I understand your desire to leave California.

Your complaints—about the high costs of being here, the state’s low levels of public investment, the obstacles to building housing—all have merit. If you’re a Californian or a California entity and you haven’t thought of departure, then you probably don’t belong in the Golden State.

What I don’t understand is why you are asking your voters to endorse secession on the November ballot in order to make San Bernardino County its very own state, America’s 51^st.

Because your biggest problem is that you’re too much like an American state.

Already you’re the size of one. Extending from L.A. to the Nevada and Arizona borders, you are the largest county in the United States by area. You are as big as West Virginia or Switzerland, and you occupy more land than New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island put together. With nearly 2.2 million people, you have more residents than New Mexico and 14 other states.

You have many of the problems of an American state. You are politically polarized and thus hard to govern, with no clear majority party (your voters are 41 percent Democratic and 29 percent Republican, with the rest non-partisans or members of smaller parties). You’re plagued by economic inequality that matches that of the developing world (gauging by the World Bank’s Gini Index, the country you come closest to is Venezuela).

And you’re geographically divided, into regions that have little in common with one another. Almost all of your people—some 80 percent—are packed into dense urbanized areas in your southwest corner, living in cities that are effectively part of suburban, metro Los Angeles. Another 400,000 or so of your residents live in the exurbs of the high desert, in the Victor Valley. The rest are rural occupants of the vast and empty mountains and deserts of your interior.

Now, I know the people leading this push for secession—county supervisors and real estate developers—imagine that being a state will free you from the edicts coming down from Sacramento. But don’t they read the papers? American states, and especially California, are increasingly at the mercy of a massively powerful, ever-expanding federal government, and constantly must fight against the whims of whichever political partisans are in charge in D.C.

It’s surprising that you don’t understand this, because you, San Bernardino County, are already under the federal thumb. Indeed, with all your national parks and wilderness areas, more than 80 percent of your land is owned by the U.S. government. The Bureau of Land Management and the Department of Defense basically control you. Of the 50 states, only Nevada is as much of a federal protectorate as you are.

Given these realities, statehood won’t mean independence. It may even make you more of a colony of Washington, since you won’t have the rest of California to fight the feds on your behalf.

If you really want independence and greater public investment, you need to think bigger: why not become your own nation? That way, all that federal land you sit on would become yours to exploit, for tourism or mining or other development. And you could provide more services and invest more in your own infrastructure if you could print your own money, which I presume would be called the ’dino.

Such a country could be an attractive place to live, especially for this columnist. Given America’s decline, and the facts that my mom is a county native and that her family—from retired schoolteachers in Redlands to milk truck drivers in Apple Valley—remain residents, I could imagine myself immigrating to Loma Linda and seeking citizenship in the new nation.

Sadly, it’s never going to happen. San Bernardino statehood would require a political miracle—the approval of the state of California, both houses of Congress, and the president. But nationhood would be even harder. Which is why we’ll never enjoy the spectacle of a delegation from your national capital—Barstow, right?—arriving in Brussels to demand membership in NATO.

So, you’ll have to resort to a second option:

Instead of splitting away from the state of California, split yourself up.

Since you are unhappy with yourself as a county, why not sell yourself off, in pieces, to your neighbors? You’d find plenty of takers. California is overdue for a resetting of its county boundaries, which were mostly determined back in the late 19^th century, when there were only a million or so people living here.

Many of your communities might do better under different management. Your cities near your western border, from Chino Hills and Upland up through Victorville to Barstow, should return to Los Angeles, where they could be more easily linked to the growing Metro transit system.

Your mountain resorts and the cities on your southern border, like San Bernardino and Redlands, might become more prosperous by joining up with Riverside County, which has been more successful economically than you for the past two generations.

You could pass off your vast and sparsely populated desert precincts—everything north of Interstate 40—to Inyo or Kern Counties, which have long histories of governing empty spaces. And, in order to increase your housing supply, you could deed your land near the Nevada border to Clark County, whose dynamic developers would soon build new suburbs of Las Vegas. (This might require a land swap between states—maybe California could trade away San Bernardino land in exchange for the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe.)

Some might call this breakup the end of the county, but it actually would be a new beginning. And a rare win-win for your region. Your communities would find themselves with new options and possibilities. And you’d spare yourself the indignities of being a California county, or becoming an American state.

The post The Breakup San Bernardino County Needs appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“You’re lucky to have freeways—when I was a kid, we didn’t have freeways,” she used to say.

But that didn’t stop my brother and me from whining about congestion on the 10 during long drives to see her relatives in Redlands. She’d respond to our complaints with the Southern California version of “when I was your age, I had to walk six miles through the snow.”

“I grew up in Hawthorne,” a working-class town near LAX, she’d remind us, “and when we went to Redlands, we had to go via Imperial Highway and other surface streets.” In her telling, the trip took three hours.

Mom is 75 now, and her memory isn’t great. But I’ve never forgotten her story, and for years I’ve wondered what such a trip would be like. So, with her encouragement—she’s a retired newspaper editor who taught me the old journalists’ adage, “if your mother says she loves you, check it out”—I decided to do the reporting. I would drive from Hawthorne to the Inland Empire city of Redlands without getting on a freeway.

The drive would trigger memories, inspire emotions, and serve as a reminder how, when you’re traveling in California, time can slow down even as it hurtles ahead.

I start near Imperial Highway’s western end in El Segundo, from the former site of the North American Aviation plant where Grandma Edith, my mom’s mom, once worked the assembly line. From that spot, I see the office building that is now home to the L.A. Times, the paper my mom and I both worked for when it was headquartered in downtown L.A. From El Segundo, the highway proceeds underneath the 105 Freeway, which effectively replaced Imperial as an east-west thoroughfare when it opened in 1993.

Imperial Highway—really a collection of four- and six-lane county roads and state highways, with stoplights—was first conceived of a century ago by agricultural and business interests who wanted to connect L.A. with farms around Brawley, 220 miles southeast in Imperial County.

But building infrastructure was never easy in this state of too-many local jurisdictions; construction on the highway got started in 1931 but wasn’t finished until 1961. The Imperial Highway my mom and her parents relied on in the 1950s and ’60s slowly became obsolete as long stretches of the highway were replaced or subsumed by other freeways and highways. Today, Imperial Highway doesn’t come within 100 miles of Imperial County; its eastern end is at the border of Anaheim and the city of Orange.

Heading east from El Segundo on Imperial, I stop immediately in Hawthorne, at a small apartment building that occupies the lot where my mom grew up. I also swing by the monument to the Beach Boys, whom my mom knew at Hawthorne High School. From Hawthorne, Imperial passes briefly through Inglewood and then makes its way through South Los Angeles, the section of Southern California that has changed the most, and most consistently drawn my attention, throughout my career.

Courtesy of Joe Mathews.

To drive Imperial Highway today is to see Southern California as an unhealthy empire, at war with itself. There are more check cashing places than banks, and more liquor stores, fast-food restaurants, donut shops, and smoke shops than I can count, most in small strip malls with names like “Imperial Plaza.” Their sun-splashed marquees mix with newer health clinics and gleaming schools—public, charter, private, and religious—often fenced off.

This streetscape reflects dueling impulses. Will health care and education save us before we eat and drink ourselves to death?

Just as in the rest of California, there is not enough new housing here. Homes along Imperial are often stucco and mid-century, their ugliness hidden behind uglier walls that block the traffic noise. The two public housing projects I pass—Nickerson Gardens and Imperial Courts—are in better shape than the apartments and motels around them.

East of South L.A., after grabbing a burrito at Plaza de Mexico mall in Lynwood, I can’t help but stop when I see the street sign for Gary Beverly Court outside of an empty Lynwood High School building. The high school has moved, but the street sign remains, in honor of a beloved principal who was shot to death on his drive home 20 years ago. I covered the case, which remains haunting and unsolved.

With a multi-car accident blocking Imperial ahead, I take a mile-long detour south into Compton, which allows me to visit the tombs of my great-grandparents. When I return to the road, I head through South Gate, and battle traffic. The retail shops become more frequent and more middlebrow in Downey. There, a sign points me in the direction of the museum memorializing the Columbia Space Shuttle, which my grandmother helped assemble later in her aerospace career.

Traffic is slow in Norwalk, with county government buildings and churches that have taken over old hotels, auditoriums, and restaurants. The drivers go so fast in Santa Fe Springs and La Mirada, the last two L.A. County cities Imperial runs through, that I move over to the slower right-hand lane.

Forty-one miles in, when I cross into Orange County in La Habra, Imperial looks more prosperous. There are a couple of tech firm offices, as well as high-end retailers, gyms and yoga studios full of pretty people, and an Amazon Fresh. I push through Brea into Yorba Linda for a bit, and see a few horse trails, along with signs for the Nixon library, devoted to the only California-born president, a kid from Whittier who weirdly embodied the promise and paranoia of his home state.

My total drive time, not counting stops, has reached two hours. And Imperial Highway would only get me halfway to Redlands, in the northeast corner of the L.A. basin that is part of San Bernardino County.

So, I turn north and head through Brea Canyon on a dusty, traffic-crammed road paralleling the 57 Freeway. Upon reaching the San Gabriel Valley, I take surface streets in a northeast direction through Diamond Bar, Pomona, and Claremont—passing a familiar mix of fast-food joints and donuts and schools.

Without a map, I drive in search of Base Line, where I’ll turn eastward. It’s the road my mom remembers most from those long-ago drives.

It also was once among the most important routes in all of California.

Indeed, Base Line is older than almost everything now standing in the Los Angeles basin. In the 1850s, U.S. government surveyors, charged with establishing an “initial point” for Southern California surveys (they chose Mt. San Bernardino), established a north-south meridian line and an east-west baseline to guide future surveys.

That baseline became Baseline, which today goes by various names—Base Line or Baseline, Baseline Avenue or Baseline Street, or, in Upland, 16^th Street. At the point beyond Claremont where I reach Baseline, I find a dustier, less dense version of Imperial Highway, with three lanes and too many liquor stores, but with more parks and trees and vacant lots. Just as the 105 Freeway shadows Imperial, the 210 tracks the Baseline corridor it replaced over the past two generations.

The housing is newer here—my mom recalls the Base Line as a strip of development and services, running largely through groves and farms. But the buildings seem sun-bleached and in need of repair—a reminder that California’s housing stock is older than that of the Rust Belt states.

I head through Upland, with ranch houses and a few parks, and then into Rancho Cucamonga, which seems to have an abundance of dental practices along Baseline. “Why all the dentists?” I ask myself, before answering my own question: it’s all the donut shops!

I am through Etiwanda and into Fontana before I spot new housing construction, a development calling itself “The Encore at Providence,” which sounds like the last song before the show ends and you get your audience with God.

But then in Rialto, Baseline becomes a divide. On the south side are homes, protected by sound walls. On the north side are warehouses. These facilities grow more massive as I move further east; the “Now Hiring” signs on their walls also get bigger as I head deeper into the Inland Empire, now an American center for logistics.

Sidewalks are replaced by dust, and the landscape gets browner, except for the brilliant green colors of Eisenhower High School. I feel like I’m in the country, with things spread out—until I cross the 215 and enter the west side of San Bernardino.

To this point, the roads have been relatively smooth, but San Bernardino is a poor city, even after emerging from one of America’s worst municipal bankruptcies in 2017. Baseline here is full of ruts and potholes, and my Prius bounces up and down. Many of the storefronts are empty. Even in the Inland Empire, one of California’s fastest-growing areas, San Bernardino seems stagnant; it’s been eclipsed by its inland urban rival, Riverside, which has grown faster and richer since the 1980s.

I’ve been driving for more than three hours, and I’m getting close to my destination. I head through the city of Highland, home of the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, who sponsor the new event space back in L.A. that the media nonprofit for which I now work helps program. I drive a few miles past their newly renamed casino and I’m in East Highlands, where my grandmother, great-grandmother and other relatives worked in the orange groves and packing houses after arriving from Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl.

Courtesy of Joe Mathews.

The packing company provided a small green house for the family to live in here in East Highlands; that’s where my mom was heading from Hawthorne six decades ago. That green house, in a line of houses once known as the Green Row, is long gone, but I find the spot, on a hillside in a planned community.

Baseline dead-ends at an orange grove, which provides a bit of agricultural respite, and beauty, between the development and a dry hillside crisscrossed with hiking trails. Many of the oranges lay unpicked, rotting on the ground.

My great aunt and uncle, Fern and Don, remain in Redlands, near the 800-square-foot house my great-grandparents saved up to buy and which we would visit on those traffic-choked drives on the 10. I turn south, taking Orange Street through the Redlands downtown and up to the retirement community where Fern and Don now live.

More than eight hours have passed since I started. My total drive time, excluding stops, has been more than four hours. But the journey has felt even longer, with time moving in reverse as I retrace my mom’s family drives from six decades ago, and follow thoroughfares that date to the mid-19^th and early 20^th centuries.

After navigating the community’s COVID checks, I knock on my aunt and uncle’s door. I hug Fern, and spend a half hour arguing good-naturedly with Don about what he’s watching on Fox News. But I am eager to get home, without delay.

In less than five minutes of driving, I’m on the 10, heading west toward L.A. This drive will take me only 90 minutes, because of some traffic around West Covina. The route is not particularly scenic. But as I drive home, I suddenly feel fresher and renewed—with new memories of Southern California surface streets, and with my mother’s enduring gratitude for our freeways.

The post Why I Drove 80 Miles Across Southern California on Surface Streets appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When it comes to arts funding, we are in a drought—in Redlands, in California, and in the nation, said Redlands University theater professor Victoria Lewis. “Politicians have cut back again and again on funding. Tons of NEA [National Endowment of the Arts] grants are gone.”

Redlands Daily Facts editor Toni Momberger, who moderated the discussion, asked the panelists to reflect on the obstacles to success. Beverly Noerr, executive director of Redlands Community Music Association, which runs a series of free-to-the-public live events at the Redlands Bowl, elaborated on the difficulty of fundraising: “It’s a constant, constant grind to get your mission out there so that people will engage with it,” she said. “Our costs are always rising. Artists are very often asked to donate their services for free, but we support the artists, so we have to pay for all the entertainment and talent that comes in.”

Wayne R. Scott, president of LifeHouse Theater, a nonprofit theater that puts on shows performed by volunteer actors, sympathized. “There’s an unbelievable amount of hidden costs to putting these things together,” he said, naming everything from lighting to insurance. “It’s amazing to me how generous people can be, but also, when you pass the bucket around, how ungenerous people can be.”

Beyond funding, the panelists detailed cultural challenges that make filling seats difficult—shifting audience demographics, lack of exposure to the arts among younger generations, and the ever-growing role of technology in our lives, which can discourage people from making the effort, and shelling out the dollars, to attend live performances.

“The most challenging thing we’ve faced in Redlands is the diversity of the youth community here,” said Josiah Bruny, CEO of Music Changing Lives, a nonprofit that provides studio space and music instruction for children ages 8 to 18. He referenced an age population gap in the city, which makes it difficult for the city’s kids, who make up a much more diverse population than the city’s other residents, to connect with the programs that attract older attendees.

So, Momberger asked, what can be done? She focused on the role of technology in particular, which she said can contribute to a “communication breakdown” between younger and older audiences, but at the same time presents new opportunities for reaching out to people. “How is technology forcing community arts to evolve?”
In Bruny’s view, technology is more beneficial than anything else. “We use technology to sell our music, promote our artists. It’s a great tool,” he said. “We’ve landed national and international gigs from social media. Before, if you were a guerilla marketer, you would promote by flyers. Now, with Facebook, Instagram, you can reach anybody.”

“Live theater will always have this aura to it,” Scott said, “but technology is a great promotional platform.” Out of the 30,000 people who visit his theater annually, he noted, a mere 3 percent are from Redlands. The rest come from all around Southern California and beyond, “all through social media,” he said.

Lewis made the point that theater and other performance arts can no longer be seen as separate from technology, but rather as immersed in technology as everything else. At Redlands University, she said, they’ve started a theater business major to teach marketing and other ways to survive from a practical standpoint in the theater world.

“It is show business,” Scott agreed. “You have to wear a lot of hats. I’ve always been weak in that area, but I’ve tried to bone up on it, because you need it to survive.”

“As far as social media goes, the genie is out of the bottle,” Noerr said. “Whether we love it or not, we’re living with it.”

Beyond technological innovation, the panelists touched on a number of other solutions for promoting community arts: exposing kids to performances at the earliest possible age, encouraging diverse casts by reaching out to underrepresented communities to draw in new performers (and audiences), and adapting performances to reflect the changing tastes of younger generations. Bruny mentioned partnerships his organization has made with school districts and juvenile halls, and Lewis talked about recruiting actors for a play from a local women’s prison.

One major solution, Momberger suggested, may be partnering with organizations outside of the arts—finding ways to attract funders and participants at all levels of society, from inner city youth organizations to university economic departments, to capture the interest of people wouldn’t normally have an obvious investment in the arts, yet who could become passionate about performance once they’re exposed to it.

During the question-and-answer session, Lewis expanded on this notion by suggesting that getting more people involved may mean broadening our definition of community. “We all belong to various communities, and community theater is many different things,” she said. “But I think what theater does is make you part of something bigger than you are.”

As with all forms of performance, when it comes to theater, she said, “people are incorrigible.” The panelists wholeheartedly agreed when she declared that regardless of how difficult the times get, people “will keep making it.”

The post Live Performance Will Never Die appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.