Vehicularization

It's amazing how much effort we're expending on the news and the reporting of Toyota's sticky pedals...all for the prevention of a few dozen deaths, tops. Tops! I find it amazing because at the same time I routinely watch all my Elk Grovian neighbors speeding through our neighborhood streets as if every pedal was stuck to the floorboard. It is highly likely that you are one of them, simply based on the numbers.

We'll spend tens of millions in full page newspaper apologies advertisements and lost stock values and feigned CEO caterwauling and mechanic's overtime pay addressing this "safety" issue, and then, when your Toyota is finally fixed you'll go out and drive it like a complete shithead. You'll speed along our collector roads and a few of you will find yourselves involved in pedestrian fatalities or will have taken the curve too fast and will wrap yourself around a tree, into a garage door, or into a living room. You'll accelerate your beautiful Toyota vehicle quickly, increasing your gas consumption, while braking excessively, increasing your brake wear.

Indeed, far, far more of us will lose our lives to the way we drive than the problems with what we drive, yet we focus our attentions on these [mostly] trivial things that don't really matter. But we live in an autocentric nation and we build places to live that mandate vehicularization, and foolishly assume suburban Elk Grove is safe because of the way we've built it. It's safe! And safety is everything! Keep our children safe! Safe schools! Safe cars! Safe parks! Yet, the single most preventable thing we could do to promote safety in Elk Grove we refuse to do -- build roads and environments that don't promote driving like assholes. Suburbia fails for precisely this reason; traffic accidents are the most preventable cause of death while we make the ridiculous claim that suburbia is safe.

But, we value the ability to speed through wide residential streets more than the value of our neighbor's or our own lives. We live so far from the places we need to go that to speed to make up all that lost time is rationalized. We collectively accept the consequences of these actions. No big deal, we say.

Friends Of Madeira

I will be highly entertained over the next few months, perhaps years, watching a local group of housal unit owners fight the proposal to add a second WalMart here in our little Elk Grovian burg.

The Friends of Madeira (FoM) has sued the city. The store location was originally studied and approved in 2008 for a 150,000 sq ft Target, but the corporation sold off the land to WalMart who wants to build a 100,000 sq ft SuperCenter. FoM claims [as I understand it] that the the original review process would have been different for a big box store selling more than 10% perishables (read: groceries), and as such, the original review is insufficient. That is, the city must perform another one, and one that addresses the notional issues of urban decay, air pollution, and traffic that a grocery/retail store would bring.

"Refrigerated trucks entering and exiting a residential area? Unspeakable."

I personally find this a bogus argument. First off, Bruceville and Poppy Ridge roads are [or will soon become] 5-lane traffic sewers used to move most Maderia residents to and from their housal units to their jobs 15-30 miles away. The argument that a few dozen refrigerated trucks plying these collector roads will somehow create a traffic nightmare is bullshit...it's already brutalized by these consumer-commuters. Elk Grove is flat and jake brakes are already banned in the city limits.

The argument of parking lot lights shining into bedrooms: wouldn't a Target parking lot have done the same thing?

Then, this gem from FoM attorney Brett Jolley: "typically when you combine grocery with retail...there is a tendency to close other stores in the area." Well, when Madeira consumers clamor for mass volumes of cheaply produced foreign consumables and they can only get that through the economies of big box scale, what the fuck do you think happens to local retailers?

I believe this is nothing more than a group of housal unit owners who are concerned, rightfully so, that the introduction of a WalMart will reduce housal unit values, will introduce rampant minority crime, offer clouds of particulate diesel smoke for their young'ens and old'ens, offer fourteen hours of mercury vapor lamp lighting into their bedrooms, and traffic so bad you'd sooner slit your wrists than drive down Poppy Ridge Rd. But I believe their arguments are facetious.

Personally, I think they are more afraid of the People of WalMart -- people that don't look like them. Problem is, I could never prove my assertion and people can't sue on that basis in America...so we take other approaches to prosecute economic racism/segregation like arguing that refrigerated trucks belong nowhere near residential housal units. Therefore, it's argued, the corner (already single use zoned for commercial activity) is unsuitable for a WalMart and should be located elsewhere.

This one issue sums up perfectly many of the tenants I raise on my monologues -- the failures of single use zoning to provide for meaningful places to live, work and socialize (which, in this case, FoM argues that they shouldn't even be zoned adjacent to one another), locally undesirable land uses, the destruction of local economies and jobs while throwing parades for the grand opening of new big box stores, economic segregation, collector road sewers, and the spectacular failure of Elk Grovian suburbia to provide jobs sufficient to buy even the median Elk Grovian housal unit.

FoM will likely, and in my opinion, ought to, lose their fight. Communities across the U.S. fight these every day with the end result being more separation between land uses while these same communities' desires for cheap imported shit only serves to bolster the introduction of said stores. Valid relationships between commerce, industry and residential are only further destroyed through these actions yet we continue to march march! towards living in cities without worth.

Indifference

I'm amazed at the indifference my Elk Grovian neighbors have towards one other:


House on left -- occupied by people who care about their pristine landscape.
House on right -- foreclosed on due to default on deed of trust.
House on left -- occupied by people who don't give a flying fuck about their neighborhood.
House on right -- man-sized weeds due to nature.
House on left -- occupied by people who think they are an island of their own.
House on right -- clearly neglected by rightful owners.
House on left -- clearly negligent of their own neighborhood and everyone else who might live among them.

Seems to me that if someone is willing to keep up their property, the very nature of living next door to a foreclosure should spur them to provide for a modicum level of maintenance even if it means doing some manual labor like cutting weeds. Certainly these neighbors of mine don't give a rat's ass about where they live, only about where they live. We can bash the people who bought a house they couldn't afford, yes. But why these next door neighbors couldn't spend a few minutes of their time to maintain the landscape of a bank owned property is really telling of what kinds of people we have in our communities. People who don't give a shit about anything but what they own, their own property, their own private realm.

This is what Elk Grove is -- a land of private realms with no public realms filled with indignant people who only care about me, me, me, my, my, my, mine, mine, mine, and fuck everything else. This is what suburbia gives us. It gives us people who are failures at being citizens because there is no reason whatsoever to become a decent citizen. So long as the roads are maintained to perpetually drive, so long as the big box stores are regularly and cheaply filled with 12,000 items, they couldn't give a shit about their neighbors because they mean nothing to them, they provide them nothing of value.

Nothing of value.

Forcing Change

I've been reading a local news blog, ElkGroveNews.net, that provides a nice source of local news with a bias similar to my own -- many of their short news articles are written by people (none of whom I know) who clearly decry the suburban landscape that Elk Grove has become.

I am not alone. I am not the only one who thinks our suburban sprawl and auto dependency over the past fifty/sixty odd years is what's contributed to the wholesale destruction of civility, of our environments, of our open spaces, of our global environments, and of our culture. I am not the only one who would prefer us to live differently, to live in more humane surroundings.

It's easy to blog about our bad living patterns. I can back it with observation and with facts, but the end result is that this is just a blog...it offers nothing to society as a whole, nothing -- not unless I back this up with action. But I don't take action. I don't, mainly because I don't identify with any particular group but also because I know that this city was bought and paid for a long time ago by pro-sprawl proponents. I have neither the energy nor the requisite money to piss away to attempt to effect change.

I live in a city whose council members require funds to get into and remain in office and those funds don't come from non-sprawl or local sources. Every city council candidate I've ever voted for in my city was pro-responsible growth. None of them have ever been elected and none of them ever will. To the extent that any candidate meets my requirements I vote; otherwise, I don't vote. Regardless, my candidates always lose.

That said, I don't maintain any hope we are going to willingly change our city's pattern of cancerous sprawl all the way to the Consumnes River and all the way to Galt. You can't confuse me with someone who maintains hope because I am smart enough to know that I cannot possibly yield enough consensus around better/sustainable-growth. I am smart enough to know that we will never collectively willingly change course. This is why, in my humble opinion, I am wholly looking forward to something that will forcefully effect change -- such as a water, oil, or some other resource scarcity, an economic meltdown, or a natural calamity. These are the only things that I see will have any real effect in curbing our insatiable lust for material growth, for culling the miscreants, assholes, and non-contributors from our ranks, and for forcing a change in our living arrangements where neighbors matter, where people matter...

I am open about my opinions, I identify myself, and I am not afraid to express my views. Interestingly, ElkGroveNews.net had a wide variety of anonymous comments on their articles until just last week, until the website required commenter registration due to uncivil comments from our "neighbors." As soon as Elk Grovians had to identify themselves they stopped commenting. As soon as Elk Grovians were required to take responsibility for their actions they stop taking action. If this doesn't show you how wretched a society we've become then I don't know what would.

Our Old Towns

I put the boat into Miller Park today to spend time on the Sacramento river. Nice way to keep cool on this near record hot day. We took advantage of the subsidized parking at the Old Sacramento public dock and ate lunch at Hot & Spicy, blowing one bill and pumping cash back into the local economy at a local eatery.



This part of Sacramento is very nearly the only part in the whole county that is designed in a traditional urban layout. What is it about this that attracts me, vs. Old Town Elk Grove:



First and foremost, the lack of enclosure in Old Town Elk Grove. And by that I mean buildings that form an enclosure around me, the pedestrian. I wouldn't have much business to conduct with second or third story tenants but that isn't my point; my point is, I feel more comfortable in an enclosed outdoor setting. Elk Grove feels rather like walking across a soccer field to the next business, and without a population density that puts people on the street, that soccer field is empty.

There is no way these newly planted trees are going to compensate for that lack of enclosure because these trees were planted haphazardly -- there is no uniformity, no formality, no likelihood of them overarching the future street forming a canopy. Elk Grove is a hundred degrees five months out of the year! Old SACTOWN doesn't employ many trees, either, but their pedestrians are sheltered from the elements. Even on a scorching day you don't feel like you're trying to cross the Venusian equator. The buildings themselves provide that enclosure. There is a continuity to the buildings while each is unique. That's the problem with Elk Grove -- our building codes say everything about what you can't build but give no guidance on what ought to be built; hence, a hodgepodge of styles and sizes and parking lots in between sections and overall disharmony...even though Old Elk Grove is designated a Special Planning Area! The code offers guidelines for what to do, but yet? Doesn't that make you wonder about the planning area in which you live? It ain't special, that's for damn sure.

I also think that Elk Grove Blvd., with its 5,000 daily thru commuters, doesn't help things. But compare this to Livermore's 1st street -- even though that thing is brutalized by thru commuters taking the shortcut from Tracy to Freemont, there remains a degree of livelihood on its margins. Parallel parking provides pedestrians a physical buffer from traffic and there is a substantial volume of parking on the street (although as you're endlessly circling around looking for one on a Friday night you wouldn't think that). It not only offers a place to park but the sheer volume of parked cars slows down all those irritable thru commuters. A thousand slant parking spots means there are a thousand potential cars pulling out and drivers have no choice but to slow down. Old Sacramento is not on an expressway, not on a thoroughfare, and not on a commuter freeway. Speeding to get to the dry cleaners before closing time doesn't happen there but it happens all the time on Elk Grove Blvd., and with a city mandate to ensure that the comfort and ease of vehicular transport trumps everything else, well...I'm not thinking, living, and shopping Elk Grove...

Ninety Degrees

To get to my bus stop I have to pedestrinate across my street corner:

This is an action very, very few people ever endeavor to take, and for good reason -- it's a death march. No one crosses in this direction, and as a consequence the neighborhood is gutted in two. Truthfully, there is not one neighborhood. The people living over there might as well live fifteen miles away; they aren't my neighbors. It's two neighborhoods separated by a wall of speeding cars.

I live on this suburban corner that's brutalized by traffic; not from the volume, necessarily, but from the speed. Take note of my corner's radius -- instead of it being at a pedestrian friendly right angle, the wide radius encourages cars to take the turn at high speed. Tell me -- why is it at all necessary for Elk Grove to build street corners like this? What purpose could it possibly serve other than to place all its inhabitants at risk? And I do mean all -- the driver who now feels comfortable taking the turn at 31 mph who might lose control in the turn; the bicyclist who now has to take the lane to stop the driver from attempting to cut her off while taking the turn at 31 mph; the child who's crossing to walk to school, crossing a corner now twice as long facing cars moving twice as fast; the mother walking her dog; everyone is put into harm's way...but we build these fucking things nonetheless.

Suppose for a minute that the corner concrete met at ninety degrees. Everyone would immediately become safer. The only drawback would be that cars would have to slow down to negotiate the turn. Apparently, this is too big a drawback to allow. To impede speed is treasonous in our auto dependent city.

Perhaps the Elk Grove traffic manual outlaws 90 degree curbs, outlawed because a fire truck's response time would be lengthened as the fire truck would also have to slow down to negotiate the turn. This might impose an unacceptable fire safety risk. To address that risk I offer only one incredibly obvious observation -- how many fire truck and ambulance calls are made to traffic accidents relative to fires, huh? 17:1? 60:1? More? Less? The actual number doesn't matter; what matters is that life safety is reduced as a consequence of us building residential neighborhoods resembling NASCAR ovals. Firemen spend a fair chunk of their careers responding to traffic accidents, and it would be beyond irony if the same fire department enables these accidents in the name of response times or truck maneuvering. At least their response times to traffic accidents are "satisfactory."

Every day I ride the bus home I get to stand on that adjacent corner by the fence waiting to cross the street, and the curvilinear street makes it impossible, impossible, to cross the street with any sense of safety. I risk death by anyone driving 30 mph over the posted speed, which happens all the fucking time. The only way to ensure I live to see the other side is to listen for a speeding car on Frye Creek.

And two decades from now, when I'm 60 years old, deaf from thrash metal, crossing my street for the last time on my retirement day, and all our cars, trucks, motorcycles, ice cream trucks, scooters and tractor trailers are battery powered and silent, some dumbass "neighbor" of mine driving his Oldsmobile Ohm thirty miles over the limit will run me over.

Delusions Of Adequacy

I attended an Elk Grovian special city council meeting Monday, to hear public comment on the proposal to cut my bus routes. Attendance and comments, I believe, led the council to cut only two runs instead of the four that were proposed.

Yep, the recession has finally hit me, 22 months into it. I was immune until Monday, but now I lost 1/4 of one of my options to get to work and back without having to drive my own car. My 2009 prediction of a loss of bus service has come true. What's really bad about this is that the buses are normally packed to the rafters, and now we're going to have to squeeze in all us riders into fewer buses. It's a good thing I ride my bike 1/3 of the time so I'm not competing with others to get on the bus.

Not only am I now paying more to ride (my cost doubled on Tuesday), I have fewer buses to ride. There is no need to wonder why people don't even try it. The #1 reason (across the whole USA) why people don't ride the bus is that service isn't on a time interval that can compete with the private vehicle. If you have to stand for a 1/2 hour to wait for the bus, well, fugettaboutit.

For me, the only cost I'm directly offsetting by transit is gasoline. As my car sits in the driveway I'm still paying to insure it and register it, the same as if I drove it 23,000 miles a year. Its rubber and plastic parts are still deteriorating the same as if I drove it 23,000 miles a year. The sun still beats down on the paint the same as if I drove it 23,000 miles a year. Perhaps I'm not replacing tires or changing oil as frequently, but really, there is no cost savings...not when I now pay more for a bus ticket than the cost of a gallon of gasoline to get me to and from work.

I could even argue that it costs me more to take the bus, considering it takes longer to take transit than it does to drive myself. So why do I even bother? I'm a "choice" rider. I have two legs; I can bike. I have three cars; I can drive. Both my next door neighbors work at SMUD with me; I can carpool. The Elk Grove city council, when looking to slash city costs, looks at me as a "choice" rider and wonders "why are we subsidizing this schmuck?"

I argue that this would be a false "choice," for reasons obvious to anyone who's read my monologues.

Elk Grove transit suffers from delusions of adequacy. We can never hope to make it work in our low density suburban slum. It cannot possibly do an adequate job under the framework of sprawl. The city realizes that everyone drives themselves everywhere to do everything at all times, and when you build a city like that there is no hope for alternatives to the private car. Take the bus? Spend a hour longer to get where you're going. Ride a bike? Risk permanent paralysis or death by our speeding agitated drivers. Walk? Spend three hours longer to get where you're going. Take light rail? Wait two more decades to even start your commute.

Water Conservation? Please...

I note how high Lake Camanche is this year; how high the water is even in mid-late August. Supposedly, we're in the third year of a Northern Californian drought but you couldn't tell from the reservoir this last weekend. Therefore, I ignore any and all calls for water conservation. It looks plenty high enough to me.

We water users in Central and Northern California don't give a shit about our water usage...it isn't something we've been conditioned to worry about. In particular, I'm referring to my own water usage -- I'm not currently metered, so I could use any amount I want and be billed the same regardless.

There is absolutely no, none, zilch, nada -- no incentive for me to watch my water usage. Sure, the City of Sacramento runs radio ads encouraging conservation, but I'm not in the City. Until I'm metered, I'm going to use as much water as I damn well please.

Seeing how the Elk Grove Water Service has raised rates 185% since I've moved here regardless of how much I use or don't use, I've removed the bricks from my toilet tanks, removed those low flow shower heads, set my sprinkler timers to a good 45 minutes to ensure a sopping wet yard in July, and let the water run in the shower while I do my ironing, to ensure the hottest most comfortable shower possible.

Instead of using a wash basin while rinsing out my beer bottles for homebrewing I just let the water run from the faucet and use fresh rinse water. Very nice, I might say...much easier than trying to conserve and re-use rinse water, and I feel better knowing I get the highest level of sanitation possible.

I just ignore the sprinklers and water the concrete...but I do it at 3:45 AM, so no one sees it, no one monitors it, and I'm asleep so I'm resolved of any direct responsibility. I only fix sprinklers when the lawn browns. Otherwise, I don't care how much might water might not be getting on the surface. If the lawn overall turns dark I just turn the timer up a few minutes to compensate.

Don't want to spend the money to meter me? We'll, take note that I'm an Elk Grovian...that should be all you need to know about my "voluntary" water conservation efforts.

How Not To Build A City

Our Elk Grovian Mayor was on the news last night against the backdrop of our beloved Jewel 'O The Valley -- the wind swept, sand dirt choked, barren wasteland Elk Grove Promenade mall.

This quarter-finished mall is the perfect example, perfect, of exactly how not to build a city. Spend all your effort and capital to attract suburban development, strip retail development and a mall whose tenants who couldn't give a rat's ass about the community, and then pin your city down by a heroin-like dependence on retail sales taxes ...and of those retail sales, make 30% based on automobile sales. Further pin future retail sales on a mall that ain't gonna get built.



At one point late in 2008, I was seemingly impressed how Elk Grove, relative to Sacramento County, to the State, to the Nation, didn't carry nearly as much debt as every other level of government. I was wrong. From our latest city budget 5-year forecast, we are expecting to carry an annual $4,000,000 deficit going forward...assuming things don't get worse and things improve by 2012 -- both rather bold assumptions, wouldn't you say?

That Elk Grove (or any government, for that matter) didn't plan for a contingency for even the most mildest of recessions is amazing. But you know, our government only mirrors its constituents, all of whom also failed to plan for any possible loss-of-growth. My neighbor's friend, a florist-turned-real estate saleslady, never assumed her $15,000 per month in commissions in 2004 was going to dry up...repossessed was her beautiful, beautiful Mercedes, and repossessed was her beautiful, beautiful 3,800 sq ft Elk Grove starter mansion.

We got what was brung to us.

Strikes!

Peter Calthorpe, the "renown" San Francisco architect, built Laguna West as a Transit Oriented Development project in the early 1990's. The whole point was a human scaled, mixed use development within walking distance of quality transit. Following a few scornful letters to the editor I wrote to the Sacramento Bee regarding the project and Elk Grove in general, the Great Tsakopoulos opined in a later piece that he helped develop "the first walkable community built in the U.S. since WWII."

On the whole, the project is a total fucking failure.

15 miles south of Sacramento, it's indeed walkable. Walkable to Nowhere. You can walk to the Laguna Interstate 5 interchange if you want, only to be handcuffed by the CHP if you pedestrianate down the freeway. Laguna Blvd. itself is a Great 6-Lane Divider, dividing the residences to the south to the supposed job centers to the north, making walking across it to your job a wholly dissatisfying experience and one fraught with danger, so I've not ever seen one resident do it. The Laguna interchange regularly hosts thirty six thousand vehicles per day, filled with chronically speeding housewives late in dropping off their kids and inattentive husbands commuting to Sacramento to work. Light rail plans have long since been scrubbed -- the community will never, ever see any train service whatsoever. The whole of their residents commute to Sacramento and the Bay Area. As my bus commute takes my through the famed Laguna West, I've only ever seen a handful of people drive their cars near the bus stop and walk to board the bus; this is the extent of "the first walkable community built since WWII." What a total crock of shit.

Regarding the job development on the north side of Laguna: well, I admittedly stand in awe at the potential this had, but I am totally underwhelmed by what actually did get built. Tsakopoulos and Phil Angelides both lured Apple and JVC (among others) into the development and for years we actually had some manufacturing in the city! Elk Grovians actually built stuff rather than just consumed it!

But wouldn't you know it, JVC pulled out a while ago. Another out-of-town corporation with absolutely no loyalty to the locality decided (for whatever goddamn reason they chose) to pull up stakes and bail. They used to produce 3 million CDs and DVDs per month and employ just north of 100 people; today, those 100+ manufacturing jobs [likely] reside in Cambodia whilst it's the same Americans who are consuming those CDs and DVDs.

JVC also, presumably, paid development impact fees to site the facility there; fees to provide sewer, water, natural gas, police and fire service, roads, what have you.

Cut to the present. 2008 sees the reincarnation of their old manufacturing facility into Strikes! Bowling. Actually, it's called the Strikes Family Entertainment Center. So instead of 100 decently paid manufacturing jobs, now we get one multi-millionaire developer, one multi-millionaire owner, and scores of wage slave attendants and fast-food servers earning far less than required to buy even the most decrepit Elk Grovian piece of shit starter home...and certainly nowhere near any capability to buy in the more expensive Laguna West "development." All these wage slaves commute in by their own private motorized vehicles from elsewheres. So much for "walkable."

And now! The City of Elk Grove has announced to the Strikes! owner that he's on the hook for $536,000 in developer impact fees...the owner who had no idea this was coming (supposedly). Mayor Hume says it's "just been a communication breakdown between parties...but you still owe us a half million dollars, please."

The owner and developer "assumed" that JVC paid that shit two decades ago. Nope, the city and mayor want their own slice of our growing retail/service sector pie.

I have been to Strikes!, once, and not likely ever again --the beer prices are completely fucking outrageous...and these prices don't even reflect the "impact fees" supposedly still due. I would say primarily I do not enjoy Warehouse Entertainment. Several hundred patrons stuffed into a big-box venue surrounded by five acres of parked cars. Poor, poor Strikes! may have to close up shop because of these fees, according to our Elk Grove Citizen. Of course, the city, while demanding hundreds of thousands in fees, won't possibly allow it to close simply because the city has no other jobs other than bowling alley attendants. They think that keeping all these low paid jobs in the city will keep millions in payroll tax receipts rolling into their coffers, so they won't let it fail.

Personally, I see the total need for Elk Grove to double dip, to charge Strikes! for development impact fees -- primarily because they don't have jobs that are worth a shit, jobs whose payroll taxes will pay back all that road upkeep their South Sacramento employees use, jobs that will pay back the scores of police service calls, jobs that will pay back all the local vandalism and mayhem those South Sacramento employee's friends bring. All those employees aren't buying new cars at the Elk Grove Auto Mall either..can't afford them...they're driving Sacramento County Paul Blanco beaters. Perhaps the owner and the developer are buying new cars, but they won't bother buying any of that suburban housewife shit offered by our Auto Mall. A Honda Odyssey? Please.

Charge away, my fair city.

Think, Shop, Live Elk Grove?

Here's a novel idea -- use tax money to fund a stimulus plan to give $500 in gift cards to the first 500 people who buy a new car at the Elk Grove Auto Mall...then make the bold claim that this will stimulate the local economy and increase tax revenues for the city!

What fucking planet do these city council members live on? Funding for this stimulus can be sourced right back to our taxes, effectively. Instead of pulling it from the general fund (read: taxes), we're gonna pull it from a one-time telecom refund. Don't you feel better knowing it doesn't come directly from a tax source? Let's see, we're effectively taxing ourselves to pay for this and then we say that this is going to increase tax revenues? A quarter million dollars is needed to fund this scheme, and along with the ridiculous notion that our economy is local, this isn't gonna stimulate shit.

Look around, my fellow Elk Grovian. Name me one business that's local. WINCO? Boise, ID. PetSmart? Phoenix, AZ. T.J. Maxx? Framingham, MA. I've oft mentioned how we don't have any local economy here (and as a consequence, no community), and I'm clearly not the only one to recognize this -- my sister pointed this out with her reference to the 3/50 project.

Go ahead, my ignorant neighbors....spend your $500 in gift cards at Target, Old Navy, Best Buy, Jamba Juice, Chili's, Chevy's, TGI Friday's, LaBou's, Chick-fil-A, BJ's Brewery, Roger's Jewelry, United Rentals...and watch less than 50% of your "local" dollars go back into our "local" economy. I'd guarantee that 97% (by volume) of all transactions in this city are made to non-local businesses.

If you want to go local, how about Nelson's Locksmithing? Or Baja Burrito? A buck spent there will return 68% back to the local economy.

Think, Shop, and Live Elk Grove is a bold faced lie because virtually nothing is local. Go ahead, spend north of $23,000 to buy that new car (another remotely made product) to get your $500 in vouchers. The point of this exercise in government subsidization isn't to promote a local economy (which doesn't exist)...it's to sell more fucking cars. This is where our property tax money goes -- to help our Auto Mall sell more cars. Wonderful.

Good Luck Comes In Threes

Riding my bicycle into work today was blissful, thanks to 1) a pleasant cool tailwind, 2) a Furlough Friday, and 3) thousands of unemployed Elk Grovians.

We've had some very nice weather this week, so much so that you'd think that bike riding would be much more acceptable to commuters. Alas, no...for a moment I forgot I live in the one of the most car dependent cities on earth. I'm still only one of a handful of Elk Grovians who bothers to exercise to work, whether gasoline is $2 or $4 a gallon.

Furlough Friday's are also more commonplace, now that California's Fiscal Armageddon has finally arrived. We've hummed along blind for two years with billions in budgetary debt with absolutely no progress on fixing it, so it's finally rearing. The DMV office is closed today, along with two other Friday's this month. As I rode by the empty Broadway office building this morning I couldn't help but think how much less likely I'll get plowed over by a car now that DMV employees aren't commuting to work and neither are hundreds of patrons. I'm going to guess that DMV employees are just as likely as every other Californian to speed, to fail to signal, to text their boyfriends, to improperly yield. The mechanic's car is always the worst running jalopy on the roadway; the gardener's own lawn is always the worst kept yard on the block; the DMV employee is likely the worst driver on the road.

My city of Elk Grove, a city with no jobs of its own, requires the perpetual motoring of its occupants to the Bay Area, Rancho Cordova, or Sacramento for work, but with all these regions laying off people our Elk Grovians are driving less. And God bless them, too, for that means fewer chances for them to plow me over while texting their mistresses soon after leaving home. The Elk Grove Citizen newspaper this morning had seven pages, seven! of notice of defaults on a deed of trust, compared to three pages five months ago, so Elk Grovian foreclosures are still running hot, straight and normal. Because these people are defaulting and because there are no jobs here they are moving away -- back to renting in the Bay Area, back to living with relatives in cities with jobs. The decline of traffic on Franklin Blvd. in the morning is stunning, absolutely stunning.

I originally estimated that our depression slowdown would reduce my odds of an accident by 5%, but now I'm thinking it's closer to 15%.

The Holy Grail of Elk Grove

My little burg of Elk Grove has apparently decided that we don't have enough vacant strip retail in the city. Nope, what we need is more commercial building, and to facilitate that effort the city has slashed their developer impact fees in half...making it even more attractive to building more of what we don't need.

Regardless, this city has excelled in the approval of building absolute shit; nothing built in the last thirty years will still be standing in another thirty years. Well...our buildings might still be physically standing but they'll have no standing...the facades will have faded, graffiti will line the walls, roofs will be continually leaking, parking lots will have warped and blistered and neglected vegetation will dominate. In thirty years time our city will be approving lowered developer impact fees not for refurbishing the existing tiers, but for new construction south of Eschinger and Dillard. Our existing suburban build out will have turned to liquid shit like every earlier suburban Sacramento ring, with higher crime rates, more traffic calming devices and neglected private realms. Those who can will move to these new areas; those who can't will care less and less about their "communities."

There must be three or four hundred strip retail 'outlets' in 'power centers' across this city that currently stand vacant, waiting for a resuscitated economy to fill them with Asian nail salons, cell phone kiosks, ReMax realtor centers, balloon shops and bible stores. The mayor hopes that even more of these will jumpstart our economy, producing badly needed jobs and wa-hey! tax revenues.

A total crock of shit. It's not as if the impact to infrastructure has magically disappeared, that the addition of a new strip retail store on Bilby Road that sells chocolate covered strawberries has less a need for a fire department, has reduced needs for road upgrades even though 99.993% of its clientele are solo motorists because the store is physically isolated from housing. It's not like the three service sector jobs created by the owner are jobs whose tax receipts pay for the services these employees use; these are fake jobs, jobs that gain the city nothing, jobs that drain the city because all that suburban infrastructure these people will have to use to commute to their homes isn't paid for by them from their taxes.

Of course this isn't limited to commercial real estate; home developers also get a break -- so in the midst of three thousand foreclosed vacant homes in the city we are encouraging the development of even more homes. This shows how utterly fucking dependent this city is on expansion of subdivisions, strip malls and office parks, that without ad infinitum growth the city cannot support itself.

This effectively means that we're gonna shift the burden of these infrastructure requirements not to those who created them but to those who already paid for their own and now get to subsidize the newer entrants. All for the holy grail of Elk Grove-- perpetual growth.

Fresh Start

I am trying to understand how Spain has managed with double digit unemployment for decades while here in the U.S. we approach 10% and the sky falls.

While I am personally immune, bombproofed, and on high ground vis-a-vis our recession, many around me are not. But one thing that every unemployed person I know has to keep up in a bad or good economy is a motor vehicle...something that not every Spaniard has to deal with.

This point isn't widely appreciated. Paul Blanco's Chevrolet's FreshStart credit program advertised on the radio yesterday and said, "You need a car." No matter how much debt you currently carry, "You need a car." Bad credit? No credit? "You need a car."

And you, the radio listener, deserve a car. Even if you've fucked over every other lender in the past, you deserve a fresh start

because without you buying sixteen million cars a year our economy falls apart.

No shit. My unemployed cousin still has his car...not to drive to interviews, he gave up looking for a job long ago. No, his car is used daily to get to the store, to buy his malt liquor, and to get his second DUI...come on, what American is going to walk? Certainly not the unemployed. And certainly not anyone who bought a "home" in some suburban landscraper two miles from the nearest supermarket (because neighborhood markets are illegal) and five miles from every other service.

So to live in America, the greatest nation in the world that somehow can't seem to culturally manage even a small economic downturn, car ownership is mandatory. Mandatory maintaining, gassing, and registering all come with citizenship. This isn't something most 24 year old Cordobans have to deal with, because they aren't forced to own a car just to live. Unemployment, while never pleasant, is at least easier managed without the specter of a car payment every thirty days.

Here in Elk Grove, every unemployed soul would be forced, absolutely forced, to own at least one vehicle to even get to the unemployment office, let alone to manage the daily tasks of living. So I say fuck 'em -- a large portion of their economic plight is self-created -- they chose to live in such arrangements.

Thank Hitler

Western Germany is today well connected, in part, due to the efforts Hitler made to transport Ruhr valley war materials to the battlefront. Praise is due this man, yes.

It might seem callous, but hey, I'm just calling it like I see it. I know of no other region of the world that is better and more efficient in the movement of humans today, thanks to earlier efforts to more efficiently kill humans yesterday.



This is a typical view out of any main station. This one is just a small one in the city of Gelsenkirchen -- three tracks supply trains that run into and out of this city every ten minutes or so. Some are express trains, others stop at all stations, and all provide a stunning level of service. Indeed, for the entire week and a half, of all the trains I traveled on, not a single train was off by more than sixty seconds from schedule.

Then, when you're traveling within the city, you have access to an unprecedented level of surface trains and busses:



Now, realize that this city is about the size of my Elk Grove. Three intercity trains...seventy eight bus routes -- compared to Elk Grove which after nineteen years of unmitigated suburbal sprawl is still looking at another nine years to get a single fucking light rail train station. Elk Grove has thirty one bus routes, with half of them express commuter busses that only run weekday mornings and evenings. Less than half as many for a city as big with a quarter the level of service.

The truth is, Elk Grove public transportation can never, never! work. Never. Its low density is insufficient to make any service profitable for competing providers, nor self-supporting for governmental providers. Elk Grove has utterly failed to develop regionally or self sufficiently, so that surface streets, collector roads and freeways are all choke-a-block with traffic...the consequence of which would lead to intense resistance to either convert or sever any roadway to make room for rail. Or it leads to intense costs to shoehorn in rails and stations on top of an existing suburban automotive dominated fabric.

And all on top of a nation that subsidizes gasoline so heavily that car ownership becomes compulsive and mandatory. Why does California not build and maintain roads without federal matching funds? Because without federal tax dollars funding roadworks instead of gasoline taxes, and without state general funding instead of gasoline taxes, California wouldn't have enough money on its own. We end up with a perverted payment system where people end up paying for it indirectly. But so little is ever allocated to rail, bus, or alternatives such as multi-use trails.

Wishing for a transportation system like that in Germany for my little Elk Grovian burg is a fucking pipe dream, and I know this. It's a futile effort to even blog about it, mostly. But I do, because I like to comment on the sad state of our affairs, our environment, our culture...I like to comment on how wretched things are...not as they ever will be.

Shop Local

Elk Grove, in their monthly newsletter, is promoting the "shop local" line.

This is as mendacious as it gets. There is virtually nothing about Elk Grove that's local. Nothing. If there happens to be a local store owned by local residents, their products they sell are almost certainly non-local. In these cases, any value-added contributions to non-local resources are indeed local, but name me an establishment that does this?

The obvious connection is sales taxes. This contributes to Elk Grovian coffers, yes. But when I go to the TGI Friday's on Laguna Blvd and order from their menu that was designed by some focus group on the fifth floor of their corporate headquarters in Dallas, TX, I am most certainly ordering from a menu from a corporation that doesn't give a flying fuck about what sorts of local foods Elk Grove produces, what local area farmers produce, or even what this state produces. If some eleven dollar an hour twenty six year old "sampler taster" on the fourth floor says the chicken products from Arkansas are what she prefers, and the accountants on the seventh floor agree that nationwide distribution from these particular Arkansas chicken wholesalers meet the company's basic tests for quality and product repeatable reliability, then Arkansas it is. 600,000 pounds per month are "procured," distributed by TGI's 7,000 tractor-trailer "warehouses on wheels," and delivered as signature Jack Daniel's flavored chicken products.

This is local? Because I bought the end result in Elk Grove?

Jewel O' The Valley

It didn't take very long for General Growth to declare bankruptcy...the owners owers of our proud, unfinished Jewel O' The Central Valley -- the Elk Grove Promenade Mall.

So our hulking half-done mall collects rats while the city and the defunct owners decide on what to do about it. I will await better reporting from the Elk Grove Citizen newspaper to clue me in to what our elected officials have to say about these developments.

Let me guess...I can think of a dozen ways our leaders will respond:

1) "While we're obviously disappointed,..."
2) "Elk Grove will prevail even under these tough..."
3) "Elk Grove will emerge a stronger and..."
4) "Revenue growth remains uncertain..."
5) "While this is a blow to our 'community'..."
6) "Our projections for tax growth remains..."
7) "While not our preferred course of action, today's filing..."
8) "We can find a silver lining from today's..."
9) "We anticipate no significant consequences from GGP's announcement that..."
10) "We're resolved to grow our city now more than...:
11) "While our community mourns, let's focus on the long term prospects for..."
12) "Our citizens will emerge more resilient and prosperous as a result of..."

If I had the personal capability to utter this shit on command I know I would be quite a bit more successful in life...successful in that the best orators and bullshitters are seemingly always elevated. These lines sound like they'd come from an Elk Grovian city council member, don't they? You can't raise enough cash to become elected without having some innate ability to goad others to give you that cash. This is how it works, how it has always worked, and I can accept this. It would not be too difficult, I'm sure, to follow Elk Grove city council election funding right back to GGP.

So a handful of white, middle aged, overweight board members in Chicago get to decide the economic fate of a hundred thousand residents in a "community" twenty five hundred miles away. I will wager my yearly salary and say that the "new" owners of the Elk Grove Promenade will most decidedly be non-local. Perhaps it will be taken over by a group of Bangladeshi investors. Perhaps some sort of consortium of Houston-area investors. Maybe an out of state bank, assigned as the guarantor. Maybe another, bigger mall operator (decidedly non-local). The thing is, it could never, never! be owned by the city, or people of the city. We decreed that local ownership is verboten.

The Owers

The unfinished Elk Grove Promenade outdoor mall is now permanently on hold. The project has been cancelled due to lack of interest. There it sadly waits, longingly looking out towards all those Highway 99 commuter-consumers, listlessly awaiting the economic rebound that's shedjooled to return at the end of 2009.

Concurrent with this "rebound," Elk Grove will also need General Growth Properties to get their heads out of their asses and somehow turn up solvent again. They are the owners of the Promenade...well, owner is probably a misnomer, considering they don't really own anything, they owe everything. They are the owers of the mall.

As owers, they've got north of three billion in debt that has to be extended or refinanced this year, lest they go belly up. Actually, I might expect a larger competitor like Westfield to snatch them from the jaws of insolvency, which will, of course, lead to only one ower in the country, towards only one mega-mall-mega-ower. We'll see.

The city of Elk Grove is sitting around, waiting...waiting...waiting for all those millions in tax revenues to suddenly appear, blowing the city out of their economic doldrum. It's too bad, isn't it, that our city is utterly and wholly fiscally dependent on what a half dozen majority shareholders outside Chicago at General Growth do and think. We pin our economic hopes and aspirations on a single 1,100,000 sq. ft. 102-store mall owned by outsiders. No, we don't bother to build jobs into our "community" aside from the $8 retail, service, maintenance, and security jobs the mall will graciously provide. We take in these fake jobs (jobs that do nothing to grow our city, jobs whose taxes don't come close to servicing their living arrangements in suburbia), and neglect jobs that provide meaningful careers to people...doctoring, engineering, custom furniture building, agriculture, mechanics and masons.

No, instead of good jobs we're going to get a big plastic hot dog kiosk in the shape of a hot dog manned by minimum wage workers uniformed in hot dog outfits on the edge of the mall's food court, next to the obligatory China Express, Steak Escape, Burger King, Wetzels Pretzels, Mrs. Fields cookies, and Cinnabon cinnamon roll stores manned by their own casts of underpaid underbenefitted clowns. I will guarantee every one of these listed franchises will be in that food court even though the mall has never announced their food court tenants. You're not gonna find Elk Grove residents Tina and Cam Nguyen opening their own restaurant in the mall's food court...that would be illegal. They are not a chain, and are not franchisees. Locals are barred from such opportunities at the "local" mall. Think what they could provide for the community -- tailored food for targeted residents, business taxes that stay in Elk Grove, local ownership responsive to local needs, and a reason for a couple to work hard and evolve their business instead of simply shuffling between "employment opportunites" with out of state franchises. These benefits are exactly why it is illegal, why it is barred, why it will never happen. General Growth can't provide for shareholder growth with local involvement.

General Growth says in their public relations materials that their malls are more than just places to shop -- they are places to experience. I can see why. Here in Elk Grove we are all uninspired by our own neighborhoods with shitty car dependent layouts and even shittier architecture, we won't allow our children play outside due to our 31,477 registered sex offenders although we live in 'safe' suburbia, while our elderly parents are effectively trapped without a car of their own. Every one of us are looking for something more from our vast collections of noplaces...so into our vehicles we'll climb, and motor to the Promenade to have someplace to experience.

ADT

Here's another classic example of how my Elk Grove has done things completely wrong (actually, every city in America for that matter). After spending the last eighteen years doing everything it could to fuck up its historic town center, to intentionally destroy it, Elk Grove is priming itself to "revitalize its core."

Old Town is right on Elk Grove Blvd., an east-west street dating back to the 1860's, and this road (dirt at first, then a two lane for many, many years) was more than enough to service the town core. Elk Grove was always something of a very small city, but (wouldn't you know it) people a century ago decided that a human scaled, walkable, tree-lined, compact community would provide for most everyday needs for its residents who lived both on the main street as well as close adjacent streets.

For over a full century, there was never a need for "redevelopment," or "revitalization." The city core organically adjusted to the new conditions of living during the earlier decades of this century.

Today, within a span of less than twenty years, we are shuttling 22 thousand cars per day (ADT, or average daily traffic) through the intersection of Elk Grove Blvd. and Elk Grove Florin Rd, a half mile west of the Old Town. To preserve the core "character," Elk Grove Blvd. became a zipper street, necking down from a four lane 'freeway' to a two lane 'expressway' straight through the heart of the town core, slicing it in half with commuter traffic from Highway 99 to the 8,000+ housal units (we'll call this development) to the east. The city has no intention of stopping further development to the east...although our "tough economic times" has sorta squashed any recent growth. Once Elk Grove is back to 15% growth and 20% annual housal unit price increases then Elk Grove will expect (and rightfully deserve) suburban sprawl all the way from Old Town to the Consumnes river, with all these new "happy" citizens gleefully commuting through Old Town to get to the freeway and to all those jobs elsewhere in other cities. They represent all the future potential spenders in the core.

Having already spent north of $6 million to "revitalize" the core with sidewalks and vehicular amenities that (wouldn't you know it, it made traffic worse!) was a complete failure, businesses are dead and dying. And guess what all the council members, business owners, and historic preservationists are suggesting as the "antidote" to this fucking fiasco?

A Parking Structure!

Wa-hey! That will cure it!

Strip retail success in our great, grand America is predicated on one thing, and one thing only: ADT. The only bit of information any developer needs is "how many cars will drive by, because that defines the pool of potential 'hits.'" Hmmmm....somehow, eight thousand vehicles a day commuting through Old Town, somehow, hasn't managed to spur Old Town spending. So let's build vertical parking and lure those citizens consumers in. And make it free! Yes! Free parking, subsidized by all of Elk Grove.

"Some type of parking structure [is] vital, vital for the area." -- Elk Grove Mayor Pat Hume

You know, my fair city is going to spend hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, studying, planning, examining, reviewing, and recommending options that won't do, that can't do, anything to rectify decades of bad civic design. The only thing that works is correct urban design from the beginning or correct infill afterwards. Unfortunately, with suburban sprawl proponents funding 87% of our elected officials' coffers and re-election campaigns, Elk Grove will never be in the business of doing things correctly. It can never recommend solutions that work for an old city core atop a framework of car dependency and single use zoning.

Why do you suppose nearly every original city core in America also needs "revitalization?" If our suburban sprawl model is so fucking superior, then why is anyone concerned with "preserving" these cores? Why don't we just raze them all down, all of 'em, and erect more efficient large format retail and acres of parking to shuttle in all our superior citizens consumers?

Old Town Elk Grove is doomed to fail.

Hyperopic

After eleven days in Colorado I will temper down my earlier thoughts on our economy.

Having spent some time outside my Elk Grovian confides, I am becoming aware that this "recession" is most certainly worse here than elsewhere across my America. Sure, Aurora, CO home values have dropped, but not anywhere near what Elk Grove has seen, along with unemployment and all other economic activity. Our national economy appears better outside Elk Grove and California -- these two are not an accurate barometer of our nation's overall economy. Not all communities and cities fucked themselves over like Elk Grove has.

I am cheering on our recession. Still, I'm convinced, now even more so, that a depression is highly unlikely. While I personally believe we'd find ultimate value in total collapse, I grudgingly accept that we won't make any headway towards stemming our complete rout of the independent American farm family and accept that we will continue to pave over of all our countryside with strip malls, low density suburban tracts and fried food huts, even in the wake of taxpayer funding of Wall Street bonuses for abject failure. We collectively think this is the best of all possible outcomes and we passively accept it. This is our Merika. Love it or leave it.

I will never accept it, but then again, I hold an extreme minority opinion. I happen to think we could do better. This is my opinion, but clearly it's not going to be actively accepted by anyone else. OK.

To that end I will strive to keep to my own hyperopic view, that I can do well during any long term feast or famine, and fuck whatever else might rise or fall around me. I personally will do fine regardless of how you do, or how the nation does.