For as long as I can remember, St. Andrews Plaza in Oakland has been an eyesore, a drug den and a point of public embarrassment.

In recent years, the triangular plaza on San Pablo Avenue at 32nd Street had become an open-air haven for intravenous drug users who made their daily rounds in the neighborhood. It was the ending point of their well-traveled route: stop one, the metal recycling shop at 34th and Peralta streets to cash in on their “collections” of the day; stop two, a local drug dealer; and stop three, the plaza.

But the party is over for denizens who had claimed it as their own. The plaza now sits empty behind a 10-foot-high metal fence. The land has been graded and cleared, but most importantly, there’s a plan in place to renovate it for public use by 2017. I’m speechless — and that’s hard for someone with a drive-by mouth to admit, but it’s true.

Ray Kidd, who’s lived in the neighborhood since the early 1970s, didn’t believe the park could be transformed.

“I was skeptical,” said Kidd, who’s waiting to see if the problems that were once there return when the plaza reopens.

The plaza has stood for decades as a testament to urban blight and a metaphor for the city’s inconsistent and uneven response to even the most basic municipal issues — and a lack of civic pride.

Joe DeVries, an assistant to the city manager’s office, said he dealt with problems there for more than a decade, when the city helped lead a cleanup effort begun by community members.

“Our organizers had to walk the streets with seniors because (the seniors) were afraid to go on their own,” DeVries said. “Another resident slept with her foot against the door for fear of break-ins, and the neighborhood kids who attended Hoover Elementary School walked around the plaza. We had to move a bus stop.”

The renovation is being funded by a $465,000 state grant and will be a collaboration of city planners and neighborhood organizers who have worked for years to either close — or clean up — the site.

City officials built on the work of community activists who in 2013 commissioned a sculpture as a strategy to reclaim the space, but city officials wanted something more.

Final plans for the plaza have not been set, but some of its design is already approved.

In addition to the sculpture, city officials are working with local metal sculptors and artists to create a unique — and very permanent — fence to be erected around the site. The design will allow for a wide gate for entrance, but will be locked and closed every night — city parks and plazas close at dusk.

The working plan for the plaza is to use it for scheduled activities, everything from food trucks to morning tai chi or maybe a farmers’ market featuring Oakland-grown produce.

And for plaza denizens, city outreach workers have spent the last three months working to direct them to public services for food, shelter and clothing.

The city should not just stop with St. Andrews Plaza. Across town, city officials have apparently given up on resuscitating Tyrone Carney Park, another of the city’s miniature pocket parks that butts up against urban streets.

After a decade of violence at the park at 105th and Edes avenues, city officials have shuttered it for the foreseeable future, save a one-day event there last August.

Coming to terms with the metal recycling firm, which has been ordered to move, shuttering a blighted park and collaborating with residents to find solutions represents a level of coordination and forethought that Oakland city government has not displayed consistently for more than 20 years.

Finally, no significant Oakland project would be complete without the naysayers, in this case remnants of the Occupy movement who tore down a fence around the plaza last year and protested the gentrification of St. Andrews Plaza last week.

If Oakland, or any city for that matter, doesn’t have the right to reclaim a public plaza in the middle of a residential neighborhood that’s become a haven for drug addicts, alcoholics and the homeless, it has no decision-making authority at all.

Chip Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. His columns run Tuesday and Friday. Email: chjohnson@sfchronicle.com