Hard Times in the Valley

It's hard to even know where to start with the farm crisis. First, there's the drought: several years of lower-than-average rainfall that have reduced the Sierra snowpack and therefore water deliveries to farmers in the Central Valley. Then, there's the fish: federal court rulings and various biological opinions that have required water to be diverted into the San Joaquin/Sacramento River delta to ensure the survival of endangered fish species. The combination of the drought and the biological opinions have lead to water delivieries that have been reduced by 90% or even eliminated. Farmers are plowing under fields or even cutting down orchards in anticipation of permanent water reductions.

Then there's the misery. Towns like Mendota, largely agricultural, have been flattened economically by the water reductions. Unemployment is officially at 40% but that doesn't even include those that are underemployed, and then there are the families. The foodbanks are out there weekly for distribution and even they can't keep up with the demand.

The problem is that even before the drought life in those towns were already miserable. Between the seasonable labor, the low wage, the pesticides, other forms of pollution, the lack of services, and just the poverty, the places were already pretty marginal. See the NPR article on the poor nutritition in the Valley.

I'm still thinking about what I think.

Hard Times in the Land of John Steinbeck Newsweek Business Newsweek.com

Mendota: A Town Scraping Bottom (SF Gate)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/25/MNQ718IAAI.DTL


Central Valley Disconnect: Rich Land, Poor Nutrition (NPR)
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106061080


Drought Adds to Hardships in California (New York Times)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/us/22mendota.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

Dying on the Vine
http://www.newsweek.com/id/211381

The Fultonia

The Fultonia.com Blog

Okay, the cool part of Fresno is The Tower District. It's a little northwest of downtown, sandwiched between the older Lowell neighborhood (more on Lowell later) to the south and the historic Fresno High School neighborhood to the north. Lots of homes built in the 1920's and 1930's, and a real mix of small bungalows and estates. Even the older multi-family units feel like you're in an up-and-coming area, with a lot of energy. And why not? The historic Tower Theatre is there, along with a couple of smaller venues, a good percentage of the city's clubs are in this one neighborhood and while it lacks great dining there are plenty of good, comfortable restaurants there.

All true, if you stay north of Olive Avenue. The south part of the Tower has all of the architecture and most of the charm of its sister neighborhood to the north, but as you drive south, closer to Lowell and Belmont Avenue that divides the two areas, things get, well, dodgy. The commercial vitality found along Olive disappears and the number of vacancies swallows the number of occupied units. But along Fulton is a collection of great mid-century apartment buildings, including the Fultonia, a late moderne building with a neon tower of its own, 10 empty commercial units along the street and most of the 39 apartments sitting empty, stinky and rotting.

The debate early in the year was what to do with it. The City (maybe) wanted to buy it for the homeless program, the housing authority looked at it and one property owner finally bought it at auction: Terance Frazier. Later in the summer we at the RDA agreed to make a $600,000 loan for renovation and the work is underway.

I've been out there a few times, first before the deal was closed and a couple of times as we put the agreement, to get a handle on the scope of work. On the first trip, the entire complex smelled like wet, dirty dog. Dog. Ugh. So we put that in the scope -- clean out all of the feral animals, including the family of cats that had taken up residence in the hallway behind the commercial spaces.

On the second trip, we got to look into some of the units, a couple of which were still occupied. I'm not sure what was worse, the empty, trashed units or the ones that still had tenants. One of the things I've had to get used to working in Fresno is working in really, really poor areas. Palm Springs has a low median income and a fair amount of working poor, but the geographic scale of the poverty here is really daunting.

The follow up visits have been a lot better. The funk is gone, the water damaged plaster is gone, and the contractor is busy rebuilding the entire place. The next challenge is to figure out how to make the buildings on either side get dressed up.

So there's hope for SoTow. We need to clean up Belmont, and any progress we make in Lowell to the south will help, and we're buying foreclosed homes in that neighborhood, too. Sometimes you have to go right at the worst property on the block. It's the right thing to do.

There's a link to the property's website embedded in the title (click on the title) and below is an article on the deal.

Business Street fresno

America's Smartest Cities—From First to Worst - The Daily Beast

America's Smartest Cities—From First to Worst - The Daily Beast

A few weeks ago Tina Brown's blog The Daily Beast labeled Fresno as the dumbest city in America. Ouch. First came the jokes, then the denials (we can't possibly have a collective IQ of 3, can we?), then the hand wringing, then something else. Acceptance? Sort of. Screw them? Sort of. Hard to describe.

But read the blog. Was the index unfair? It was intended to measure community brainpower. Was it unfair that they weighted the score 35% for bachelor's degrees and 15% for advanced degrees? What else should they have chosen?

One of the real keys to looking at the index is that they selected metro areas of a million people or more. Fresno itself has about a half million people and Clovis -- more affluent and presumably more educated -- about 100,000. Where are the other 40% of the residents picked up in the study? Most, living in surrounding farming communities: farmworkers.

I don't want to pick on farm workers. They have enough heaped on their plate. But large parts of Fresno and Clovis look and feel like other parts of California -- I can walk to Starbucks, Whole Foods and even J. Crew in 10 minutes -- but huge areas of the City are deperately poor. As a society we heap scorn on the cause and effect of education and income (the Ph.D. cabdriver was legendary before he became a Senegalese cabdriver) but the correlation between education and income is undeniable. Especially now that good blue collar jobs are evaporating in the recession.

The second half of the study, I think, is what really hurts. (Actually, I shouldn't even really call it a study -- it was done by the blog staff.) Non-fiction book sales, the ratio of colleges per capita, and political engagement. We should have scored better than a 3.

Anybody upset about ending up at the bottom should read the list, especially the top ten cities or so. College towns. Research towns. High tech meccas. For the most part, their agricultural history is pretty much behind them (though I think they still grow tobacco in North Carolina). We can dream, right?

(See the articles below.)

http://www.mercurynews.com/top-stories/ci_13569950?nclick_check=1