Weekend Links: May 13-15
DIY crosswalks, doomed lawns, and 8 other stories to consider in your quest to understand the Golden State
Greetings from What is California? HQ, where we are on podcast hiatus after a successful second season—but still very much excited to round up some of the most compelling, curious and eye-catching news from around the state. Where else can you expect to find the intersection of jacaranda trees and cryptocurrency? You are welcome.
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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:
An anonymous group is taking it upon themselves to create crosswalks in Los Angeles - Vanessa Romo, NPR
I’m a little late to this from April, but here’s a tasty tidbit of civil disobedience from the land that pedestrian safety forgot: Los Angeles, where police data shows 128 pedestrian fatalities in 2021—roughly one every three days. An anonymous group called the Crosswalk Collective has had enough, taking requests from the public via social media and surreptitiously adding unauthorized crosswalks to dangerous streets and intersections. This trend joins guerrilla bike lanes in the vernacular of do-it-yourself public works, and evidently, CC’s work has drawn interest from folks around the country eager to join the trend. “In response,” Romo writes, “the collective said they're going to put out a how-to guide that's going to include a standardized, professional-grade crosswalk stencil.” Love it! Stay safe out there, fellow walkers.
With Dr. Dre’s help, a new $200-million Compton High breaks ground - Jeong Park, LA Times
Nearly a decade after he and his partner in Beats, Jimmy Iovine, donated $70 million for a new music industry academy at USC, the hip-hop legend has given $10 million to help fund a 900-seat performing arts center at the new Compton High School campus. The project, which broke ground this week, is expected to open in fall 2025 and will also include “a new gym, an aquatics center, football stadium and track.” Awesome! But still—three years to build a public high school? Maybe that’s how long it will take to find water for it. Stay tuned.
Faulty charging stations hinder California’s electric car push, study finds - Julie Johnson, SF Chronicle
Anyone who has ever needed a charge for their non-Tesla EV while out and about has no doubt opened an app like EVgo or Electrify America or PlugShare to find a charging station. Then, with maybe 5 miles of juice remaining, you arrive at the station and find a busted screen on one charger and another charger that won’t accept your credit card. I used to think it was just me. Nope, reports Johnson: In a survey of charging stations around the Bay Area, researchers found “nearly 23% had inoperable screens, payment failures or broken connector cables. On another 5%, the cables were too short to reach the vehicles’ charging inlet.” And that’s in the EV heartland, where (theoretically) this stuff is really kept up. It feels way more dysfunctional than that in Sacramento. EVgo responded to the study seeking patience with an industry “still in its infancy.” (Electrify America didn’t respond at all.) Meanwhile, drivers in conventional vehicles have no difficulty finding functioning gas pumps to fill their cars with fossil fuel—at $6 a gallon. Not great, folks.
Facing a new climate reality, Southern California lawns could wither - Joshua Partlow, Washington Post
This story is amazing: A water district serving affluent Agoura Hills in Southern California has drawn backlash after insisting its customers cut water use amid unprecedented shortages. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars in their landscaping,” said a district employee serving notice at a house that consumes 40,000 gallons of water per month. “And now we’re telling them: you almost have to let it die.” Set aside the moral grotesquerie of all of this for a moment. My question: Has anyone ever told these people that grass doesn’t die? When it goes yellow or brown or whatever dreary color it becomes without water, it’s just dormant. Like, if only lawns died that easily—I wouldn’t be fighting the eternal war against the Bermuda grass and nut grass poking through my sheet mulch every spring. Do they think all those rolling hills of our state die every summer and are reseeded or something to go green in the winter? Anyway, I can’t recommend this article enough as both a reality check and a semi-shocking glimpse at a part of California as lawless and entitled as anywhere else in the state. For the rest of us: Water your trees, plant drought-tolerant native species, and mulch mulch mulch.RELATED: I loved this little bit of media criticism from water researcher Cora Kammeyer pleading for perspective from the Washington Post:
California wants to embrace cryptocurrency. But the industry is horrible for the environment - Justin Ray, LA Times
Every now and then you see or read or hear that cryptocurrency is a colossal contributor to climate change. If you’re like me, you might say, “Huh? How?” Ray, the estimable writer of the Times’ “Essential California” newsletter and recent What is California? guest, offers this accessible explainer to help better understand the phenomenon. Suffice it to say, the process of cryptocurrency “mining” that helps verify transactions uses insane volumes of electricity: “One bitcoin transaction uses the same amount of power that the average American household uses in a month,” Ray writes, citing the cryptocurrency authority Digiconomist. That doesn’t really square with the ambitious climate goals of Gavin Newsom—who, by the way, also signed a recent executive order supporting the growth of cryptocurrency transactions for businesses statewide. Such a paradox! Has anyone suggested pivoting to bartering? Clean, dependable, and probably all we’ll be able to manage in California by 2100 anyway.
How one California tribe protects the history of its land - Manola Secaira, Capital Public Radio
After decades of virtually unchecked development, encroachment, pollution, and sprawl in California, what does it actually mean to protect or steward tribal land in 2022? Secaira has a great dispatch from Lake County, where the Habematolel Pomo of Upper Lake brought on a “cultural monitor” to scan the terrain for artifacts and other evidence of tribal culture that might be disrupted by scofflaws or builders rushing to throw up the next subdivision or master-planned community. And the best part: It’s working! Even the local sheriff is bought in after training from the tribe: “It was only a few days after the 2016 training, which focused on some of California’s new laws, that the county charged a man who was found collecting Native cultural artifacts, alongside other concerns,” Secaira reports. Let’s hope this effort continues to grow.
New state legislator takes train between SF, Sacramento - John Ferrannini, KRON
Let’s hear it for Matt Haney! The new assembly member from San Francisco doesn’t own a car, but that doesn’t stop him from commuting to and from Sacramento via train. (He stays at a hotel during the weeks in session.) As negative as all the talk can be about the bullet train and other mass transit in California, it’s such a pleasure to read about a person who isn’t making dumb, toxic excuses about the futility of alternative transport. Not only does it work, but it’s got Haney ready to push for more: “We definitely need to plan for building a train that can go directly between SF and Sacramento, and fast,” he told Ferrannini. “A second Bay tube that allows for that direct connection is something I’m committed to fighting for.” (Tip: The Flixbus is also a very reliable, affordable option between cities.)
The Purple Tree Gods of Los Angeles Return - Brian Gallagher, NY Times (gift article)
Sorry to have so many LA-focused articles today! But this is the first What Is California? newsletter installment to come out during jacaranda season, which means a surfeit of stories about the stunning purple-blue blossoms currently exploding around the region. Gallagher delivers the best jacaranda content of the year, I think, ranging from history to literary impact to social media prominence.RELATED: If you like this, don’t miss Julia Wick’s memorable, definitive 2016 jacaranda feature from LAist.
RELATED RELATED: A wise admonition to any would-be jacaranda cultivators outside Los Angeles, from UC Master Gardener and recent What is California? guest “Farmer Fred” Hoffman:
California Targets Loud Exhaust with Sound-Activated Camera Enforcement - Emmet White, Autoweek
I was beside myself last week as some bozo tooled up and down my block in—no joke, no hyperbole—the loudest goddamn car I have ever heard. And not an arguably “good” loud, either, like an indy car that at least confers skill and performance. Rather, it was a pinched, soaring frequency punctuated by pops and hiccups and half-assed accelerations as the driver either lost their nerve or forgot how to shift. (Maybe both?) Setting off car alarms, sending dogs into paroxysms, etc. I sincerely almost walked down to the corner to just beg the driver:Get off my lawn.Please stop. I’m not proud of it, you guys! And I didn’t do it. Anyway. The point is I’m totally gonna get one of these sound-activated cameras to indulge my old-man opprobrium and get those shrieking-exhaust fetishists to think more seriously about what they’re doing with their lives. And then I can go back to my regular scheduled program of lonely, quiet weeping. I don’t care! I’m calling it progress.
And finally…
SF Milk Tea Shop Was Front of International Fencing Operation: DA - Sergio Quintana, NBC Bay Area
Is there a more San Francisco headline in 2022 than the one above? It’s kind of amazing. Either way, the bust at a Quickly shop yielded a trove of phones, tablets, computers and other electronic devices that the district attorney’s office says was largely stolen from vehicle break-ins around the city. If you see your stolen MacBook in the video, stay tuned—the DA’s website will soon post a way for you to pick it up. Miracles happen!
Thanks for reading, and have a safe, happy weekend!
-Stu