I’m not grown-up enough to be 50.

So perhaps it’s fitting that I celebrated passing the half-century mark by coaching some Southern California children in their Little League opener. My party consisted of post-game cupcakes and fourth-grade humor.

Or maybe I missed an opportunity to take a day off. Under the Biblical tradition of jubilee, every 50 years you are supposed to release people from debts, free all slaves, return property to its owners, and go home. Instead of working the fields, you should rest—and take that time to reassess.

Rest and reassessment sound pretty good right now, after the exhausting pandemic years, and not just for your columnist, who has been banging out these weekly pieces for 10 years.

California could use its own jubilee year, to reflect and rethink how it governs itself.

I, like the state’s 21st-century governing system, am a child of the 1970s. I was born in 1973, which makes me a rare bird. Fewer children were born in the United States in that year than any since 1945. In retrospect, it looks like a nadir of post-war America, with gas lines, the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal.

But it was also a time of new beginning.

The resulting popular anger of that decade produced many changes in the country and in California. The 1970s birthed our signature environmental laws, the reform initiative that still rules our politics, and Proposition 13, the tax initiative that is the foundation of our highly complicated system of governance. That decade also inspired the political career of Jerry Brown, who has been governor for one-third of my half-century life. He, as much as anyone, turned California’s governorship into a second American presidency, with power over a large and highly centralized system.

Looking back now, it is remarkable how much California has achieved despite the governmental dysfunction birthed in the 1970s. We are a far richer and wealthier place than we were a half-century ago. Our air and water are far less polluted. We are better educated. We live longer.  We have extended legal protections and rights to Californians of all kinds, even as other parts of the country attack bodily autonomy and limit voting.

Our problems, while serious, are in most respects the results of our successes. We produced so much wealth that our inequality is great. We created so much new technology that we disrupted our lives. We produced so many jobs that our traffic got worse, and all those drivers wore down our infrastructure and spewed more greenhouse gases. We grew so much cheap and abundant food that we have an obesity crisis. The University of California got so good that it became nearly impossible to be admitted to a campus. Our housing prices soared, leaving more people homeless.

But how long can all that success, and all the negative consequences of that success, go on?

The number of children is declining, as is immigration to California. Every single year of this century, the state has lost more people to other states than it has gained. The exodus to other states is accelerating. So, California’s overall population is shrinking, staying under 40 million; estimates from 50 years ago had us reaching 100 million by now.

That population is not likely to rebound soon, because so few people move here. The Public Policy Institute of California recently reported that “the state is no longer a significant draw for people from other states of any age, education, or income.” Does anyone know the words to “California, Here I Come?” anymore?

A sane state might stop, take a breath and a year off, and think about how to make California attractive again. But we’ve never been sane. Instead, we are hurtling ahead, spinning new and expensive solutions to our success, depending on Silicon Valley dollars that may not last forever.

State lawmakers, as usual, are offering thousands of new proposals, all building on the existing system. Gov. Gavin Newsom, touring California this month in lieu of the traditional State of the State address, pushed out familiar-sounding ideas for old problems at a rapid clip. But neither he nor anyone else in power seems capable of slowing down long enough to design new systems that fit our age.

In recent years, I’ve spent more time outside the country, looking at how provinces and states govern themselves, and realize that there are many better directions for California to go. Thinking about the possibilities makes me feel young, even though I’m the same age as the former starlet Kate Beckinsale, the previously ahead-of-his-time comedian Dave Chappelle, and the one-time political wunderkind turned U.S. Senator Alex Padilla. It’s hearing people talk about all the old limits, about all the reasons we can’t change things, that makes me feel old.

These days, with strange weather making the climate crisis undeniable, we’re often told that time is running out. But even when you’re a half century old, you have a lot of time left.  I’m a teetotaler, and my relatives who don’t drink often live well into their 90s—that’s nearly another 50 years. Who knows? Maybe the scientists who are radically extending the lives of lab rats can get me another 100.

I don’t know if it’s child-like or immature or irresponsible to dream of new beginnings. But I do know that many of the pre-teen ballplayers whom I coach on Saturdays will see 22nd-century California. What better time than right now for a statewide jubilee, where we retreat and imagine a new path to their not-so-distant future?

The post Why California and I Both Need a Jubilee appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Two journalists who covered presidential campaigns in different eras—NPR To the Point host Warren Olney and Zócalo California editor Joe Mathews—visited Zócalo to discuss what campaign journalism means to the country right now, and how to make it more useful, during a Twitter Live event earlier today.

Their conversation focused on how campaign coverage—and its influence over the electorate—has shifted in five-plus decades since Olney began his career as a broadcast journalist. During the hour-long discussion, Olney recounted his time covering the Nixon presidency, drawing a comparison between criticism circulated by the campaign that the press was “hostile toward Nixon and favorable toward the Civil Rights Movement” to today’s anti-media rhetoric encouraged by the White House.

Mathews and Olney also considered the degree to which special access on the campaign trail may compromise the integrity of media coverage, and whether the successes of so-called “Teflon” presidents, like Reagan and Trump, represented the candidates’ talent in campaigning or a failure of the reporters responsible for covering their campaigns.

They both also spoke to the difficulty of reporting in an age of misinformation, gaining the trust of an increasingly partisan readership, and whether journalists in 2020 are sufficiently responding to criticisms of coverage of the 2016 presidential election.

”Quoted” with Warren Olney:

There can’t be a downside to revealing the truth about the campaign. And somebody will notice. Something might happen. You have to assume that that will be the case and hope for the best.

Watch the full conversation below:

Zócalo Live: What Do We Need From Campaign Journalism? with @warrenolney1 and @joemmathews https://t.co/RnGJ7jUGjU

— Zócalo Public Square (@ThePublicSquare) September 10, 2020

The post What Do We Need From Campaign Journalism? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

California is an orphan of a state, and Monterey’s beginnings are the closest thing we have to a birth story. Admission Day—September 9, 1850, when California became an American state—doesn’t really amount to a birthday, since California was a province of two other countries, Spain and Mexico, long before that. Other birthday options are problematic, too. We can’t know the exact day, thousands of years ago, when native peoples arrived. And 16th- and early 17th-century Europeans (like Sebastián Vizcaíno, who gave Monterey its name) didn’t stick around long enough to establish much.

So the closest thing we have to a moment of birth is probably June 3, 1770. On that day, Junípero Serra, California’s controversial and cruel saint, held Mass and Spanish military Capt. Gaspar de Portolá planted the Spanish colors in Monterey, which would become California’s first capital—and most enduring place.

A quarter-millennium later, Monterey, for all its rough history, is often dismissed as too precious, and too much a place apart. But the same has been said about California. Indeed, the peninsula city—by serving both as a hideaway enclave and an open door to the world’s diverse peoples—has become an emblem of the state.

“Monterey was California’s experiment,” writes Dennis Copeland, the city of Monterey’s museums, cultural arts, and archives manager. “Monterey today represents California’s past, present, and future.”

Indeed, Monterey has a special ability to keep its past alive and connect its story to California’s future.

The famous—and famously brutal—mission system began in San Diego in 1769, but Monterey’s mission, at Carmel, would become the headquarters. In 1776, Spain declared Monterey the capital of its Alta California colony—inspiring the creation of other Spanish settlements in the late 18th century, including San Jose and Los Angeles.

Monterey survived a brief 1818 attack from—of all countries—the newly independent Argentina (its revolutionaries burned the presidio, stole what they could, and left). The Mexican government took over from Spain in 1822, and Monterey remained the provincial capital. Mexico also designated Monterey an official port of entry, making it a center of trade and commerce and California’s first “front door,” according to the late local historian J.D. Conway.

In that role, Monterey changed the world’s perception of California—from a feudal Spanish frontier backwater into a highly desirable destination. “The cosmopolitan atmosphere created by the international trade helped make Monterey a hotbed of liberal thought,” which produced elections and local self-government, wrote Conway in his terrific 2003 history, Monterey: Presidio Pueblo and Port. California’s tradition of political revolt got its start when Montereños rebelled against a series of provincial governors who were seen as favoring Mexico City’s needs over their own.

Monterey was where the Americanization of California began, with Commodore John Drake Sloat’s peaceful conquest of the city in 1846, and the establishment of the first American fort. In 1849, Monterey hosted the convention to produce the state constitution that California would use to muscle its way into the United States in 1850.

In the decades after statehood, a misguided conventional wisdom held that Monterey no longer mattered. Sure, the place suffered some indignities. Legal chicanery allowed a land baron to steal 30,000 acres. Santa Cruz, fueled by its American prejudice against the more Mexican Monterey, formed its own separate county. And in the 1870s, Salinas stole Monterey’s status as the Monterey County seat through a corrupt bargain that allowed the city of Hollister to make itself the seat of its own breakaway county, San Benito.

Despite these blows, Monterey—a global-facing, Spanish-Mexican-Catholic city—kept on prospering. Its sleepy reputation reflected the ignorance and bigotry of the rest of California, which was growing more Anglo, more nativist, more Protestant, and more violent towards native peoples than the missions had ever been. “California’s change from a Hispanic culture to an Anglo-Protestant culture made Monterey appear to be out of the mainstream,” Conway wrote.

Monterey quietly kept welcoming people: Chinese fishermen, Portuguese whalers from the Azores, even wealthy tourists who came to stay at Charles Crocker’s Hotel Del Monte. Artists arrived to form colonies, while marine scientists made camp to study the bay and the ocean. Waves of migrants from Sicily, Spain, the Balkans, Japan, and the Dust Bowl formed communities and businesses that local boy John Steinbeck would make famous in Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row.

In the 20th century, Monterey kept making itself the capital of new things. As the state grew interested again in its Spanish heritage, Monterey mined its own history and architecture to become the Adobe Capital of California. Monterey’s fishing and canning innovations also made it become the Sardine Capital of the World. And in the century’s second half, Monterey cemented its reputation a capital of tourism and cosmopolitan cool, with the establishment of the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1958 and opening the Monterey Bay Aquarium in 1984.

Monterey’s embrace of military training and education facilities, especially for the study of foreign languages, has paid huge dividends. The Navy’s Postgraduate School found a home at the old Del Monte Hotel, and the military’s Defense Language Institute grew up at the Presidio of Monterey, spinning off the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Taken together, these institutes have allowed Monterey to host a cultural festival that celebrates it being a Language Capital of the World.

In all this, Conway, the local historian, saw a civic “schizophrenia”; Monterey, like California, clings to its past while relentlessly seeking out future new identities. That two-sidedness has made the city difficult to govern. Locals have fought for decades over water, growth, and downtown redevelopment.

But Monterey’s ability to remain so attractive and alluring—over these 250 years—also holds an important lesson for Californians: size and political power are not what make a city great. Instead, it is the places that truly welcome strangers, that collapse time and space, that connect us to history and the future, that remain worth celebrating.

I’m sad that COVID-19 forced the cancelation of the 250th birthday party Monterey spent two years planning for itself. But you can still honor the occasion the next time you visit the peninsula. First, savor the views from Lower Presidio Historic Park, where a native village once stood, where Vizcaíno landed in 1602, and where Serra and Portolà got things started in 1770.

Then wander over to San Carlos Cathedral, one of oldest buildings in this state, and say a prayer that California, and its real capital, will still be around to celebrate in another 250 years.

The post Why Monterey’s 250th Birthday Bodes Well for California’s Future appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

California has a peculiar peril: Our state is becoming too rich for its own good.

For evidence, just look at Orange County.

The dangers of too much wealth have not been much of a topic this fall as the county of 3.2 million—more than the population of 21 states—hosts a national political war over control of Congress. But they should be. Because, for all the conversation about our state’s considerable problems with poverty, today’s wealth may be a greater threat to California’s future.

By the statistics, Orange County looks as flawless as any of the toned bodies on the beach at Corona del Mar. It has a GDP greater than that of smaller European countries like Greece or Portugal; unemployment is at just 3 percent; and the median income approaches $90,000—which is $25,000 higher than the state figure.

But O.C.’s economic beauty is only skin deep. Beneath the surface lies a heart that is old and beating too slow. Orange County’s comfortable wealth may be robbing it of its dynamism.

The wealth we hold in our housing is central to the problem. Orange County, like California itself, should be a place where everyone wants to live. But it’s so expensive to live there that, for most of the last two decades, more people have been leaving the county for other parts of the U.S. than have been moving into it. Orange County is also a place where you should want to raise your kids; the schools are good, and dropout rates are low. But, with the high cost of living and declining births, school enrollment and the number of young children have fallen.

One result: Orange County is in danger of getting dumber. Some regional analysts have warned of a “brain drain,” as the county’s millennial population shrinks. That means Orange County is not developing its next generation of residents and workers—and is in fact losing many of the young people who graduate its universities with technical degrees.

The problem is not a lack of jobs. To the contrary, the labor market is impossibly tight, with employers in surveys complaining about the extreme difficulties of hiring educated workers with the right skills. A workforce report released late last year by the Orange County Development Board and the Orange County Business Council warned: “A less robust workforce talent pool could make Orange County a less attractive destination for businesses.”

In some ways, there may be too many jobs there. National political reporters, as they descend on the political battleground, lazily call Orange County a giant suburb, but it actually profiles more like an urban job center. While spending considerable time in the county recently, I was struck by all the office space under construction: more than 1.5 million square feet.

The nature of those jobs contributes to the county’s problems. Orange County hasn’t developed the robust and innovative tech sector of other wealthy American places. Instead, what distinguishes Orange County is the high percentage of its workers who are in high-paying professional services posts, from finance to accounting. But those higher-paying job categories are stagnating, while there is robust growth among much lower-paying job categories—in tourism, leisure, construction, and, to some extent, healthcare. The real growth in jobs in Orange County in the next decade, according to state projections, will be low-paying ones in food preparation and service, personal care aides, and retail sales.

Already, many of those workers can’t afford to live in Orange County, so they commute in from neighboring, and cheaper, Riverside and Los Angeles counties. Earlier this year, the UCLA Anderson Forecast found that, for the first time on record, Orange County has more local jobs than it has people to fill them. (Orange County is hardly alone in this; Silicon Valley faces the same problem.)

And that puts pressure on a major Orange County weakness that also hasn’t been much of an issue in this fall’s political campaigns: transportation. Orange County, despite being a job center and a crossroads between counties in Southern California, has been irresponsibly cheap when it comes to building its infrastructure. Orange County residents declined to build an international airport at El Toro when they had a chance. The limited train service in the county doesn’t connect the different parts of the county well, and even its freeways mostly run north-south. It’s nothing close to the center of transportation it should be.

Lack of connection contributes to a divide. Jerry Nickelsburg, the director of the Anderson Forecast, says that Orange County is not one economy but two. There is the low-paying leisure and hospitality economy dominated by Disney on the north side of the county. The other involves finance, aerospace, and some tech around Irvine and Newport (with a branch in Seal Beach).

That north county economy has been getting national attention, via political and union organizing to raise the wages of people who work in and around the Disney complex. But Orange County’s richer southern precincts are aging rapidly into irrelevance. Those communities struggle to find enough construction workers for building projects, especially those that serve the surging population of senior citizens.

Such trends, if not reversed, do more than explain today’s political divisions. They foretell a more divided future for one of California’s most beautiful places. How can the poorer north county get the resources it requires when O.C.’s politics and economy are dominated by the richer south? And what kind of representation is possible when more of the people who do the work in Orange County don’t live there?

A recession could further darken the picture, especially if it cuts hard into the professional services sector. Economic slowdown would probably further hurt manufacturing (of things like aerospace parts and nutritional supplements) and local government sectors that have seen declines in employment.

Automation in retail, a major industry for a county with fantastic malls like Fashion Island, also looms as a threat. Even tourism has shown some vulnerability, with hotel occupancy rates and the number of passengers at John Wayne Airport leveling off. (Perhaps Galaxy’s Edge, the new Star Wars-themed land scheduled to open at Disneyland next summer, could spark new growth and a more futuristic local outlook.)

A more fundamental problem is the lack of dynamism. The rate at which Orange County creates new businesses has been on a long-term decline. This reflects aging and slowing immigration in the county. Since those same trends exist across the state, California could become much less vital and entrepreneurial, too.

So while it’s interesting that so many young activists and political operatives from across the country have come to Orange County for campaign season, it would be much better if they could stick around, and start new families and new enterprises.

The post Is Orange County Too Rich For its Own Good? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Maybe they’ll do it by the time I have grandchildren.

It’s already too late for my own kids. The youngest of my three sons graduated from preschool last week. I celebrated by writing my final preschool check—for monthly tuition of $1,165. With that check, my spending on preschool tuition for all three boys, over the last seven years, totaled more than $120,000.

All that tuition, alongside a 21st-century Southern California mortgage, has wiped away most of my family’s savings. And yet, my kids are extremely lucky because they got to go to preschool at all.

Today, only half of California’s 4-year-olds and 21 percent of our 3-year-olds are enrolled in either a public preschool or Head Start, according to figures from the National Institute for Early Education Research. By comparison, 90 percent of 5-year-old Californians attend a public kindergarten.

That leaves most families to search for their own preschool solution, if they can. Many middle-class families struggle to find anything affordable (preschools often charge tuitions higher than the $14,000 of the University of California) and full-day (to accommodate work schedules). The state’s tax credit for preschool—$516—would cover two weeks at such facilities.

Subsidized preschool programs mostly target low-income kids, but an estimated 170,000 California children who are eligible for publicly funded preschools can’t go because there aren’t enough spots. And only 13 percent of low-income kids are in high-quality preschools, advocates say. In a state with high childhood poverty and inequality, such statistics are unconscionable.

Preschool makes liars of California adults, demonstrating the vast canyon between our progressive rhetoric (“children are the future”) and reactionary reality (“kids don’t vote so why should we care about them?”). Investments in early childhood education are of enormous social value: Kids who get high-quality preschool are less likely to fall behind in school, be victims of crime, or drop out of high school. The RAND Corporation even found that spending on early childhood had a higher rate of economic return than dollars devoted to infrastructure or workforce training.

So it would make a great deal of sense for California to invest in our kids. But the state can’t even match Oklahoma, which established universal preschool in the 1990s. Voters turned down a ballot initiative to establish universal preschool in 2006. Even part-way measures get blocked. In 2015, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a bill guaranteeing one year of part-day preschool to every low-income 4-year-old.

This year, California has the billions necessary to make preschool universal, but instead the new state budget throws $16 billion into rainy day reserves. This failure to do the best by young children is barely an issue in an election year in which Californians are debating a tiny gas tax increase that doesn’t do much for infrastructure.

Since the Great Recession, which saw $1 billion in cuts to early childhood programs, preschool has made progress: increases in the number of subsidized preschool slots, improved ratings and quality systems for preschools, and the establishment of transitional kindergarten for 4-year-olds. Some local school districts have added programs, passing local taxes. But all this falls short of a universal system in which preschool is guaranteed, like a grade in school; instead early childhood education is provided through a complicated patchwork of nine programs with different settings, standards, hours, and fees. The closest thing to universal preschool—transitional kindergarten—is limited to students born between September 2 and December 2. State spending per child on early childhood education actually declined last year.

This lack of commitment to preschool undermines quality and staffing. It’s hard to get talented people to devote their careers to early childhood, given the uncertainty. And California relies far more than most states on unlicensed providers.

Despite all these challenges, I have hope. And that hope is grounded in four Northern California children—the four kids, all under the age of nine, of our likely next governor, Gavin Newsom.

Newsom talks obsessively about early childhood, which is a good sign. Yes, he’s rich and lives in Marin, but the difficulty of readying small children for the world is one thing that even the glitterati have in common with the rest of us. A few years ago, while I toured a ridiculously expensive and irresponsibly progressive L.A. preschool, one prospective parent, the actor-musician Jack Black, became so frustrated at the school’s absurd child-centeredness (“we never correct the children even when they’re wrong”) that he asked the principal, with full School of Rock exasperation, “Don’t you think kids need a little more structure?”

Newsom proposes, in great detail, to create a robust system of public early childhood services that starts in the womb (with greater prenatal care), emphasizes coaching for parents of very young kids, and includes universal preschool. He calls for integrating the early childhood system with K-12 education and even universities.

This could be just the most elaborate of a generation’s worth of unfulfilled promises, but there are reasons to take him seriously: As mayor of San Francisco, he implemented a “Preschool for All” program, funded by a voter-approved tax. And in putting together a statewide ballot initiative that legalized cannabis in 2016, Newsom directed some marijuana money to early childhood.

Of course, Newsom will have to negotiate with child care providers wary of change, as well as education and health interests who see universal preschool as unwelcome competition for public funds. He should build a broader constituency for preschool by making sure his expansion reaches middle-class families. Middle-class support is why Social Security and Medicare are more popular than targeted programs for the poor.

And he shouldn’t wait. Those early years fly by. In the fall, my youngest will start kindergarten at our local public school. And while I no longer will be paying preschool tuition, I still will be writing checks.

California guarantees only half-day kindergarten, which means that he’ll be in the classroom for just three hours and 25 minutes a day, 8:10 to 11:35 a.m. Since my wife and I work, we’re very relieved that we can keep him at school by enrolling him in a “kindercare” program for the 11:35 a.m. to 3 p.m. stretch, and then an after-school program to cover 3 to 6 p.m.

Those two extra programs will allow us to keep our jobs. They also will cost us $750 a month.

The post California Promised ‘Preschool For All.’ What I Got Was $120,000 in Tuition Fees. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My first answer: Get my head examined.

For 40 years, the state government and California voters have steadily reduced the revenues and limited the discretion of municipal governments; anyone who starts a new city in such conditions is insane by definition. Our newest cities—like Jurupa Valley and Menifee in Riverside County—have struggled to survive.

Then I reconsidered. No, I don’t believe in the advanced dream cities that technologists at Google parent Alphabet or startup accelerator Y Combinator want to conjure. But maybe you could form a workable California city—by exploiting California’s present-day realities, rather than bowing to them.

I certainly know how I wouldn’t start a new city: by electing a city government, building expensive housing, or hiring the police and firefighters whose salaries and retiree benefits swallow municipal budgets whole.

Instead, I’d start my California city—let’s call it Joeville—by bringing on board the most important person in any California city: the developer.

Spit out your coffee if you must, but cities thrive or wither by the quality of their developers. California laws on politics, open meetings, and open records so greatly restrict the power of our public officials that they often can’t talk freely and legally to each other. As a result, developers don’t just create projects—the good ones become the hubs of communication, the head coach through which all the players in a city talk and plan.

What would my developer develop first? Certainly not streets, houses, or businesses. Those can come later. If you want a great California city, you should start with a big research university.

It’s no accident that California’s most successful post-war city—Irvine—got a University of California campus in 1965, six years before the city incorporated in 1971. Or that Stanford started in 1891, three years before Palo Alto incorporated in 1894. Universities also can transform small and sleepy towns. Look at La Jolla: Once a retirement village for Navy people, it became an international center for research and technology after it got a UC campus.

Universities perform many roles in building community: They are economic engines, provide a look for the city, and attract talented people from around the world. The good ones work to address social challenges, too. And California needs more of them, given our shortage of college graduates.

If you doubt their impact on cities, consider San Bernardino and Riverside, as James and Deborah Fallows do in their terrific new book, Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America. “Riverside and San Bernardino were similar-sized cities with similar economic prospects at the end of World War II,” they write, but now Riverside is 50 percent bigger. “Their prospects began diverging in the 1960s—Riverside’s up, San Bernardino’s down—when Riverside was chosen as the site of a new University of California campus and San Bernardino was not.”

Only with a university would Joeville be viable. I’d put mine in the city center, not on the outskirts as was done, mistakenly, with the new UC campus in Merced. I’d also put my university in charge of the local school district—creating a teachers college in the process.

With the schools in place, the developer could turn to developing a tax base. Under California’s misbegotten tax system, the best-off cities often are those that collect the most sales taxes. That’s why retail-poor San Jose, despite having so many rich homeowners, has a weak city government, while the city of Cerritos, with its auto mall, is rich.

My city would be designed around two highly attractive retailers that produce huge sales and taxes: Costco and an Apple store. I’d attach the Apple store to a luxury hotel so that I could tax its rooms, too. And since those retailers pay well, many of their employees could become, along with the university students, my city’s first residents.

You probably think that, at this point, we’d establish a city government to set up services. Think again. Local officials in California are so weak as to be useless. Better to have citizens take the lead.

California’s preeminent expert on local participation, Pete Peterson, dean of Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy, offered a number of suggestions for Joeville. First, it should be a charter city with its own mission statement, drafted by citizens, that answers the questions: What are we for? Why are we doing this? These ideas would help the town form its own distinct identity. Joeville could have its own local holiday—Founding Day—in the town’s public square, called the zócalo (which happens to be the name of the media nonprofit where I work), at which the mission statement would be read.

Peterson suggests that since the citizens would be leading the governance of their city, residents should attend a multi-day “Citizens Academy” where they would learn the basics of municipal government, including budgeting. Then citizens would be asked to serve on government commissions and local nonprofits.

Peterson says that Joeville could increase citizen engagement through its design. To encourage neighbors to get to know each other, city code might require porches to be built on the fronts of houses, with no attached garages.

Once Joeville’s citizens are engaged, we’d be free to set up whatever municipal departments are required. Joeville wouldn’t be afraid to contract out services, especially police and fire, given the expense, so as to have more money for libraries, parks, and civic forums. In this, Joeville would be typical: Fewer than one-quarter of California cities are responsible for all of their own municipal services.

Now, by this point, you’re thinking that Joeville is fantasy. Wouldn’t Joeville be stopped in its tracks by California’s regulation and litigation? Yes, which is why we’d lobby state legislators to have the entire city declared to be a stadium—not for sports, but of civic experimentation. The state, you see, routinely gives environmental and regulatory exemptions to stadiums, if little else.

Of course, Joeville still needs to find financing. In the meantime, California’s nearly 500 cities, struggling with state restrictions on funding and governance, might adopt Joeville’s civic motto: “You’ll Never Win If You Play By California’s Rules.”

The post My Plan for Building the Perfect California City appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This is the larger truth at the center of the Golden State’s June 5 first-round elections for governor, a U.S. senator, and other statewide and legislative offices. Under our peculiar system, the top two finishers in each race both advance to the November runoff election.

In practice, this rule means that virtually all campaigning is about who finishes second. At the moment, the California airwaves are full of ads, many of them deceptive, and all of them are designed to put a particular candidate in the second spot.

This fixation on finishing second isn’t limited to elections: Californians highly value being second in matters of civics, arts, and technology.

Take Silicon Valley. Our tech industry used to run on the idea of the “first mover advantage”—the belief that whatever startup moved first into a space had a head start and was likely to win.

But now the consensus has shifted, and “first mover advantage” is widely considered a myth. The evidence suggests that you’d rather be second in pursuing an idea—“a fast follower” in one common phrasing—if you want your technology to succeed in the marketplace.

Google, for example, didn’t adopt a version of pay-per-click advertising system until two years after a small startup called Goto.com created one. Ryan Holmes, the founder and CEO of Hootsuite, noted on Medium that Microsoft came up with a tablet a decade before the more successful iPad debuted, and that Snapchat pioneered disappearing images and several other features, only to see Facebook co-opt its ideas.

“Ultimately … it’s not who’s first to market but who’s best to market,” wrote Holmes. “As a second-mover, you benefit by having a clear, real target in your sights. Chasing down a market leader keeps your mission focused and your team aligned …. First-movers, by contrast, are forced to drive looking in the rear-view mirror.”

Being first is also no guarantee of reputational advantages. Uber, the ride-sharing leader, is widely distrusted, while Lyft, which trailed behind, is often celebrated.

Compare also the reputations of fly-by-night news sites that get the information up first to careful publications that do a better story later. Note that, to save money, California’s most distinguished newspaper, the L.A. Times, is moving from a first-rate location in downtown L.A. to a smaller city named El Segundo. The town’s name, meaning “The Second,” nods to its history as the site of Standard Oil’s second big California refinery. (El Primero was in Richmond.)

Being second also makes you less of a target. The paparazzi go a lot easier on second-tier action star Keanu Reeves than on Tom Cruise, and ditto for box office expectations. In addition, there is undoubted cachet to being second banana. Keith Richards is cooler than Mick Jagger. The Second World War is better understood than the first. The Dodgers are the richest and most successful baseball franchise in California, but, between their high-priced tickets and the fact that many cable operators can’t afford the carriage fees to show their games, you’re better off being a fan of the second-tier Angels.

And while people love to hate California’s biggest city, Los Angeles, who doesn’t love to love our state’s second most populous municipality, San Diego? If you believe the marketing, San Diego is “America’s finest city.”

As a whole, California—while maintaining that it’s a global leader—is actually No. 2 in some important measures. We’re the second most diverse state (Hawaii is tops). A recent study ranked our economy as the second strongest among American states, after Washington state. On the downside, we’re second among states in number of people per house, behind Utah—a reflection of our housing shortage.

In many things, being second is worth celebrating. The city of Stockton is very happy—after surviving municipal bankruptcy—to be ranked recently as the second most fiscally solvent city of the 75 largest cities in America. (The city’s budget surplus is now more than $3,000 per resident.) And California, according to consulting firm McKinsey, has the second lowest smoking and prisoner recidivism rates in the country.

Of course, when you’re choosing a candidate for a job or high political office, you want to pick the best. But California’s top-two system incentivizes people to select their second choice.

For example, say you’re a Democrat who wants your party to win back the U.S. House of Representatives and serve as a check on President Trump.

If Gavin Newsom is your first choice for governor in this month’s election, you might be better off voting for a different Democrat—like Antonio Villaraigosa—so that he can finish second in the June election. That way, two Democrats would advance to the November election in the top two. That would likely lower the turnout of Republicans in November, and thus make it harder for California’s Republican members of Congress to hold on to their seats in November.

The same holds true for a Republican who prefers the second-leading Republican contender for governor, Travis Allen, over John Cox, who according to polls has the best chance of getting into the top two. Vote for your top preference, and your party is probably less well-off.

Frustrating, yes. But this is how decision-making works in a state so devoted to settling for second best.

The post From Voting to Tech Innovation, California Ranks First at Second Best appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You are far too kind: I never imagined a bureaucratic nightmare this cruel, absurd, and surreal.

I don’t know exactly how I got to California, or even how I came back to life. But I appeared here some weeks ago, in the form of an insect, like my protagonist in The Metamorphosis. And I’m glad I did. If I’d known weather like this in my lifetime, I might not have died of tuberculosis in Prague in 1924, shortly before my 41st birthday.

In my prime, I was a master of conveying oppressive and intangible systems that trap humans and defeat attempts at reform. California, and its housing markets, do indeed fit that bill. But I never had any idea that a dystopia could be as beautiful and wealthy as yours.

Indeed, California’s talent for self-deception and absurdity leaves me in awe. You know, I thought I portrayed myopia pretty scarily in The Trial when my character K goes into the dark cathedral and can see only one piece of the painting, leaving its true meaning in pitch black. But I couldn’t have conceived of a fantastically rich place of 40 million people that claims it is open and welcoming to the whole world, while refusing to house people.

You Californians talk a big game about how you support the environment. But by a surreal trick, the laws that supposedly protect the environment also make it so difficult to build housing—especially near your transit hubs—that people are forced to live and work on the periphery, where the environmental costs are actually higher. You have enough land—and the right zoning—to have housing, but you give NIMBYs and lawyers all this power to stop housing and development even where it’s legal.

While I am proud of my ability to create nightmares of labyrinthine illogic, I never managed to dream of anything so diabolical as your California Environmental Quality Act, which you call CEQA. One lawyer, Jennifer Hernandez, who has written about this CEQA with scary flair, put it this way:

Imagine spending five years and $5 million to defend against a lawsuit challenging a plan for where to put transit improvements and other infrastructure, and critically needed housing and related public services—and then to get sued again, and again, and again, and again, for trying to implement the plan…. And then imagine that the reason for this “process” is a handful of construction trade leaders who don’t care a bit that their workers can’t live near their jobs, and can’t afford to buy a home anywhere within 2 hours—along with enviro advocates who define the “environment” as the view outside their kitchen window. And then imagine that the lawsuits can be filed anonymously, at a near zero cost, and without an iota of legal merit [and] can kill a project for 3-5 years by ending access to financing.

That surpasses my most chilling passages!

Californians have forgotten just how fundamental housing is—not merely as shelter from life’s cruelties but as a place that creates space to rest and think. As I once wrote, “It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.”

I portrayed the paradoxical isolation of an overcrowded city in The Trial, which, by the way, starts in a lodging house (the sort of housing your state could use more of). Your state is reminiscent of that, but at a scale—of escalating homelessness and housing prices far beyond the median income—that exceeds my horizons.

And oh, the terrible price you pay! I had some real health problems in my life—not just tuberculosis but migraines, insomnia, constipation, and boils. Modern scholars have concluded I also endured clinical depression and social anxiety. But your housing crisis is making you sicker than I ever was.

Millions of you have moved far from your jobs to find affordable housing that suits your family, but now your commutes are ruining your health. I know about commuting, too—while writing timeless works of literature, I had a day job with insurance companies—but I couldn’t imagine the traffic you endure or the hyper-crowded buses and BART cars you squeeze into.

All these pressures can put households in, well, Kafkaesque predicaments. I know about families—I had a tyrant of a father, and lost my two younger brothers to childhood disease. In my story, “The Judgment,” a father won’t make any room in the world for his son, who at the end hops over the railing of a bridge and plunges to his death.

But younger Californians have it worse: They can’t even have a child. So many of you are delaying marriage and child-rearing because you can’t afford a home that your state’s birthrate just fell to the lowest ever recorded—even lower than during the Great Depression.

Even those of you who have housing often have to do without very important things—like education—to pay for a roof over your heads. My father didn’t provide me much, but I got sent to good German schools, and got a law degree. You live in a 21st-century world where education is even more important, and yet your education levels are stalled, and not enough of your people can afford college.

Worse still, your schools don’t capture the full value of this huge run-up in housing values because you have limited your property taxes. When I buzzed about this to Californians, they started talking about how you all worship a strange and immortal god named “Prop 13.” And people think my stories are weird!

In this and other ways, your housing crisis has turned your sunny state into a prison I never could have conceived of in gloomy Prague. Now, I did once describe an apartment as a prison in my unfinished novel Amerika. But, by not building enough housing, you’ve created a run-up in prices that traps people in your own homes. Millions of you—perhaps most of you—live in places that you could not afford to buy or rent now if they came on the market. So you can’t move and follow prospects for jobs, education, and love.

And yes, I know that many of our civic and political leaders are proposing ways to address the crisis. But so many of the ideas (Mandatory solar! Higher affordable housing requirements! Rent control!) would only add to the costs of housing. Your local leaders don’t approve housing because politics and financial incentives run against it. And instead of changing the calculus by encouraging them to do the right thing, your state legislators suggest new laws to coerce them.

When listening to those lawmakers, I thought of an old line of mine: “It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.”

Do I have any suggestions for you? Nothing that isn’t obvious. As I once wrote, “start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.” Creating enough housing, whether it’s in Prague in the 1910s or Pleasanton in the 2010s, requires creating enough housing.

If you don’t, I fear you Californians will lose your taste for your very sweet land, just as the salesman-turned-insect in The Metamorphosis loses his taste for his former favorites of bread and milk.

I’d suggest that all Californians pick up my final, unfinished, and posthumously published novel The Castle, in which the protagonist K arrives in a village but struggles to get the permission to live there.

I never wrote the ending, but I planned to have the village grant him the right to make his home there only when he was on his deathbed.

California, do you really want to come to an end as Kafkaesque as that?

The post Even Kafka Couldn’t Dream up California’s Surreal Housing Crisis appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Haven’t heard of this Los Angeles investment banker? Your loss. Because following his example could change your life.

Beutner’s recent career exposes the lies we Californians tell ourselves about our limits. Sure, we want our children to believe they can grow up to be anything they want. But we believe that rising to the top in a field requires years of preparation, not to mention knowledge, and experience.

Austin Beutner shows us we’re wrong.

In this decade alone, Beutner has gone straight to the top in no fewer than four fields in the City of Angels—without having to pay his dues in any of them.

It started back in late 2009, when Beutner convinced Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to appoint him to be first deputy mayor of the city of L.A. Without any prior experience in local government, he helped manage 13 city agencies. During that stint, he was named interim general manager of L.A.’s most fearsome government agency—the Department of Water and Power—without experience in utilities.

After leaving city government, Beutner, without experience in journalism, took over as publisher of the Los Angeles Times, and the San Diego Union-Tribune.

But all those were a mere appetizer for his latest job. Last week, Beutner became superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District. With 600,000 students, it’s the largest school district in California and the second largest in the nation.

And if you think that earning such a position would require Beutner to have experience in school districts, you’re not thinking the right way.

What’s most impressive about Beutner is that he has had all these jobs in less than a decade. His stays in all of them were brief, about a year or so. Indeed, he also has managed to squeeze the building of a nonprofit called Vision to Learn, which provides free eye exams and glasses to children, into his sprint through L.A.’s major institutions.

Now, I admit that cynics might look at Beutner’s conquest of Los Angeles—the fastest takeover of a global city since the Visigoths sacked Rome—and suggest that there is something wrong in Southern California.

Austin Beutner, the new superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, in a 2013 photo. Photo courtesy of Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press.

They might say that L.A.’s institutions must be awfully weak to keep seeking services of the same finance guy, no matter how shiny his Dartmouth diploma is. They might find it weird that he keeps getting jobs without producing sustained success at any of his stops.

To such critics, I say, you are prisoners of your small minds and narrow horizons. My fellow Californians, Austin Beutner is a model for us all.

His inspiring lesson for this state is that you can be anything that you want to be, with one enormous caveat. You have to want to be the leader of big, complicated institutions that Californians suspect are destined to fail, no matter who leads them.

Beutner’s method is not for just anyone. In the 21st century, to be able to pick any job you want, you need a background in high finance, which dominates the American economy. Beutner fits the bill: He worked at Smith Barney and the Blackstone Group, and then, after a stint at the U.S. State Department, co-founded the investment banking group Evercore Partners. After suffering serious injuries in a bicycle accident a decade ago, he decided to devote himself to public service—indeed, all public services.

But Beutner’s number one qualification is that he understands that most Californians have given up on governance. This state’s public institutions are so complex and dysfunctional that we feel utterly powerless to fix them.

Beutner’s rise has rested on exploiting this reality. He portrays himself as the rare Angeleno who hasn’t lost all hope in legacy institutions. So he studies up on a particular entity, and maybe forms a task force to produce a report. Then he tells all the rich people who matter in L.A. that he thinks there might be a way to fix it. Those rich people call their friends and the elected officials whose campaigns they fund, and pretty soon Beutner is running said institution.

It’s a double public service—since Beutner the public servant relieves the elites, and all of us really, of the responsibility of thinking about how to improve the city or the schools or the newspaper. No need to feel guilty about our lack of involvement. We’ve got Austin on the case.

In these jobs, Beutner works hard and advances intriguing ideas that might make sense. But nothing ever takes hold permanently because, before very long, Beutner is off to the next hornet’s nest.

And that can’t be blamed on Beutner. By definition these are short-term, no-hope gigs. And the people who fill them are sacrificial lambs (or, in Beutner’s case, sacrificial sharks). At DWP, Beutner was the ninth general manager in 10 years. At the L.A. Times, he was just one of multiple publishers fired by out-of-town ownership. And at L.A. Unified, he’s the latest in the series of superintendents: a district insider, a D.C.-area import, a Colorado governor, a Navy admiral, none considered a success.

The rest of us look at such jobs and ask ourselves, why would anyone bother? Beutner has discovered the answer: There is opportunity in California’s governing hopelessness. What, after all, is there to lose if you fail as school superintendent? Especially when even a modest effort can beat our low expectations?

“Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success,” said the late historian Christopher Lasch, who anticipated the Beutner Era in his classic book, The Revolt of the Elites: “Having given up the effort to raise the general level of competence—the old meaning of democracy—we are content to institutionalize competence in the caring class, which arrogates to itself the job of looking out for everybody else.”

Who are any of us to complain about Beutner’s short tenures, when we can’t be bothered to assist these institutions ourselves? Look at me. Back when Beutner was starting with the city, I was living in Los Angeles with young kids. But did I take over as L.A. Unified superintendent or offer to run DWP? No. To my shame, I surrendered to my own needs and bought a house in a good school district in the San Gabriel Valley.

Beutner is sacrificing so I don’t have to. And building a resume so that one day he might be U.S. senator or even president of the United States, a job for which he is already overqualified.

It’s high time we stopped whining about Beutner and other plutocrats running our institutions—and started emulating them.

I, for one, resolve to follow Beutner’s example.

Instead of writing this column for various California papers, I hereby offer myself as their publisher. (Would I really be any worse at running these legacy media businesses than their current operators?) Or maybe I should aim higher. Just as Beutner participated in reports on civic institutions before taking them over, I’ve reported on California water policy (I could chair the state water board), elections (I could be L.A. county registrar-recorder), and the arts (I could straighten out the war-torn MOCA in downtown L.A.). Heck, I wrote a well-reviewed book about Arnold Schwarzenegger. That means I probably could be governor or run a movie studio.

The magic of Austin Beutner is that he opens up new possibilities. He never sells himself short. Neither should you.

Yes, his L.A. Unified stay should be short—one board member whose vote he needed to get the job is under federal indictment. But don’t worry—the Los Angeles Opera, LAX, and the Dodgers all could use fresh leadership.

To follow Beutner is to follow the zeitgeist. Today, everyone knows that knowledge is power, and that power corrupts—so too much knowledge is corrupting. Yes, it’s a fallen world. But why not rise in it?

The post You, Too, Can Be Austin Beutner (No Prior Experience Necessary) appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

From: Joe Mathews

Re: Summit

If North and South Korea can have a peace summit, why can’t California and Texas do the same?

The United States desperately needs its two biggest states to figure out how to keep the country together.

Our nation’s political leaders are committed to dividing the country; their business model for elections and fundraising depends on ever-greater polarization of the American electorate. And so the American government’s mission now amounts to three things: mismanaging entitlement programs, handing our tax breaks to donors, and throwing trillions of dollars at endless wars that should instead go to our infrastructure.

So if this country is ever going to put itself back together, it’ll be up to your two states. You’re the two most successful examples of American states—capable of attracting millions of Americans and their dreams. Sure, you represent different constituencies and versions of the American idea. Texas represents the cheap, lightly regulated, freedom- and gun-loving counterpoint to California’s progressive cultural and technological powerhouse.

But you have one big thing in common: the American predicament. You are both nation-sized places stuck inside an even larger country. California, with nearly 40 million people, has the world’s fifth-largest economy; while Texas, approaching 30 million people, has the 10th-largest economy in the world. If you were presidents and your states were countries, they would be the 38th and 49th most populous nations on earth, respectively.

All of which gives California and Texas a common enemy: federal power.

For more than a century, whichever party is in power in Washington has seized more authority for the federal government. Recent presidents of all stripes—from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump—have ruled increasingly by executive order and other dictates.

Quite often, this increasingly dictatorial federal power has been aimed at the two of you.

By now, the drill is familiar. A Democratic administration will seek to impose policies that run contrary to Texas’s preferences on health care, the environment, criminal justice, or labor. And so Texas, often with some of its Southern state friends, fights and sues. That’s why, when you were state attorney general, Governor Abbott, you famously described your job as: “I go into the office in the morning, I sue Barack Obama, and then I go home.”

Now that Republicans are in power, it’s California’s turn to be targeted for its progressive policies on climate, pollution, immigration, and health care. So now the state gets together with its Western (and Northeastern) friends and resists with lawsuits, more than two dozen against the Trump administration. This endless cycle of litigation appears to be escalating so fast that The New York Times called it a legal civil war.

All this fighting isn’t good for the country, or your states. It takes time and resources away from your states’ efforts to improve the lives of your citizens. And the resentments create internal divisions. Both of your states have movements seeking secession from the United States. And the fights with the federal government often inspire legal battles between your states and their cities.

The good news is: You don’t have to live like this! Together, the two of you can break the cycle.

That’s why you need a peace summit. The goals of the talks should be twofold. First, for both states to reaffirm their American-ness and commit to peaceful coexistence.

Second, for both states to work together to reduce federal power, and enhance the independence of states and their local communities.

This must go beyond reaffirming the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which reserves for the states the powers not given to the federal government. California and Texas are now so big that they need more explicit autonomy, so that they can make more of their own decisions without interference.

The D.C. Mandarins will call this a revolution. So be it. California and Texas must declare that this is not the United States of 13 states and 3 million people that adopted the constitution in 1789. Our country of more than 320 million is simply too big to be governed centrally from Washington, much less by the sort of people—first-term U.S. senators and reality TV stars—who get elected president these days. Our states deserve to be left alone to pursue their own destinies, with the federal government existing for little more than social insurance and national defense.

Indeed, the best argument for greater state autonomy is a democratic one. Our country barely passes as a democracy at the federal level, with a presidency often won by the candidate who lost the popular vote, a U.S. Senate that makes a mockery of equal representation, and powerful bureaucracies that defy accountability.

You’ll have to figure out through negotiations what your joint agenda is. But conservative Texas will want to transfer more taxing and regulatory power back to the state and local level, while California will want more regulatory and financing power at the state level to pursue major progressive advances in climate change, health care, and immigration protection.

I realize this will be hard politically: You both will lose the political crutch of blasting the other state, and your voters will accuse you of compromising your principles. And Gov. Abbott might have to cool down his “Don’t California my Texas” rhetoric. (Though, c’mon, Greg, it ain’t so bad having all those In-N-Out Burgers and Trader Joe’s in your state, right?)

But a concerted effort to demand greater autonomy for both states—pursued jointly through politics, lawsuits, and even a constitutional amendment—would be healthy. You wouldn’t be able to blame the federal government for your own follies. Instead, California might actually have to confront how its oppressive environmental regulatory regime has made it impossible to build sufficient housing. And Texas might have to face how its lack of planning puts its people in flood plains that stand in the path of hurricanes.

And yes, I know you might miss the good times, when your states were politically aligned with the federal government. But admit it: Even those times weren’t easy, and your federal friends are never that friendly.

President Obama, after all, was little help to California during its housing and budget crises. And President Trump’s trade protectionism is causing headaches for Texas, which has invested heavily in infrastructure and companies that support international trade, especially with its neighbor, Mexico.

Your two states also have more common ground than you might think, even on immigration. While the federal government under Obama and Trump oversaw massive and inhumane deportation of your residents, your two states have invested in educating young immigrants, including the undocumented. It’s no accident that 350,000 of the estimated 800,000 “Dreamers” call one of your two states home.

To get the talks started, California should immediately revoke its counterproductive ban on government-funded travel to Texas. Yes, the Lone Star State has some awfully discriminatory laws on adoption by LGBTQ families, but how do you change minds if you can’t meet with people? And you two governors seem to have a civil relationship: You issued joint statements about natural disasters and the Dodgers-Astros World Series last fall.

Each of your states offers places where a visitor from the other would be comfortable. Why not start the talks in Austin, a chunk of California in the heart of Texas, where Apple employs more than 6,000 people? In California, I can see Gov. Brown taking his Texas counterpart to oil-rich Bakersfield, where you two could chat at Wool Growers, a terrific restaurant serving the food of the Basques—a people who know something about the fight for sovereignty.

I’m not expecting you to produce the political equivalent of “Pancho and Lefty,” the iconic joint album of California’s late Merle Haggard and Texas’s Willie Nelson. (Though bringing Willie to the summit is not a bad idea.) But developing a strong working relationship will be important if Washington totally melts down, and creates a constitutional crisis for the republic, as many fear. In that case, California and Texas will have to put things back together.

In the meantime, regular California-Texas summits would remind us that, while we will never be the most cohesive country, we are a collection of states that requires some unity.

And that, in a country as diverse as ours, there may be no agreement as powerful as an agreement to disagree.

The post Forget North and South Korea. California and Texas Really Need a Peace Summit. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.