Oakland has been a perennial underachiever, weighed down by crime, poverty, and drugs. Dellums’ model city posits a different Oakland altogether, a civic rebirth coupled with a determination to treat underlying causes, a fervent belief that all the dots—health, economics, housing, crime, education—must be connected for the city to move forward.

So far, Dellums’ citizen task forces are the highest-profile piece of the puzzle. From the onset of his campaign, Dellums has insisted that his administration will not make policy from on high so much as solicit it from below. Since his election last year, these grassroots groups of 800 Oaklanders have been meeting in secret to hash out solutions to the city’s problems.

It’s all part of a grand plan and entirely what you’d expect from the leftist Congressman from West Oakland, the guy who brought sanctions on apartheid South Africa and killed the B2 bomber. The only problem is, much of Dellums’ actual agenda is still something of a mystery. The task forces so far have yielded a weird mix of the substantive, such as the proposal to hire a crime czar for the city (which Dellums embraced) and the featherweight, like the idea to commission a PR campaign to make Oaklanders feel better about themselves (which Dellums is said to be studying). And the mayor has yet to declare his stance on development—the issue many feel is key to the city’s resurgence—save to quash a condo project in industrial West Oakland until a citywide rezoning study can be finished.

Then, too, no one seems to know how the mayor spends his days. Aside from some press conferences and town hall meetings, Dellums sightings are as rare as bobcats in the hills, and the press has hammered him for it.

His defenders say that’s just Dellums’ style: low-key and media-averse. But style or no style, others say, that’s no way to run a city. “I don’t know who’s minding the store over there,” says Zennie Abraham, a sports business entrepreneur who worked with former mayors Jerry Brown and Elihu Harris. “People have the impression that they’re just hanging out. They might be doing great things, but we wouldn’t know.”

Also, as compelling as the model city vision sounds, it has often been obscured by the more immediate concerns that dominate headlines here—the sky-high crime rate and the garbage strike that, for a month this summer, transformed the city into a simulacrum of Dickens-era London, only with palm trees. “The model city can come later,” says Ishmael Reed, the renowned poet and author of Blues City: A Walk in Oakland. “Stop the fucking crime.” Reed, who lives in West Oakland, says he supports Dellums but has little patience for pie-in-the-sky proposals. “The number one issue in Oakland is crime, and until that’s dealt with, all these visionary ideas should be set aside.”

But in the end, maybe the day-to-day details aren’t what people elected Dellums for. “It’s the overriding sense of inspiration he provides,” says Patricia Durham, a 30-year Oakland resident and cofounder of a youth scholarship nonprofit. “Sure, we need our potholes fixed, but we also need that larger vision.”

After the HIV-testing press conference, I’m sitting in Dellums’ press secretary’s office when the mayor sticks his head in to say hello. What follows is a tour de force, his entire worldview delivered in the space of five minutes. “We’re in the middle of the reurbanization of America,” he says, sounding a note of urgency. “And it isn’t gonna get any easier when we have more people. So we gotta do it now.”

As he works his way around to the model city, his face brightens. He’s almost bouncing on his toes. “We need to address the crime, the health services, the schools,” he says. “They’re all connected.”

I’m rooted in my seat, dumbstruck by the sudden onslaught. Plus, there’s that voice: silky, theatrical, rising and falling with the practiced cadence of a showman. He’s gesturing with his hands, riffing. There are no policy points here; there is only Dellums’ vision. But while he’s talking, I see what he sees. His model city is right there for the taking. “I want to harness the brilliance and creativity of the people of Oakland—I can’t do it by myself. This is the model city I’m talking about.”

“Hold me to it,” he says.

He winks at me and, just like that, he’s gone.