Weekend Links: May 6-8
Boomer bummer, mariachi classes, and 8 other stories to consider in your quest to understand the Golden State
Greetings from What is California? HQ, and Happy Mother’s Day to those who observe! I’m celebrating by taking my mom on a garden tour. By this time next year we’ll all be living in The Road, so take advantage of these opportunities while you can. 💐
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.
ICYMI
This week’s podcast features a conversation about fire—the good kind and the bad kind—with Lenya Quinn-Davidson, a fire adviser with the University of California Cooperative Extension and the director of the Northern California Prescribed Fire Council. Please listen, share, and/or subscribe to What is California? wherever you get podcasts!
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:
Activists Helped Create the Bay Area's Most Diverse Congressional District. Now They're Probably Getting John Garamendi - Guy Marzorati, KQED
I really just wanted to include this for the awesome headline, which is one of those “if you know, you know” references for wonks of a certain age in California. For the rest (i.e. most) of you, Garamendi is the epitome of the California Democratic establishment—an avatar of the state’s entitled technocracy who just bounces from elected office to elected office on the basis of a safe, recognizable name and deep wells of donor and party support. The 77-year-old doesn’t even live in the brand-new 8th Congressional District he’s running to represent, which comprises Fairfield, Vallejo, Richmond, Pittsburg and part of Antioch—and which, Marzorati writes, is ”the only one in California in which white, Latino, Black and Asian residents each account for at least 15% of the citizen voting-age population.” Garamendi doesn’t see the problem: “Living in it is not important,” he actually said. “Knowing it and knowing how to represent it — in the district as well as here in Washington — is what’s critical.” OK, Boomer, etc. etc.
In the capital of Blue State America, a new ferment over homelessness - Scott Wilson, Washington Post
There are so many excellent reporters doing great work covering homelessness in California—particularly on homelessness in Sacramento. (See Theresa Clift’s indefatigable work on the beat for The Sacramento Bee.) Wilson is the latest to examine the city’s crisis, and he crushes it. His unflinching look at the tragedy of encampments along the American River Parkway—and local officials’ near-total futility in mitigating that tragedy—is worth the read alone. “If not for county maintenance and foundation volunteers, we’d be standing in a landfill,” said the executive director of the Parkway Foundation. “Why would you want to see one of the great amenities of Sacramento destroyed?”
California built thousands of new housing units in 2021. These cities added the most - Lindsey Holden, Sacramento Bee
But wait! There is new housing going up around the state. Among the many interesting data points in this piece:The fire-ravaged town of Paradise had California’s highest year-to-year housing growth in 2021, jumping 23% since 2020 with the state’s highest percentage of single-family homes.
Los Angeles made the Top 3 in both single-family and multifamily home construction.
Some place called Menifee (Riverside County? Anyone?) also finished Top 3 in single-family homes.
The 112,886 single-family, multifamily and mobile homes built in California in 2021 increased the state’s pinched housing stock by—🥁drum rollllll 🥁—just 0.7% year-over-year. Oh well. It’s something.
Ukrainian students arriving in California find warm welcome at schools - Carolyn Jones, EdSource
When I was a kid attending elementary school in the ‘80s, every year we’d meet a new handful of students whose families had escaped the crumbling Iron Curtain. Two girls I remember in particular—from Romania and the former Czechoslovakia—arrived knowing literally no English and went on to be at or near the top of our class by high school. Almost 40 years later, schools are welcoming a new generation of young Ukrainian refugees who’ve begun to settle throughout California. “This work is in our blood,” a Los Angeles Unified School District official told Jones. “We see that genuine smile and eagerness they have to learn. That twinkling in their eyes. And we will bend over backward to make those dreams come true.”
Mariachi classes connect CSUN students to Mexican culture - Mariana Montaya; photos by Sonia Gurrola, The Daily Sundial
Mariachi music has always fascinated me as a rich vein of Mexican culture that virtually every Californian recognizes yet which so few of us know anything about. So I was excited to happen upon this enlightening story from the CSU Northridge student news site, which takes a closer look at unique music classes on campus that I honestly wouldn’t mind taking myself. And how about this for intersectionality: “The classes are instructed by Carlos Samaniego, who is also the director of Mariachi Arcoiris de Los Angeles, the first LGBTQ mariachi ensemble in the world.” So cool!
How California created the nation’s easiest abortion access — and why it’s poised to go further - Kristen Hwang, CalMatters
Amid the terrible, terrifying news of the U.S. Supreme Court preparing to overturn Americans’ constitutional right to an abortion, California has pledged itself as a haven for out-of-state women seeking to end their pregnancies. But what exactly does that mean in the grand, tumultuous scheme of things? And why is California such a beacon of abortion rights in the first place? Hwang offers this fantastic explainer telling you everything you need to know.RELATED: An eye-popping map from the Guttmacher Institute shows how California can expect a 2,923% increase in women for whom the state is the nearest legal abortion provider. Absolutely outrageous.
A Texas woman needed an abortion. Here’s how far California went to help her - Anita Chabria, Los Angeles Times
The stats above are instructive and compelling, but check out Chabria’s affecting, angry and resolute account of what California’s reproductive freedom means in human terms: When a single mother of three in Texas unexpectedly became pregnant, she was turned away early in her pregnancy by a clinic enforcing the state’s draconian abortion restrictions. A friend recommended Planned Parenthood in Texas, which then referred her to the organization’s outposts in California. Planned Parenthood organized and paid for the woman’s journey to California to end her pregnancy. “It made me proud to be in a state that isn’t backing down from this ugly fight,” Chabria writes of the woman’s story, one of untold thousands to come for women in the states where abortion is heavily restricted or soon to be banned outright. “[I]t made me realize that we are far beyond putting on pink hats and protesting at a statehouse where the governor and legislators already have doubled down on making California a sanctuary for reproductive care.”
Can Sustainable Suburbs Save Southern California? - Emily Witt, The New Yorker
The long, hyperlitigated saga of development at Tejon Ranch—a master-planned community in the mountains dividing greater Los Angeles from the Central Valley—could fill a bookshelf. Nevertheless, as Witt writes, the development itself is really just getting started. But will its creators’ concessions to electric vehicle-charging stations, carbon offsets, and other sustainability measures really matter if Tejon Ranch just winds up exacerbating the sprawl that made Southern California the unsustainable megalopolis it already is? This is superb, nuanced storytelling about an almost mythologically desolate part of the state-turned-residential destination. (It also opens with the best description I’ve ever read of driving over the Grapevine: “As the highway ascends, the air cools and thins. Gas stations are few and far between, and drivers who make the mistake of thinking that, on the primary artery connecting Northern and Southern California, a gas station must be around the next bend will be eying the needle until Gorman, then paying a premium, shivering at the sudden drop in temperature.”)
Non-U.S. citizens could become police officers in California, if this bill passes - Martin Kaste, NPR
U.S. citizenship is not a requirement to join the nation’s armed forces. It is, however, a requirement to join a police force in California. That could change with the passage of a proposed law by State Sen. Nancy Skinner, who argues that if noncitizens can fulfill so many other professional—and military—roles in the state, there’s no reason to block them from working as peace officers. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out at California law enforcement agencies, many of which have complained in recent years of understaffing and low morale. If given the opportunity to draw from a pool of noncitizens, will they do it? And how many of those noncitizens will feel safe or encouraged to apply? Is this just performative lawmaking in Sacramento? Something to watch.
And finally…
Condors Have Come Home (PREY-GO-NEESH KEECH KE-ME’-YEHL) - Yurok Tribe, YouTube
Below, see the moment this week when California condors—once on the brink of extinction—returned to the skies over Yurok tribal lands in Northern California for the first time in over a century. What a time to be alive!
Thanks for reading, and have a safe, happy weekend!
-Stu