Several events and ideas have caught my attention this gorgeous, perhaps too gorgeous, California February. Among them are the effort to redress the wrongs of urban renewal in Santa Monica, the use of the ballot to force change on homelessness in Sacramento, the intersection of education policy and building restriction in the Bay Area, and the disposition of a new City-owned greenfield property, also here in Sacramento.
Reparations in Santa Monica and 102 Acres in Sacramento
A news article in the Washington Post riveted my focus more than perhaps any other this month. It has to do with reparations for the construction of the I-10 freeway through the historically Black Pico neighborhood in Santa Monica, and it led me to a similar December article in the LA Times on the same situation. I have complicated thoughts about reparations, but this program seems like a no-brainer. It is targeted at specific harms, not at a quasi-religious impulse to expiate original sins, and appears to be designed at a scale a local government could (and should) engage. Specifically, the program provides around 100 descendants of Black residents displaced by freeway construction with access to reduced rents (though the rents will still be crazy high, more than $1,850 for a one-bedroom according to the Times.) The Post article describes similar efforts to compensate Black families displaced by mid-20th century highway construction in places as diverse as Illinois, Michigan, Georgia, and Oregon.
All this seems like a salutary trend. Maybe it could even be expanded upon? What if local efforts at reparations around the US could be placed explicitly in the context of an expanding housing supply pie—aggressively building more units on top of righting past wrongs. Let’s just say that I think this would be a good idea. (I’ve been obsessed with avoiding zero sum policy games ever since reading and reviewing Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us last year. It’s an important book for this year too.)
These wonderings, in turn, led me to some further musings about the future of the 102 acre property the City of Sacramento just bought in the Meadowview neighborhood. As a native to dense Seattle and a former New Yorker, one strong but perhaps naive musing had to do with how such a large undeveloped property could exist within the city limits so close to downtown for so long. Certain urban spaces get devalued I suppose, and this also connects to race.
Of course, the pressing questions have to do not with why the Meadowview site has remained dormant, but with its disposition for the future. A key person here is powerhouse City Councilwoman Mai Vang, a daughter of refugees and the first Hmong (and only second Asian) member of the Sacramento City Council. I was glad to hear, on reading the article linked above, that Vang is an advocate for addressing the immediate needs of the unhoused at the site. She also references the potential for “civic amenities” useful to all South Sacramento residents. After listening to Stewart Brand talk on Tyler Cowan’s podcast this month about How Buildings Learn, I’m hoping at least some consideration is given to the quality of whatever civic amenities are constructed, so that as the space evolves it doesn’t read to future generations as something disposable, a former empty field with cheap buildings and trailers. Then again, safe parking spaces for things like trailers are certainly needed! This will be an exciting local story to watch. (See this link for a YouTube video on design recommendations from the Urban Land Institute for homeless housing designs and support.)
Bay Area News – Schadenfreude and Anxiety
A couple of national stories emerged down I-80 in the Bay Area this month. The first relates to the recall of a trio of uber-woke school board members in San Francisco, each ousted by a more than 70 percent vote. Gary Kamiya, writing in The Atlantic, writes perhaps the most interesting account of the situation I read, one that strives for a complex viewpoint but concludes that this event demonstrates a true disillusionment, even among the most liberal constituencies, with a performative politics of racial symbolism. As a centrist liberal, teacher, and parent myself I can certainly say I am personally disillusioned by the way woke politics have closed down meaningful political discussion in the K-12 education space. I will admit to a fierce pleasure in learning of the recall, a jolt of political schadenfreude more pure than any I have felt in years.
But schadenfreude is an untrustworthy emotion. Better to indulge in my wholesome love for Robert Louis Stevenson, one of numerous dead white men whose names were targeted for removal from San Francisco schools. Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses is a sui generis triumph, despite a couple of poems that read as late nineteenth century (which of course is when Stevenson wrote them). The way my older son, age one at the time, responded to Stevenson’s intimate and subtly profound rhymed poetry as I walked him around Brooklyn and put him to bed at night in our little Ocean Parkway one-bedroom was one of my major inspirations for taking up poetry myself. Poems such as “Rain” to this day still fill my heart with intense love, and make me miss my brilliant boy, now a young man studying physics at a University of California campus hundreds of miles away from me. I stray, of course, but please readers, give Stevenson a chance. In the end it does not matter whether his name graces a San Francisco school as long as he is still read.
The second national story that emerged out of the Bay Area this month has to do precisely with The University of California. The story filled me with anxiety for my equally brilliant younger son, a high school junior, all his friends soon to apply to college, and all the dear and amazing freshmen in my high school math classes who will be applying just three years from now. The basic news item here is that UC Berkeley has been ordered by Alameda County Judge Brad Seligman to freeze enrollment at 2020-2021 levels, on the grounds that the university has failed to properly study the impacts of recent enrollment increases, among other perceived deficiencies in an environmental impact report. You can read details of the story in the local publication Berkeleyside, in The New York Times, and in many other news outlets.
Here is an issue where I do not see two reasonable sides. The University of California needs to be in the business of expanding, and expanding rapidly, at all its campuses. The State of California needs to be in the business of adding new UC campuses, not constraining existing ones. Residents near colleges and universities need to simply accept more student housing, and here I include my own neighborhood, River Park, which is right next door to a California State University campus. Would I support multi-story student housing complexes in my neighborhood and adjacent East Sacramento as long as they are well-designed? The answer is yes, bring it Sac State! The needs of young people are more important than the desires of homeowners to park directly in front of their houses or maintain a low density environment right next to the downtown core of a metro area with more than 2 million people.Â
The San Francisco recall is actually a good example of why the Berkeley story is so important, and so depressing. One of the big irritants driving the recall was around admissions to the elite Lowell High School. As the supply of seats at UC and CSU campuses becomes more constrained, competition to get into effective high schools like Lowell becomes more fierce as well, and education debates take on ever more of a poisonous, high-stakes, racially divisive quality. The same ridiculous but very real drama plays out around admissions to artificially constrained “good” high school programs in Sacramento like West Campus or the venerable HISP program at McClatchy. Not expanding West Campus and HISP creates a policy-imposed zero sum game with racial equity implications that are only negative. And not allowing UC Berkeley to grow is a straight up disaster.
The obvious way to deliver on equity, to put it another way, is not to scold, not to perform, not to constrain, not to cancel. Instead, it is to build. In turn, this means severely pruning CEQA and other environmental roadblocks to building. Do many on the progressive left hold these constraints closer to their hearts than their stated interest in racial justice? I hope the answer is no. But political leaders in California need to more assertively force the question.Â
Can Sacramento Manage to Build for the Homeless?
It took 410 days for workers to build the Empire State Building in 1930-1931. Historic photos from the British newspaper The Sun show that a good deal more attention should have been paid to worker safety regulations in the process. But I bring this up to highlight just how sorry our collective performance has been in regards to creating housing for unhoused individuals in Sacramento. I am not going to primarily blame the City government here—this is on all of us. We have a deeply experienced and passionate Mayor right now, the most capable urban leader we could possibly hope for. As can be seen in this link, the City has plans on the books to create 715 car and tent spaces, 562 tiny homes, 115 emergency shelter beds, 750 motel conversions, and 350 motel vouchers. Mayor Steinberg wants to create a first in the nation right to housing, something I support so long as requirements also exist for people to accept such housing once it is built.
But we are not getting the job done. Instead, just this past week, having failed yet again to build, the City reengaged the time honored but harmful strategy of busting homeless encampments. See this article in the Sacramento Bee. Or see this article from the previous week, which details plans by Daniel Conway, former chief of staff to Mayor Kevin Johnson, to force the city to create more than 3,000 shelter beds and camping spaces for homeless individuals. This same article notes that the City Council last summer “approved a plan with 20 new sites for homeless shelters, Safe Grounds, and tiny homes.” Then it goes on to state that none of the 20 sites have been opened (this is not a 100 story skyscraper, folks), and that staff have deemed some of the previously selected sites as not viable. To which last I call bullshit. I dislike the idea of governance through ballot measure as much as I dislike the idea of governance through the courts. I want legislative bodies to function, and executive departments to execute. But enough is enough. Conway’s ballot initiative looks to me like an act of desperation, but also very likely a good idea.