In less than three weeks, voters in East Oakland will have a chance to greatly improve their representation at City Hall.

Councilwoman Desley Brooks has held an iron grip on her district for 16 years — and the district can’t afford another four years of Brooks. Neither can Oakland.

Many parts of District Six, which includes the Eastmont, Havenscourt, Maxwell Park and Millsmont neighborhoods, are bereft of the business investment and development that can be seen in other Oakland neighborhoods.

There aren’t cranes in East Oakland.

The district’s only bank, a Bank of America branch in the Eastmont Town Center, is closing its doors in December while the payday lender a few doors down will continue to prey on financially vulnerable customers.

The development of young people in the district has been stifled by poor schools and few job opportunities, and there are elderly residents who are struggling to hold on to their homes.

The district needs much more than Brooks’ beloved summer park concerts and holiday parties to keep pace with the rest of the city. The district needs a lot of things. But to get anything it needs, it desperately needs a change in leadership.

“We are hurting as a community. We are really at a crisis mode,” Loren Taylor (of no relation to this author) said. “If we wait another four years of the status quo, we will not have the community that we’re trying to protect.”

Taylor is vying for Brooks’ job. At 41, he’s a biomedical engineer turned management consultant who calls himself a professional problem solver. He’s a third generation Oakland native. The Oakland that Taylor’s parents grew up in was a city where working class families could progress from public housing to homeownership.

Oakland is now a city where working class families struggle to survive.

While much of the city is changing at a breakneck pace, District Six has operated as if it’s shackled to the past. I’m talking about a part of Oakland that was dramatically altered when the General Motors assembly plant, which anchored the Eastmont neighborhood, closed in 1963 to make way for a newer facility in Fremont. The closure fueled an exodus of people and resources from East Oakland.

White residents, attracted by low-interest housing loans, packed their cars and moved to suburbs. They used the newly built highways to commute to work. Without an anchor, East Oakland got strangled by unemployment, drug addiction and poverty.

The community hasn’t recovered.

MacArthur Boulevard, between 73rd and 82nd avenues, was once a thriving business district. It looks almost exactly the same as it did 16 years ago: boarded up storefronts, trash piled on the streets and young black and brown men perched on corners like birds.

The kind of leader who can overturn decades of neglect is someone who can attract public-private partnerships to spur development, someone who can effectively negotiate once they sit down at the table.

Brooks talks a good game. Her bruising brand of leadership makes for a good show at City Council meetings, but it comes at a steep cost to Oakland residents. A fight in 2015 between Brooks and ex-Black Panther leader Elaine Brown in a Jack London Square restaurant cost Oakland more than $2 million.

She’s difficult to work with, because she frequently hijacks council business. The tension at council meetings should be about the issues affecting the public and not the personality clashes of the people sitting on the dais.

Sticking with Brooks would be like an NBA team stubbornly running its offense through a plodding, slow-footed, one-dimensional player when the rest of the league is trying to match the uptempo, ball-sharing pace of the Golden State Warriors.

Supporters will say that Oakland wouldn’t be talking about equity without Brooks. Yes, but if Brooks gets credit for starting the Race and Equity department, she must also assume responsibility for the crumbling mess that is Oakland’s cannabis equity program.

Last week, I went to a district candidate forum at Praise Fellowship Ministries, a church on MacArthur Boulevard. Surprisingly, Brooks was absent. Without her there, the four others candidates — Taylor, Mya Whitaker, Marlo Rodriguez and Natasha Middleton — provided considerate responses to the moderator’s questions.

I asked Arthur Clark, the forum’s moderator, if he thought the district was due for a leadership change.

“I think the district needs a change in leadership style,” said Clark, an architect who was raised in the district. “The current leadership style is not working.”

In June, I reported on Brooks bullying Taylor at a Juneteenth celebration at Arroyo Viejo Park. This is Taylor’s first crack at public office, and he was advised to fight back, and to get down and dirty in his campaign.

He politely declined.

“I want to engage in this campaign the way I want to lead, and the way that I believe that we need in order to move forward,” he said. “And that is not by pulling folks down. It’s not creating the model of governance and leadership that I would want.”

How does he want to lead?

“We need to pull everyone together in order to apply resources, not just from within the community, but also outside of the community in order to help move us forward,” he said. “There’s a ton of underdeveloped, underused land and property.

“And we’re underusing our most valuable resource, which is our people.”

Putting the people first gets points for style.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Otis R. Taylor Jr. appears Mondays and Thursdays. Email: otaylor@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @otisrtaylorjr