Dispatch from Foreclosure-stan
Come on down to Foreclosure-stan. We got brand-new houses for sale, real cheap, down at the county courthouse. On second thought, wait a few months and they’ll be even cheaper.
Yessiree, Folks, Come on down to Foreclosure-stan—San Joaquin, Stanislaus and Merced counties—highest mortgage foreclosure rates in the nation. If the motels are full, consider spending the night in the branches of the eucalyptus trees on M Street in Merced along with the wintering Turkey Vultures, not far from the auctions. Get a bird’s-eye view.
Local grassroots environmentalists, who once earnestly studied resource-agency biological documents on the endangered species habitats these new subdivisions obliterated, are now boning up on economics, psychology, sociology and local history, trying to get a handle on the growth cult that swallowed Foreclosure-stan.
Both the California Environmental Quality Act and the federal Endangered Species Act contain sections on economic impacts, but in Foreclosure-stan, economics were used solely to override environmental concerns to justify construction of the half-finished subdivisions that now ring the metropolitan areas with new homes, many of them empty. When a region’s only defense against a ruinous speculative real estate boom is a collection of environmental and public-process laws and regulations, and grassroots environmentalists are facing land-use officials obsessed with the growth cult, environmental law and public processes get violated and environmental regulation is corrupted. There is no “dialogue” across that frontier and some judges decide environmental cases on impeccable business principles. Although it is no solace to remember the comment attributed to John Muir – all things hang together – it is particularly apt when viewing Merced, where after a rain you can see Yosemite. All things hang together: the growth cult destroyed much agricultural land and wildlife habitat before it busted. How much damage will have been done to the local economy through loss of farm and ranch land and through foreclosure of subprime loads remains to be seen. Hanging is a kind of suspense.
Foreclosure-stan is contained within two congressional districts: the 11th, represented until 2006 by Richard Pombo, former chair of the former House Resources Committee, and the 18th. Pombo is now a lobbyist and the committee is once again called Natural Resources. But, his sidekick, Dennis Cardoza, still represents the 18th CD, which contains the core of the foreclosure problem: Stockton, Modesto and Merced.
In the old days, we called the area Pombozastan, in honor of the greedy duo’s repeated attempts to gut provisions in the federal Endangered Species Act that would directly benefit their developer contributors. In 2006, Pombo was assailed by former Rep. Pete McCloskey, a Republican and coauthor of the ESA and other environmental legislation from the 1970s, and what Pete didn’t do to Pombo in the primary, state and national environmental groups did to him in the general. Pombo now lobbies for developer interests intent on turning the Delta into a gated community. Cardoza was removed from Natural Resources. He does a lot of backroom work to weaken environmental law and regulation while muttering pieties about more Farm Bill pork for specialty orchards.
Home prices in Foreclosure-stan tripled in less than a decade before the speculative boom busted. In 2006, Merced and Modesto were judged number four and five nationwide for containing the least affordable housing. Meanwhile, our two relatively stable leading industries, dairy and almonds, are having their own problems. Dairy got a big price increase in January 2007 but what with ethanol and drought, feed prices are eating that up rapidly. Foreclosure-stan produces 80 percent of the world’s supply of almonds, entirely dependant for pollination on the timely work of honeybees that arrive early each spring from all over the nation and abroad. Lately, honeybees have developed a disconcerting habit of wandering off from their hives never to return. It’s called “hive collapse,” and learned scientists disclose that there are probably several reasons for it. The largest cheese factory in the country is leaving Foreclosure-stan for Dalhart TX, already attracting some local dairymen to the Panhandle. Hilmar Cheese announced it would leave shortly after it was fined several million dollars for having polluted the groundwater around Hilmar for years. Its interim solution has been deep injection wells to pollute the deepest aquifers of groundwater as a going-away gift to the region. But the giant cheese factory and its supplying dairies will have some real estate for sale, smack dab in the path of growth come the next boom.
The Main Street analysis goes: A lot of people (who haven’t already lost their homes) will lose their homes because their mortgages are upside-down. Banks will lose a lot of money on the upside-down mortgages. Then it will start over again. And this is the upbeat, positive and hopeful view of local business.
Local government, forever planning for the future, is putting out the message that revenues are going to fall, services will be curtailed, and gaggles of erstwhile boom boosters will be dispatched to the state and federal capitols to whine for public funds. This is happening because "development pays for itself."
Local land-use authorities were the only possible obstacle to the dream of turning Foreclosure-stan into San Fernando Valley in one speculative boom. Grassroots environmental groups argued and sued. The arguments and the lawsuits did not convince the local elected officials of anything but the pernicious nature of grassroots local environmental groups. The more compelling the public comment, the more articulate the legal brief, the greater the hostility from authority.
The big winners were owners of agricultural parcels near urban areas. Official farming spokespersons, representing farmers living outside the zone of mad speculative land-price increases muttered righteously about food security, the preciousness of prime farm land, the sanctity of the family farm, water supply and quality. Landowners up close to the boom made their fortunes. People who sold their houses at as much as 10 times what they paid for them a few decades ago also made out pretty well if they retired to the Midwest.
Foreclosure-stan is largely the result of a decade-long con game, in which fabulous propaganda and sales techniques were employed to utterly disorient the communities that inhabit this area. It began when the eternally youthful University of California administration and board of regents spied a $12-billion state budget surplus, which excited its edifice complex. This resulted in a high state of tumescence for 2,000 acres of donated seasonal pasture near Merced. The site was in the middle of the richest fields of seasonal wetlands in the state, wetlands that contained 15 endangered species terribly inconvenient to UC, whose biologists know more about them than any other biologists in the world. UC called upon its deepest flak reserves and declared they were building a “green campus” to serve the under-served minority students of the Valley (big emphasis on Hispanics who, according to UC, won’t leave home). So the first phase of the campus was erected (after numerous lawsuits), solar panels and all, in the middle of the fields of vernal pools. Incidentally, the ardent UC administration let on, it would also be a “high-tech, bio-tech engine of growth” that would transform the entire Foreclosure-stan into – you guessed it! – “Another Silicon Valley.” Then, the sidewalks outside the three Starbucks that miraculously appeared in Merced, the former cowtown, were filled with strangers on cell phones buying and flipping houses. Some made money. Others couldn’t find a chair when the music stopped. Meanwhile, any criticism of the UC Regents’ decision was labeled “anti-environmental” and probably racist, because of all the under-served minority students in the Valley that would now be served. Criticism was definitely anti-theamericanwayoflife, and since it all happened around both 9/11 and the national chiliasm, criticism of a deal like this was sure as Hell godless. So, a “green” UC community college opened its doors as a prep school for real UC campuses. Tuitions rose right along with Valley unemployment. We don’t hear much anymore about great tidal wave of UC applicants concocted by the finest demographic flak c. 2000. Academically, the rumor is that UC Merced is breaking new ground in grade inflation.
Melquiades, decked out in blue and gold, had arrived in Macondo, wagons loaded with nanotechnology. Hot damn!
The demand for the campus, like the demand for the housing, was manufactured by propaganda for the purpose of finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) special interests along with well-placed landowners. UC Merced was the finest anchor tenant for growth that money and political influence could buy. During the period of the boom, Foreclosure-stan and neighboring San Joaquin Valley counties achieved another distinction: they now vie annually with Los Angeles for the worst air quality in the nation.
All that UC has forgotten about rural California is recalled in a concluding line in Steven Stoll’s Fruits of Natural Advantage:
What unifies these thinker (critics of the land grant colleges like Jim Hightower) is a resistance to ‘commercial valuations of life’ and the conviction that rural places have a value apart from their capacity to produce export commodities. They recognize, moreover, that no other aspect of our relationship with nature is more important than agriculture. Farming remains what it has always been: the central biological and ecological relationship in any settled society, the source of our material production and human reproduction, and the most profound way humankind has changed the earth … the nature we have mixed up with ourselves, in the cultivated lands, in the middle landscape that we can still reclaim. – The Fruits of Natural Advantage, Stoll, p. 185.
FIRE agents were all over the backrooms of Foreclosure-stan land-use authorities, thoughtfully indemnifying them for any legal actions arising from their often actionable land-use decisions. But what we humble local citizens really enjoyed were the crews of “value-free facilitators” dispatched to ease our anxieties and to inhibit any sort of comment that might be construed as the least bit “negative” or “critical” about the speculative boom as it developed, gobbling up farm and ranch land, worsening quality of life, polluting groundwater resources, and contributing to public health and safety dangers (childhood asthma is a growing epidemic in Foreclosure-stan). We were particularly impressed by facilitators that told us we had to be like Ventura and Sonoma counties when some think we are so much like Argentina that Andre Gunder Frank wrote The Development of Underdevelopment about the San Joaquin Valley. Once, Merced County hired a pollster to tell us how she would design a questionnaire to measure the public’s true opinions of the UC campus. Before value-free facilitators could intervene, a member of the audience asked if, given the UC Merced campus memorandum of understanding with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, would she ask what the public thought about the possibility of nuclear weapons research in the county? This is just the sort of local rudeness the value-free facilitators were engaged to facilitate into a gentle coastal fantasy where the eternally young and wealthy gambol through heirloom orchardettes, chewing the leaves of the aromatic arugula and having real pretty thoughts.
We do not live in a value-free world. We’ve been colonized for two centuries on other peoples’ visions of wealth through the exportation of agricultural commodities – everything from hides and tallow to cotton. We’re just full up with aspiration. We don’t need “value-free” New Age organics and a “free-market” credit collapse. What we need are policies that take into account our history and that promote environmental, social and economic justice. We need policies that conserve the sustainable agriculture that exists and reclaims more of it from the factory models and the agribusiness latifundia. We need an agriculture as if the environment, the farmers, workers and townspeople mattered. Those sorts of policies do not begin with the slogan: “Growth is inevitable.” It would be more along the lines of: “Conserve and evolve our agriculture, our farmers, workers and local businesses!”
The Valley does not want to become the Flint, Mich. of agriculture and it cannot become Sebastopol or Oxnard. Merced cannot become Davis, however much our yuppies wish it so, without terrible environmental, social and economic injustice. The consequences of it becoming another San Fernando Valley are incalculably bad.
Foreclosure-stan has a proud tradition of struggles for justice beneath its “for sale” signs, dead lawns and traffic jams. Estanislao led the largest Indian rebellion against Mexican rule here. Joaquin Murrieta fought here. Farmers wrested control of river water from the hydraulic gold miners and formed the first irrigation districts in the state here. John Muir made his greatest stands and founded the modern environmental movement near here. Migrant workers struck here in the 1930s and one of the nation's greatest novelists, John Steinbeck, wrote Grapes of Wrath about that period, near here. Cesar Chavez fasted in the Modesto City jail during the Gallo organizing drive here. Foreclosure-stan has had a strong peace and justice movement since the Vietnam War. The most active eco-justice movement in the San Joaquin Valley continues here. Its mission statement is more than 20 years old and we find no reason to change it even if it has gone out of fashion among those too addled to resist UC and finance, insurance and real estate propaganda that this land is an empty canvas for every knuckleheaded land boondoggle:
CENTRAL VALLEY SAFE ENVIRONMENT NETWORK
MISSION STATEMENTCentral Valley Safe Environment Network is a coalition of organizations and individuals throughout the San Joaquin Valley that is committed to the concept of "Eco-Justice" -- the ecological defense of the natural resources and the people. To that end it is committed to the stewardship, and protection of the resources of the greater San Joaquin Valley, including air and water quality, the preservation of agricultural land, and the protection of wildlife and its habitat. In serving as a community resource and being action-oriented, CVSEN desires to continue to assure there will be a safe food chain, efficient use of natural resources and a healthy environment. CVSEN is also committed to public education regarding these various issues and it is committed to ensuring governmental compliance with federal and state law. CVSEN is composed of farmers, ranchers, city dwellers, environmentalists, ethnic, political, and religious groups, and other stakeholders.