The County's COVID survey

Sacramento County recently requested answers to their survey of COVID responses. Here are my answers:

Describe the issue facing Sacramento County:

"The" County's issue is sprawl. Sprawl alienates people, separating them, and requiring every significant trip be in an auto. It also makes transit nearly impossible since it builds at low densities. Among its many "features" is an absence of affordable housing, oppression of poor people, and increased homelessness.

Yet we do not have a shortage of resources driving these awful consequences. For one example, San Francisco has five times its homeless population in vacant homes. The degradation and de-funding of the public realm--the space accessible even by poor people--is another consequence of sprawl.

None of this is necessary, but it's part of the multi-generational, bipartisan war on the poor. "And my class is winning" says Warren Buffett. It's unsustainable at best.

See here for more.

How has this issue been impacted by COVID-19?

The impoverishment of the public realm asks us to believe resources are so limited we can't address the problems above. The truth is that we have enough food to feed everyone, and enough housing, broadband, health treatment, etc.

Depriving part of the population these goods and services is part of "labor discipline." That sends the message that you had better take whatever crappy job is on offer, or you'll suffer the indignities of poverty, ill health, perhaps even homelessness and starvation. And if you're extra ornery, we'll put you in a cage. It's the whip in the hand of the plutocrats.

Currently, the U.S. is the world champion at incarceration, caging people at roughly five times the world's per-capita average, seven times more than the demographically-identical Canadians...and Canadian crime isn't worse than U.S. crime. It's expensive, and ineffectual.

All of these have been impacted by COVID. Government's payments to the population expose the myth that we can't afford to support people who need it. The public realm could be much nicer, but then it would deprive the plutocrats of the whip of labor discipline. Government's response has demonstrated the excuses traditionally offered are baloney.

How would you suggest the County address the issue?

 
1. Create public broadband, or make Comcast a "common carrier" that requires it to grant access to its infrastructure to competitors as a condition of access to Sacramento. Now it's in effect, a monopoly.  Competition would make service better (Comcast has won the "golden poo" award for bad service), and cheaper.

2. For infrastructure, homelessness and affordable housing, create a public bank that would lend for needed projects. Since half the cost of particularly large projects is typically financing, this could recycle our spending in the region rather than sending the money to Wall Street. California recently authorized such banks legislatively. And no, banks do not lend their deposits. They create money. The Bank of England validates this assertion.

3. Building pedestrian-friendly mixed use ("New Urbanism") would cut vehicle miles traveled roughly in half. Americans used to spend 10% of their income on transportation. Now, it's 20%...and 85% of spending on transportation leaves the community. Commutes make such spending higher, and requiring every driving age adult own a car is the most regressive tax we have. Viable public transit needs at least 11 dwelling units per acre to have enough riders within a walk of stops. Serving lower density requires subsidies.

4. Have the public bank finance multi-family dwellings in residential neighborhoods, as well as housing in shopping centers. Commerce and offices are suffering badly from online shopping which increased thanks to COVID, and "lifestyle" centers that include housing have per-square-foot sales that are as much as 50% more than sprawl, single-use commerce, so including housing would be an all-round win.

Citrus Heights already has a design like this for Sunrise Mall. The County could ensure such things are built there and elsewhere. A public bank could finance them.

5. Stop relying on law enforcement to solve social problems. Better to treat the cause: poverty. Poverty makes people desperate, if not crazy, and trying to handle a desperate situation after it's already reached its zenith puts our peace officers at risk. We don't need bigger jails, or more people "justice supervised." We've already proven that after impoverishing the public realm, punishment and threats don't work to increase safety in our communities.

One example of how we need to treat our problems: There's a school "reform" movement at large in Sacramento (Michelle Rhee's "Students First") that wants (union-busting) charter schools, merit pay (because teachers are so motivated by money!) and increased testing (to "measure" the schools' value added), saying such things would improve educational outcomes.

The reformers have even funded a propaganda film called "Waiting for Superman" (WFS). That film touts Finland's schools as the ones to emulate. And Finnish schools are very good indeed. Oddly, WFS omits mention that Finnish teachers are unionized, tenured and well paid.

Actual scientific studies validate none of the "reformers" tactics as improving educational outcomes. What does correlate with educational outcomes? Answer: childhood poverty. It's 2% in Finland, and 23% in the U.S. Addressing poverty rather than charters, merit pay and testing would be a different, wholistic approach.

Meanwhile, although crime, arrests and convictions have (long term) been trending downward, the County Jail is full. Why? It turns out that 50% - 70% of the inmates are there not because they have been convicted of anything. They are caged because they're too poor to afford bail. Yep, it's illegal to be poor in Sacramento.

The problems listed can be solved, but cannot not going to be solved overnight. They are typically systemic, rather than individual problems, too, so scolding the poor to pull themselves up by their bootstraps is both cruel and ineffectual.

The County could do a lot to address these issues, but wholistically, systemically, is the way to go. Trying to pick off a single issue here and there won't do the job.

Finally, our current land use planning apparatus (the system not the individuals) is designed to fail, and working as designed. It unnecessarily hands lots of money to land speculators while doing something that could only be called "planning" if that word were synonymous with "ad hoc scrambling to solve problems by shoveling money to the speculators." See my editorial from 1993...and nothing much has changed since then.