Weekend Links: June 10-12
Goodbye Chesa, parking insanity, and 8 other stories to consider in your quest to understand the Golden State
Greetings from What is California? HQ, where Elsie the HQ Cat and I are preparing for this weekend’s heatwave the only way we know how: With a cold-brew coffee and a roundup of super-cool Weekend Links from a busy news week in California. (Is that corny? It’s corny. I'm sorry.)
Programming note
What is California? HQ is closed for the next month as we take a much-needed break to recharge after a successful first year. I hope you get a chance to do the same. This newsletter will be back in your inbox on July 22, and the podcast will return with Season 3 later this summer.
Meanwhile, if you missed them, you can catch up with our Weekend Links archives here, and you can check out the first two seasons of the What is California? podcast—28 action-packed episodes in all—at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, or wherever you listen. Enjoy!
Welcome to new subscribers and followers!
It’s been amazing to see so many new folks following, sharing, and listening to What is California? here on Substack, on Twitter, and wherever you listen to podcasts. I’m grateful to have you here, and I hope you’ll stick around! If you like the show and the newsletter, please consider rating and reviewing What is California? on Apple Podcasts and/or sharing What is California? among like-minded folks.
On with the Weekend Links!
Meanwhile, I hope you'll consider checking out some of these nifty California stories if/when you are so inclined:
80 years later, Manzanar and what it stands for still resonates deeply - Donna Apidone, Capital Public Radio
In early 1942, following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the Roosevelt Administration ordered the forced transfer of 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes to internment camps. Nearly 11,000 of those Japanese Americans—men, women snd children—were incarcerated at Manzanar, a camp in the high desert of the Eastern Sierra. Apidone tracks the history of the camp and the threads of cultural interest that compel folks to visit Manzanar eight decades after it opened. (The camp closed in late 1945.) I remember learning about the dark reality of the camp when I read Farewell to Manzanar in high school, and I was stunned recently to mention Manzanar to another Californian who said he’d never heard of it. If anything in this state meets the criteria for “Never Forget” status, it’s Manzanar.
RELATED: The National Park Service’s Manzanar site showcases collections of historic photos by Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange and Clem Albers.
California voter turnout at 18% before polls close; Bay Area leads state - Sara Donchey, KPIX
I don’t think anyone’s too surprised that voter turnout for this week’s primary election was low… but this low? The 18% cited in this report on the morning after Election Day is a little higher than the Secretary of State’s official count, which was sitting at a pathetic 16.5% as of Thursday afternoon. That’s less than half the 37.5% turnout from 2018 (the previous midterm election-year primary in California) and nearly 10 percentage points below the garbage 25.1% turnout in 2014. There is a very good chance that this newsletter will reach people who didn’t vote. If you did vote, thank you!! But if you didn’t… what happened? Contact me for a pep talk. I am the elections hype man—vote, vote, vote.
Meet the East Bay Shop Cranking Out Warriors T-Shirts for the Finals - Nick Lozito, KQED
Years ago I went to a baseball game in Baltimore where the first 20,000 fans received a free Orioles t-shirt. It was really nice—kind of a beach-y vintage design with the classic Orioles logo (and some dumb bank’s logo on the sleeve, but whatever). The shirts were all XL-sized. I’m a bigger guy, so that worked for me. But my petite date took one look and asked the attendant if he had a t-shirt in a small. He replied, “Honey, it’s a ballgame, not a boutique.” I thought of that memorable shade as I read this delightful chronicle of the folks who locate and print shirts by the thousands to be draped over chairs and worn en masse by Warriors fans at Chase Center. It’s exactly the amazing labor and logistical undertaking you can imagine. (And yes, they’re still all one size.)
Dianne Feinstein, the Institutionalist - Rebecca Traister, The Cut
This block of stories comprises three fascinating long reads all rooted in the last half-century of San Francisco people, politics and policy. If that’s not your thing, I totally understand—jump ahead as you like. But it’s rare to get this kind of high-definition view on such a complex California arc, starting with a sobering look at our senior U.S. senator. We know from previous reporting that the 89-year-old Feinstein’s mental faculties have diminished to a point that’s affecting her work in the Senate, but Traister shows that diminishment in Feinstein’s own words and comments: In this new interview, Feinstein trails off, leans on her aide for key dates and details, and defaulting to “impenetrable platitudes.” (Not so different than a lot of politicians, but read it and you’ll understand.) For decades, Feinstein advanced moderate Democratic ideals in her role as San Francisco mayor and later as senator, overcoming the unfathomable tragedy of Harvey Milk and George Moscone’s 1978 assassinations to become one of California’s most important leaders. That ascent had historic results (including spearheading the historic 1994 assault weapons ban, which lapsed in 2004) while also finding Feinstein pivoting and groping for a consistent point of view on crucial Democratic issues like abortion rights. Today, as the Senate grinds through year after year of polarized gridlock, as autocrats in waiting eye the White House, and as the Supreme Court clamps down on rights from voting to abortion, Feinstein remains weirdly sanguine: “I think one great thing about a democracy is that there is always flexibility, newcomers always can win and play a role, and it’s a much more open political society, that I see, than I hear of in many other countries.” Oh.
Twilight of the NIMBY - Conor Dougherty, NY Times (gift article)
Technically this isn’t a San Francisco story—it’s a Marin County (just across the Golden Gate Bridge) story, zeroing in on one unapologetic opponent of new housing in Mill Valley. Her name is Susan Kirsch, and since the day in 1979 when she “stretched to buy a house for $112,500,” she has evolved into the archetype of a certain Bay Area resident who espouses all of the fashionable liberal ideology of environmental, social, and economic justice while embracing a steadfastly libertarian framing for local control of new housing (and, of course, preserving property values). It’s classic NIMBY (i.e. “not in my backyard”) stubbornness, but the difference here is Kirsch’s commitment to the bit. She really doesn’t want state leaders coming in with its new housing laws and regulations aiming to relieve California’s housing crisis. For Kirsch, local control means marshaling a two-decade effort to thwart a community of new townhomes proposed for a plot down the street from her house. Her organization has some interesting allies, too, including Bay Area anti-gentrification activists. Meanwhile, the YIMBYs are pissed, and Kirsch’s 86-year-old townhouse-developer archnemesis isn’t budging: “I’m going to win or I’m going to die,” he tells Dougherty. “It’s one or the other.”
How San Francisco Became a Failed City - and How it Can Recover - Nellie Bowles, The Atlantic
Arguably the most consequential news to come out of California’s elections this week was the landslide recall of Chesa Boudin, the progressive district attorney in San Francisco. Boudin’s recall launched a thousand takes about how and why America’s most liberal city would so swiftly exile a criminal justice reformer (some of those takes are more nuanced than others), and Bowles has theories of her own. “[T]he reality is that with the smartest minds and so much money and the very best of intentions, San Francisco became a cruel city,” she writes, citing open air drug plazas, unprosecuted thefts of cars and businesses, and people left to literally die in the streets. “It became so dogmatically progressive that maintaining the purity of the politics required accepting—or at least ignoring—devastating results.” It’s not just crime: Progressive school board members got the boot this year, too. There’s a lot going on here—leftists versus liberals, cops versus reformers, activists versus bureaucrats, NIMBYs versus YIMBYs, billionaires versus millionaires, even man versus nature (the Millennium Tower continues to sink and teeter on its foundation). But the one consistent thread is a total lack of leadership—a person or people willing to swallow hard, form coalitions, make sacrifices, and commit to the grueling, multigenerational policy work necessary to improve a city. Mayor London Breed reducing San Francisco existential woes to “bullshit” in a public address isn’t it. Boudin’s reformist evangelism wasn’t it. Feinstein did the work nearly 50 years ago, but her canny moderate positioning was a product of its time—almost totally unrecognizable in an era when the current mayor spends her time resolving if or how cops and firefighters will be allowed to march in the SF Pride parade. Like everything else that fails in this world, San Francisco has failed because no one will take responsibility for it. The far-right takeover in Shasta County will fail soon, too, for the same reason. Ideals aren’t governing. It’s like the developer in the previous item said: “I’m going to win or I’m going to die.” That’s not a sustainable state of affairs.
California mystery: Why does a small rural county vote like SF? - Mark Z. Barabak, LA Times
Onward! Let’s head to Alpine County, where voter turnout was actually well over 50% and defied the stereotype of rural California being secessionist fantasias of right-wing resistance. But why? “Is it liberals from the Bay Area choosing to cast their ballot from a second home?” Barabak writes. “Is it the Democratic-leaning Native American community, which makes up a significant part of the population? Is it Democrats moving in and Republicans moving out as people seek to live among like-minded partisans? All seem like plausible explanations.”
RELATED: In a podcast episode from Season 2, I discussed the nuance and novelties of rural politics with Stacy Corless, the immediate past board chair of the Rural County Representatives of California:
Sacramento spent $617K preparing to open a homeless shelter. Here’s why the plan fell apart —PAIRED WITH— Sacramento County to open tiny home village for homeless — Theresa Clift, The Sacramento Bee
No journalist in California does better work than Theresa Clift covering the civic response to the homelessness crisis. Clift is in the streets talking to unhoused residents of Sacramento, bringing clear-eyed yet empathetic reporting to readers. She knows the activists and nonprofit leaders influencing the discussion. She’s in city council and county supervisor meetings observing the setbacks and progress among municipal leaders. The latter was especially prominent this week, when the futility of Sacramento’s city council to make any meaningful progress on shelter for unhoused Sacramentans once again took center stage—that total failure of leadership, vision, and basic governing that I alluded to above. But the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors, seemingly against all odds, voted 3-2 to approve a community of 100 tiny homes to go up just outside the city limits. The deal includes sanitation and security presence, accounting for (at least some of) the concerns of neighbors. Anyway, I just wanted to note this glimmer of good news from a city (and, increasingly, a state) where it’s getting easier to feel like all is lost.
We’ve Got to Stop Requiring Parking Everywhere - Farhad Manjoo, NY Times (gift article)
Did you know there are only about 15 or 20 bike racks outside the relatively new Golden 1 Center arena in downtown Sacramento? And no new bike lanes or infrastructure on the streets around the arena? Yet the city expanded parking garages to more swiftly recoup its arena investment? This obviously rewards sprawl and congestion over low-cost, low-impact transportation modes, and so I’m on the same page with Manjoo: Rethinking parking is a great place to start when determining the future of cities in particular. Manjoo cites Disney Hall in Los Angeles—which has almost as many underground parking spots as main auditorium seats—as an example of how car-focused convenience has swallowed more sustainable strategies to serve more people. “[B]y requiring parking spaces at every house, office and shopping mall—while not also requiring new bike lanes or bus routes or train stations near every major development—urban-planning rules give drivers an advantage in cost and convenience over every other way of getting around town,” Manjoo writes. “We need all that parking at Disney Hall because, thanks to all that parking, we’ve made driving the city’s default way of going anywhere.” In other words, folks, the call is coming from inside the garage. At least add some bike racks to the mix!
And finally…
Local Rapper Hiway Gets Political With His New Track ‘Orange Cap City’ - John Ross Ferrara, Lost Coast Outpost
I didn’t know how much I needed a hip-hop video centered in Eureka, where an epidemic of drug use has resulted in the telltale orange caps of syringes strewn here, there and everywhere. That’s the bad news. The good news—as it were—is this spotlight on this embattled North Coast city, its haunts, and its habitués. Streets, shops, shorthand… you name it. There’s a salty, slightly tongue-in-cheek, but genuine Humboldt County pride here, and I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
Thanks for reading, and have a safe, happy weekend! I’ll see you in July!
-Stu