6 ms·

Why Is the Central Valley So Bad?

37 points by nsoonhui 4y ago

abernard1 4y ago
The author should look at himself and his class for why the Central Valley is so bad. The Central Valley population is the serfs of a political system owned by a group that hates them. Let's look at the blessings that class has brought: - Failure of MTBE additive which poisoned groundwater, had to be reverted, and will take decades to pay off adding ~$1 to CA gas prices - Pollution which flows downstream from Northern CA into a basin where it stays (those lovely SF winds blow that somewhere) - A patronage system that spends all of its education money and qualitative goods in urban areas while denying those same benefits to the valley. Instead, economy and society destroying welfare is handed out that has low social capital. - Political vengeance with diverting ~50% of available agricultural water to the ocean to protect for a variety of fish - Buying off districts with political pork so that CA could have a veto-proof majority and not have budgetary constraints with the R minority. You thought the bullet train was a bug?... it was the feature. There was no intent to ever finish that train. - Disabling of power plants via PG&E and a benchmark electricity rate that is based upon temperature ranges in.. you guess it, San Francisco. Combine punitive, non-linear prices with a location that gets in the 110s in the summer benchmarked on the temperatures of Northern California, their poorer southern neighbors pay substantially more in electricity. - Massive illegal immigration. Those statistics were just legal. CA has well over 8 million illegal immigrants and almost all live either as transients or in crime-ridden areas where crime is not reported because of political inconveniences. I could go on, but it won't matter. California hates the Central Valley, and hates the people in it. And that, coupled with sanctimonious how-could-this-be? ignorance is why I left.
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  > California hates the Central Valley, and hates the people in it. I live in one of the cities mention in the article and yes, this disdain is apparent. When I go to cons in the bay, I hate mentioning where I'm from. The look on peoples' faces ranges from contempt to disgust. California has always had a costal/valley divide. You can read newspaper articles from the early 20th century about how money shouldnt be spent on the then-new hwy 99 because those on the coast don't want to fund valley projects. The same sentiment exists in the HSR discussions today. That's one example, and for nearly every issue there is a similar costal/valley dynamic. We often hear of the NorCal/SoCal division, but for political issues, we really should be talking about coastal/valley differences. I have neither an explaination, nor a call to action, but I know that I often feel like an outsider in both places. Not everyone here fits a type, just like how not everyone fits a type where ever one lives.
  - diogenescynic 4y ago
    >I live in one of the cities mention in the article and yes, this disdain is apparent. When I go to cons in the bay, I hate mentioning where I'm from. The look on peoples' faces ranges from contempt to disgust. Completely agree. It's something I have also experience numerous times--especially in college where basically people from SF/LA/SD would be extremely judgmental and basically write you off just knowing where you grew up.
- masonic 4y ago
  >Pollution which flows downstream from Northern CA into a basin where it stays (those lovely SF winds blow that somewhere) The San Joaquin River flows south to north.
  - dehrmann 4y ago
    That comment was about car and industrial exhaust, though I'm not sure if the central valley or bay area is a larger contributor to it.
    - masonic 4y ago
      Downstream refers to liquids, or concepts. Perhaps "downwind" was meant?
- Lammy 4y ago
  > There was no intent to ever finish that train. Same as it ever was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mussel_Slough_Tragedy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mussel_Slough_Tragedy
boxmonster 4y ago
Life long Californian here: You have to be brain dead to think you can kayak down this river and then declare the Central Valley to be a waste land. Let me guess. The author is not from California but has bought into the California hate on right wing media. Or if he is from California he's got an axe to grind. He could figure out that the river was dry for long stretches before he set out to prove his point. Ludicrous.
- yellowapple 4y ago
  I grew up in Sac. If anything the author ain't anywhere near harsh enough.
  - boxmonster 4y ago
    So if you had a friend visit and say he was going to kayak down the San Joaquin you would tell that's a good idea while the state is facing a massive drought? Also, you need to spend some time in really poor areas of the country to get a proper perspective on how lucky we are in CA
    - yellowapple 4y ago
      > So if you had a friend visit and say he was going to kayak down the San Joaquin you would tell that's a good idea while the state is facing a massive drought? I have no idea what that has to do with my comment. In any case, whether people kayak on water that's already flowing out to sea has just about zero bearing on the drought. > Also, you need to spend some time in really poor areas of the country to get a proper perspective on how lucky we are in CA The coasts are lucky(-ish, depending on whether or not you own land). The valley, per the article's calculations, is literally one of those "poor areas of the country".
- sn0w_crash 4y ago
  When will people stop associating $DifferenceOfOpinion with “right wing media” ?
  - 4y ago
yellowapple 4y ago
I grew up in Sacramento - well, one of its suburbs, aside from a brief time after my parents split and my dad moved to Sacramento proper (and then eventually moved back after meeting my now-stepmom and her daughters / my now-sisters). One thing the article doesn't seem to mention at all is the 2008 financial crisis. The Sacramento area got hit hard, especially suburbs like mine. My specific hometown, Elk Grove, rapidly expanded from being mostly farmland when I was a kid to being the poster child of suburban sprawl when I was a teenager. The population exploded, the housing supply exploded (and got outstripped by demand), and then in 2007/2008 it all came crashing down, with foreclosures and vacancies and squatters everywhere. I can imagine other Central Valley cities got hit similarly hard. The article mentions people commuting from Central Valley cities to coastal cities. My dad was one of 'em for awhile, commuting from Sacramento to the Rite-Aid he managed on Van Ness in SF. He wasn't rich, and at the time neither was my mom; living closer to SF was out of the question even back then (especially after they divorced). My stepmom and her parents had emigrated from SF to Sac before meeting my dad, and she worked at the same store, making the same commute (and that's how they met, and were soon happily married 'til death did them part when he passed in May this year). It was indeed a long commute, leaving home before sunrise and getting back after sunset. All in all, even Sacramento was kind of a shithole, let alone the rest of the Valley. Now it's an even more expensive shithole. I ended up leaving to work my first job (because few employers in Sac were willing to hire a high school graduate when they're being flooded with college graduate applicants), and I haven't really looked back; decent memories, but neither the present nor future are appealing - especially when it looks like we're on the verge of another 2008.
- _8j50 4y ago
  Fyi, it does mention the 08 recession in the video.
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago
  Damn, imagine having to spend so much of your life grinding just to give your kids a life in the shitty suburbs with an insane commute, and then somehow still being priced out a decade later. The US working class is so fucked
wrycoder 4y ago
Victor Davis Hanson has written about this at length in his books[0][1][2] [0] Fields Without Dreams [1] Mexifornia, a State of Becoming [2] The Land Was Everything: Letters From An American Farmer
syntheweave 4y ago
I agree with the other comments, as someone who grew up in SF - there is a longstanding tendency to disparage the Central Valley farm towns, and even the central coast, as "places you go to get stabbed". Simultaneously there is total reliance on those farms for the excellent, year-round produce. And there's a political nexus that isn't mentioned in the article, which is the massive post-60's policy shifts that have remained the norms ever since. In the early 60's, there was still a Bracero program. By the mid-70's the farm owners were bussing in illegal immigrants, and the "drug wars" had started, helping to keep those countries destabilized and easy to draw workers from. Agribusiness deals in commodities, so unless there's coordinated top-down enforcement of standards and practices, it quickly converges on exploitation or automation to remain price-competitive. The 70's saw an energy crunch; appetite to attempt further mechanization for fruits and the like would have been limited, if it were even possible. Today's inflationary environment, battery EV and robotics suggests we're due for a rethink of that, which would completely upend longstanding narratives around immigration. The growth of the South Bay is likewise instructive; it used to be a fruit orchard. But post-war, it picked up steam as a military-industrial hub, from which Silicon Valley emerged, again with the 70's marking a certain turning point as computing started to access a mass market, at first with integrated circuit devices and then with microprocessors. That was a better business to be in, after all; a lot of land got sold off and developed, and San Jose eagerly annexed everything around it to become the big city of the area while the Peninsula cities mixed the high-end talent from Stanford with an emerging VC business. Again, a largely unchanged dynamic until very recently. California HSR has the goal of linking the Valley with the coast cities. One hypothesis would be that this would revitalize those cities and bring them into the urban ecosystem of the coast. Another is to look at Japan's Shinkansen experience and say, "all cities are suburbs of Tokyo", i.e. living in Fresno, you'd most likely be a supercommuter who uses the train to get to SF or LA, but is still effectively "off the map" in terms of local vitality.
_8j50 4y ago
One thing the guy who interviewed said that I have heard other californians say is how liberals and liberal cities are at fault. You have liberals in NY and you don't see this. In reality it is a money and jobs problem, liberals didn't cause the 08 crash or climate change related drought that killed the ag industry (I am not a liberal or conservative for the record). What I have also noticed with people that have this sentiment is they have some group to blame, not a solution. Would farming more profitable cashcrops or moving away at least paritally from agriculture help? Would better housing decelopemnt (more housing density but at a competitive price, not for thr poor) bring housing costs down? Also, central valley feels a lot like conservatice states as thr article points out. That includes intolerance to other people and ideas.
- diogenescynic 4y ago
  Since the passage of Prop 46 and 47, the Central Valley has become exponentially worse. I grew up near Fresno and you never ever saw the level crime, homelessness, and open drug use that is completely accepted now. People in the Central Valley resent that those laws were passed by liberals in SF and LA and now the Central Valley can't even address the crime situation. Similarly, I've seen tons of YouTube videos where people in Boston, SF, San Francisco say we should have open borders and allow all immigrants--but that they should settle in rural areas (i.e. republican areas) because their cities are too crowded already. It's easy to pass ideological laws when you work in a nice office park, or in your Ivory tower in Mill Valley or Nob Hill--but there are a lot of people now who work low level jobs and now have homeless tweakers living outside their house--something that was not a problem even a decade ago. California is sabotaging and self-destructing. None of the progressive laws have improved people's quality of life--they've had the opposite impact for most. But as democrats have increasingly become an elitist and PMC focused political party, they don't care that there is rising black on Asian crime, homeless people in nearly ever public space, and shoplifting and open drug use are not just status quo parts of SF. I say this all as a Bernie voter and someone who has NEVER voted republican, but I have lived all over California and have a pretty good sense of how typical SF citizens misunderstand what's really pissing people off in the Central Valley. It's not all guns and abortion--it's about what actually impacts them and their kids.
dehrmann 4y ago
> Fruits, vegetables, and nuts benefit from intensive manual picking, so farm owners hire outside labor. Nit: nut harvesting is heavily automated. This is a pretty good overview of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql9NIPilcPI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql9NIPilcPI
nullc 4y ago
If you draw a polygon around the poorest contiguous region of 5% of the population of any state ... won't you also likely end up with a area with a median income below Mississippi? Forget the contiguous geographic restriction for a moment, if I instead said the median of income in the poorest 5% of California was less than the median income of Mississippi would anyone find that surprising in the slightest? What about the poorest 5% of counties having a median income less than mississippi? Still not surprising. Requiring the contiguous areas would increase the income somewhat-- but we know that activities and income are not geographically independent.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  I get why you think the boundary is unfair, but the choice wasn't gerrymandered, it's 1/3 the size of Mississippi, has a larger population, and 2M+ people in it are in medium to large cities. It's fair to look at it as a region, though unlike Mississippi, does have places with 2 hour commutes to rich, world-class cities.

37 points by nsoonhui 4y ago

The author should look at himself and his class for why the Central Valley is so bad. The Central Valley population is the serfs of a political system owned by a group that hates them. Let's look at the blessings that class has brought: - Failure of MTBE additive which poisoned groundwater, had to be reverted, and will take decades to pay off adding ~$1 to CA gas prices - Pollution which flows downstream from Northern CA into a basin where it stays (those lovely SF winds blow that somewhere) - A patronage system that spends all of its education money and qualitative goods in urban areas while denying those same benefits to the valley. Instead, economy and society destroying welfare is handed out that has low social capital. - Political vengeance with diverting ~50% of available agricultural water to the ocean to protect for a variety of fish - Buying off districts with political pork so that CA could have a veto-proof majority and not have budgetary constraints with the R minority. You thought the bullet train was a bug?... it was the feature. There was no intent to ever finish that train. - Disabling of power plants via PG&E and a benchmark electricity rate that is based upon temperature ranges in.. you guess it, San Francisco. Combine punitive, non-linear prices with a location that gets in the 110s in the summer benchmarked on the temperatures of Northern California, their poorer southern neighbors pay substantially more in electricity. - Massive illegal immigration. Those statistics were just legal. CA has well over 8 million illegal immigrants and almost all live either as transients or in crime-ridden areas where crime is not reported because of political inconveniences. I could go on, but it won't matter. California hates the Central Valley, and hates the people in it. And that, coupled with sanctimonious how-could-this-be? ignorance is why I left.

kelseyfrog 4y ago
> California hates the Central Valley, and hates the people in it. I live in one of the cities mention in the article and yes, this disdain is apparent. When I go to cons in the bay, I hate mentioning where I'm from. The look on peoples' faces ranges from contempt to disgust. California has always had a costal/valley divide. You can read newspaper articles from the early 20th century about how money shouldnt be spent on the then-new hwy 99 because those on the coast don't want to fund valley projects. The same sentiment exists in the HSR discussions today. That's one example, and for nearly every issue there is a similar costal/valley dynamic. We often hear of the NorCal/SoCal division, but for political issues, we really should be talking about coastal/valley differences. I have neither an explaination, nor a call to action, but I know that I often feel like an outsider in both places. Not everyone here fits a type, just like how not everyone fits a type where ever one lives.
- diogenescynic 4y ago
  >I live in one of the cities mention in the article and yes, this disdain is apparent. When I go to cons in the bay, I hate mentioning where I'm from. The look on peoples' faces ranges from contempt to disgust. Completely agree. It's something I have also experience numerous times--especially in college where basically people from SF/LA/SD would be extremely judgmental and basically write you off just knowing where you grew up.
masonic 4y ago
>Pollution which flows downstream from Northern CA into a basin where it stays (those lovely SF winds blow that somewhere) The San Joaquin River flows south to north.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  That comment was about car and industrial exhaust, though I'm not sure if the central valley or bay area is a larger contributor to it.
  - masonic 4y ago
    Downstream refers to liquids, or concepts. Perhaps "downwind" was meant?
Lammy 4y ago
> There was no intent to ever finish that train. Same as it ever was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mussel_Slough_Tragedy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mussel_Slough_Tragedy

boxmonster 4y ago

Life long Californian here: You have to be brain dead to think you can kayak down this river and then declare the Central Valley to be a waste land. Let me guess. The author is not from California but has bought into the California hate on right wing media. Or if he is from California he's got an axe to grind. He could figure out that the river was dry for long stretches before he set out to prove his point. Ludicrous.

yellowapple 4y ago
I grew up in Sac. If anything the author ain't anywhere near harsh enough.
- boxmonster 4y ago
  So if you had a friend visit and say he was going to kayak down the San Joaquin you would tell that's a good idea while the state is facing a massive drought? Also, you need to spend some time in really poor areas of the country to get a proper perspective on how lucky we are in CA
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    > So if you had a friend visit and say he was going to kayak down the San Joaquin you would tell that's a good idea while the state is facing a massive drought? I have no idea what that has to do with my comment. In any case, whether people kayak on water that's already flowing out to sea has just about zero bearing on the drought. > Also, you need to spend some time in really poor areas of the country to get a proper perspective on how lucky we are in CA The coasts are lucky(-ish, depending on whether or not you own land). The valley, per the article's calculations, is literally one of those "poor areas of the country".
sn0w_crash 4y ago
When will people stop associating $DifferenceOfOpinion with “right wing media” ?
- 4y ago

yellowapple 4y ago

I grew up in Sacramento - well, one of its suburbs, aside from a brief time after my parents split and my dad moved to Sacramento proper (and then eventually moved back after meeting my now-stepmom and her daughters / my now-sisters). One thing the article doesn't seem to mention at all is the 2008 financial crisis. The Sacramento area got hit hard, especially suburbs like mine. My specific hometown, Elk Grove, rapidly expanded from being mostly farmland when I was a kid to being the poster child of suburban sprawl when I was a teenager. The population exploded, the housing supply exploded (and got outstripped by demand), and then in 2007/2008 it all came crashing down, with foreclosures and vacancies and squatters everywhere. I can imagine other Central Valley cities got hit similarly hard. The article mentions people commuting from Central Valley cities to coastal cities. My dad was one of 'em for awhile, commuting from Sacramento to the Rite-Aid he managed on Van Ness in SF. He wasn't rich, and at the time neither was my mom; living closer to SF was out of the question even back then (especially after they divorced). My stepmom and her parents had emigrated from SF to Sac before meeting my dad, and she worked at the same store, making the same commute (and that's how they met, and were soon happily married 'til death did them part when he passed in May this year). It was indeed a long commute, leaving home before sunrise and getting back after sunset. All in all, even Sacramento was kind of a shithole, let alone the rest of the Valley. Now it's an even more expensive shithole. I ended up leaving to work my first job (because few employers in Sac were willing to hire a high school graduate when they're being flooded with college graduate applicants), and I haven't really looked back; decent memories, but neither the present nor future are appealing - especially when it looks like we're on the verge of another 2008.

_8j50 4y ago
Fyi, it does mention the 08 recession in the video.
SQueeeeeL 4y ago
Damn, imagine having to spend so much of your life grinding just to give your kids a life in the shitty suburbs with an insane commute, and then somehow still being priced out a decade later. The US working class is so fucked

wrycoder 4y ago

Victor Davis Hanson has written about this at length in his books[0][1][2] [0] Fields Without Dreams [1] Mexifornia, a State of Becoming [2] The Land Was Everything: Letters From An American Farmer

syntheweave 4y ago

I agree with the other comments, as someone who grew up in SF - there is a longstanding tendency to disparage the Central Valley farm towns, and even the central coast, as "places you go to get stabbed". Simultaneously there is total reliance on those farms for the excellent, year-round produce. And there's a political nexus that isn't mentioned in the article, which is the massive post-60's policy shifts that have remained the norms ever since. In the early 60's, there was still a Bracero program. By the mid-70's the farm owners were bussing in illegal immigrants, and the "drug wars" had started, helping to keep those countries destabilized and easy to draw workers from. Agribusiness deals in commodities, so unless there's coordinated top-down enforcement of standards and practices, it quickly converges on exploitation or automation to remain price-competitive. The 70's saw an energy crunch; appetite to attempt further mechanization for fruits and the like would have been limited, if it were even possible. Today's inflationary environment, battery EV and robotics suggests we're due for a rethink of that, which would completely upend longstanding narratives around immigration. The growth of the South Bay is likewise instructive; it used to be a fruit orchard. But post-war, it picked up steam as a military-industrial hub, from which Silicon Valley emerged, again with the 70's marking a certain turning point as computing started to access a mass market, at first with integrated circuit devices and then with microprocessors. That was a better business to be in, after all; a lot of land got sold off and developed, and San Jose eagerly annexed everything around it to become the big city of the area while the Peninsula cities mixed the high-end talent from Stanford with an emerging VC business. Again, a largely unchanged dynamic until very recently. California HSR has the goal of linking the Valley with the coast cities. One hypothesis would be that this would revitalize those cities and bring them into the urban ecosystem of the coast. Another is to look at Japan's Shinkansen experience and say, "all cities are suburbs of Tokyo", i.e. living in Fresno, you'd most likely be a supercommuter who uses the train to get to SF or LA, but is still effectively "off the map" in terms of local vitality.

_8j50 4y ago

One thing the guy who interviewed said that I have heard other californians say is how liberals and liberal cities are at fault. You have liberals in NY and you don't see this. In reality it is a money and jobs problem, liberals didn't cause the 08 crash or climate change related drought that killed the ag industry (I am not a liberal or conservative for the record). What I have also noticed with people that have this sentiment is they have some group to blame, not a solution. Would farming more profitable cashcrops or moving away at least paritally from agriculture help? Would better housing decelopemnt (more housing density but at a competitive price, not for thr poor) bring housing costs down? Also, central valley feels a lot like conservatice states as thr article points out. That includes intolerance to other people and ideas.

diogenescynic 4y ago
Since the passage of Prop 46 and 47, the Central Valley has become exponentially worse. I grew up near Fresno and you never ever saw the level crime, homelessness, and open drug use that is completely accepted now. People in the Central Valley resent that those laws were passed by liberals in SF and LA and now the Central Valley can't even address the crime situation. Similarly, I've seen tons of YouTube videos where people in Boston, SF, San Francisco say we should have open borders and allow all immigrants--but that they should settle in rural areas (i.e. republican areas) because their cities are too crowded already. It's easy to pass ideological laws when you work in a nice office park, or in your Ivory tower in Mill Valley or Nob Hill--but there are a lot of people now who work low level jobs and now have homeless tweakers living outside their house--something that was not a problem even a decade ago. California is sabotaging and self-destructing. None of the progressive laws have improved people's quality of life--they've had the opposite impact for most. But as democrats have increasingly become an elitist and PMC focused political party, they don't care that there is rising black on Asian crime, homeless people in nearly ever public space, and shoplifting and open drug use are not just status quo parts of SF. I say this all as a Bernie voter and someone who has NEVER voted republican, but I have lived all over California and have a pretty good sense of how typical SF citizens misunderstand what's really pissing people off in the Central Valley. It's not all guns and abortion--it's about what actually impacts them and their kids.

dehrmann 4y ago

> Fruits, vegetables, and nuts benefit from intensive manual picking, so farm owners hire outside labor. Nit: nut harvesting is heavily automated. This is a pretty good overview of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql9NIPilcPI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql9NIPilcPI

nullc 4y ago

If you draw a polygon around the poorest contiguous region of 5% of the population of any state ... won't you also likely end up with a area with a median income below Mississippi? Forget the contiguous geographic restriction for a moment, if I instead said the median of income in the poorest 5% of California was less than the median income of Mississippi would anyone find that surprising in the slightest? What about the poorest 5% of counties having a median income less than mississippi? Still not surprising. Requiring the contiguous areas would increase the income somewhat-- but we know that activities and income are not geographically independent.

dehrmann 4y ago
I get why you think the boundary is unfair, but the choice wasn't gerrymandered, it's 1/3 the size of Mississippi, has a larger population, and 2M+ people in it are in medium to large cities. It's fair to look at it as a region, though unlike Mississippi, does have places with 2 hour commutes to rich, world-class cities.