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Salinas, California, isn’t just “Steinbeck Country,” its landscape famously memorialized in novels. The Monterey County city is also known as “America’s salad bowl,” for the produce, including lettuce, that is grown there. And last night, it was a fitting site for the Zócalo and The James Irvine Foundation event, “‘What Is a Good Job Now?’ In Agriculture,” part of a larger series exploring low-wage work in sectors across California.

One-third to one-half of all agricultural workers in the U.S. reside in California—so what happens here matters immensely for the industry, The James Irvine Foundation president and CEO Don Howard reminded a packed audience at Sherwood Elementary School, in opening remarks.

The evening’s panel consisted of farmworkers and their advocates: Salinas local and UC Berkeley student José Anzaldo; agricultural consultant James Nakahara; Alianza Nacional de Campesinas executive director & co-founder Mily Treviño-Sauceda; and retired farmworker attorney Juan Uranga. Los Angeles Times staff writer Rebecca Plevin moderated.

The group teased out the many challenges California’s farming industry and its workers face, from climate change to low wages to health issues. A meaningful message emerged: The solutions to these challenges will have to center on the humans that do the work.

Plevin launched the conversation by asking Treviño-Sauceda to list issues impacting California’s campesinas (women farmworkers) today. Citing wage theft, pesticide positioning, and discrimination, Treviño-Sauceda noted that sexual harassment and rape are widespread—9 out of 10 women are harassed in the field. Alianza Nacional de Campesinas aims to bring attention to these issues and more, she said.

Anzaldo chimed in, speaking directly to Treviño-Sauceda, saying that he respects the work she and her organization do.

“And we want people like you, too, talking about it and building consciousness in society,” she responded.

What about climate change? Plevin wondered, moving on to another hot-topic issue. With extreme heat, wildfires, and floods ravaging California farmlands, what kinds of changes are needed to protect workers?

Nakahara, who advises on farming practices, said that climate change presents both risks and opportunities. Some agriculture will have to shift geographically to accommodate changing climes—citrus, stone fruits, and avocadoes will move north—but other crops may move in to take their place. “We are going to get to grow things here we couldn’t 3,000 years ago,” he said. Throughout these large-scale changes, though, the industry will need to support and care for its workers.

But isn’t California progressive, with good protections for its workers? Plevin, who reports on equity issues, pointed out that California’s rules exceed federal standards. The state regulates when workers cannot work outside due to extreme heat, and requires growers to extend overtime benefits to farmworkers.

“I think the solution is better wages, not better overtime laws,” Nakahara said. Farmworkers cannot afford to live near their work, sometimes commuting four hours each way to get to the fields.

This resonated with Anzaldo, who recalled his own experiences pulling weeds and strawberries. “I remember being paid $13 an hour. I needed it for textbooks.”

To make ends meet, Anzaldo’s mother worked another job in addition to her farm work, and did not have a lot of time to spend with him and his siblings. The work is also physically grueling, and back-breaking. If he put his back up to rest or stretch, Anzaldo remembered, he would be penalized. “We will replace you,” his employers told him.

“It’s disheartening,” Anzaldo told the audience.

And change isn’t easy, said Uranga, the retired lawyer. “Anytime you make substantial changes to the relationship between grower and farmworker, growers are going to complain,” he said. Uranga started working in Salinas in 1974, with California Rural Legal Assistance. Growers like the status quo, and don’t want the challenges of creating new business models that take into account protections for workers.

There’s another big problem, too, Uranga said: Farm work is seasonal. So even if you’re getting $17 an hour, you’re getting it only some of the time. The communities that farmworkers live in have a big role to play, he said. Salinas and Monterey could help agriculture and farmworkers by subsidizing affordable housing or tutors in schools.

And what about technological changes? Plevin asked. How is tech changing farm work?

It’s helped—seed planters and other advances in greenhouses and nurseries have helped make the work easier—but advances are often hard-won, both Nakahara and Uranga noted. Outlawing short-handled hoes, which are more strenuous on the body, only happened when workers and advocates pushed for it, Uranga said.

“We need to stabilize the labor force,” Uranga argued, which dovetails with immigration reform and policy. The H-2 visa program allows growers to go directly into other countries, like Mexico, to recruit farmworkers for brief periods—making it difficult to develop an empowered, stable farming workforce. Fieldworkers should be allowed to stay, with some sort of pathway to permanent residency and citizenship, Uranga said.

For Uranga, that growers and industry leaders didn’t stand up for immigrant workers when political reform came up and amid Republican vitriol against migrants was disappointing. It “gets in the way of creating a job situation for the farmworker community in the U.S. that is more valued,” he said.

The way society values farm work needs reframing, all the panelists agreed. “We need to change the way we view the people who do the hardest work in our country and state,” Nakahara said, pushing back on the notion that farm work is “unskilled.” Treviño-Sauceda, too, pointed out that farmworkers were considered “essential workers” during the COVID-19 pandemic, but not treated as such. No one gave them health insurance or sick days.

The panel fielded questions—from both the online and in-person audiences. “How can consumers leverage purchasing power to drive positive change in food systems?” asked one in-person guest.

Change the packaging, said Nakahara: We have all these labels—certified organic, local, natural. But we don’t have a label that says “this food was made without exploiting labor,” or without forcing workers to get by on poverty wages, he noted. “I think if we did, people would shop differently.”

The night closed with a performance from a live mariachi band and catered food from El Charrito. But before the reception, the audience viewed clips from East of Salinas, a 2016 documentary film that features a young Anzaldo and his mother as subjects; and Beyond Salinas, a forthcoming sequel delving into Anzaldo’s experience at UC Berkeley as a first-generation college student.

Anzaldo said a few words to the crowd at Sherwood, which he attended all those years ago. He said he was dedicated to his community in Salinas, and he wanted those who viewed the films to understand not only his compassion but the issues he and his community face.

“My struggle doesn’t stop,” he said.

*CORRECTION: This “Takeaway” originally reported that panelist Juan Uranga argued for cities and counties like Salinas and Monterey to subsidize farmworker wages. Uranga mentioned subsidies for affordable housing and tutors.

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I’ve worked in the fields of the Salinas Valley since I was 18, tending grapes and picking broccoli.

Agricultural work has many contradictions. It is both steady and uncertain. I work constantly but don’t have one job. Instead, I work different jobs for different contractors during the picking season.

I could not have survived without doing this work, but sometimes I wonder how much longer I can survive doing it. Farmwork is getting easier in some ways, and harder in others.

I immigrated here from Guanajuato, Mexico, at 18 to find work and help support my large family. I had relatives in the Salinas Valley, and not long after I arrived, I met my husband, a Jalisco boy who also works in the fields. We had the first of our three children when I was 19 and soon settled in the small city of Greenfield, on U.S. 101, about 40 minutes south of Salinas.

When the kids were young, I tried to work less, skipping some seasons. But we needed the money, which meant more time away from them. Sometimes I found myself working 14 hours a day, six days a week—and getting paid not hourly, but by the box. I remember making just $1 for each box of broccoli I gathered and packed.

The work came with physical costs. I’d have pain in my back and neck and right arm. When I began working with grapes, I found, as most workers do, that I had to pull so hard on the grapevines that I would sometimes fall on my back. The pain could make it hard to sleep. Jorge is good at giving massages, but that isn’t always enough.

It was easy to get sick, especially since the companies didn’t provide gear for working in the wind and in the rain. I’d sometimes get nausea and headaches from the herbicides and insecticides. I believe that my work, including exposure to chemicals, contributed to the complications I experienced in my last pregnancy and to the health and development challenges of my youngest child.

Getting care for injuries and illness has always been very difficult. Companies didn’t offer sick days or leave days to go to the doctor or clinic if you were sick or hurt. And getting the right treatment might mean a trip up to Salinas.

Also, there were no medical benefits or healthcare coverage. My children, as native-born Americans, have always had their healthcare covered under Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program. But as an undocumented worker, I was not eligible for Medi-Cal. When I had to have a gallbladder operation, we were stuck with a hospital bill for $24,000 that we can’t pay.

Some, but not all, of these working conditions have improved in recent years, because of changes in the state laws and regulations for farmworkers.

The laws now require that we be paid hourly. With the higher state minimum wage, I make $16.50 per hour. We also get paid sick leave—at first, it was three days a year, but last fall, it was raised to five. And Jorge and I, like other undocumented people in California, were made eligible for Medi-Cal last year.

Our maximum hours a week are now 40. That means more time for family, for church, and for my volunteer work with Líderes Campesinas, which advocates for and organizes female farmworkers.

The trouble is that it’s often hard to get 40 hours of work these days. Sometimes I get 30 hours or less.

Together, my husband and I now earn $43,000 a year. That’s more than before. But the cost of living in California rises faster than our wages. We can’t come close to buying our home here in Monterey County, where even small houses cost $600,000 or more. And renting a three-bedroom house in Greenfield can cost $3,000 or more a month.

When all three children lived at home, we paid $2,800 to rent a three-bedroom. Now that our kids are growing up and moving out, we have a smaller place with two bedrooms for $1,600 a month.

You may have read about agricultural companies providing housing for workers. But that housing is almost always for guest workers who come here from Mexico or other countries under visas, stay for a few weeks or months, and then go home. I’ve never received any housing support.

Despite all these challenges, our lives have been blessed. I’ve always made enough money to send $200 to $300 a month to my mother. And we are so very proud of our three children.

Our older son, 26, graduated from Fresno State and is working in Monterey. Our 20-year-old daughter is entering her junior year at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Our 17-year-old son, soon to be a high school senior, is raising a prize pig that he will sell to help pay for college next year.

But we also feel frustrated at the obstacles to a better future.

My husband I have both tried to go to school. I’ve long wanted to become a teacher and work in early childhood education. I’ve taken some community college classes and even did some training. But I haven’t been able to finish a degree or get a job—because I’m undocumented. My husband, who wants to be an electrician, faces the same barriers.

The biggest thing this country could do for us would be to legalize our immigration status.

We have been living here, and paying taxes, our entire adult lives. We should be like anyone else—able to train for better jobs, collect unemployment when we lose our jobs, buy life insurance and better health insurance, and find a house that we can purchase.

Perhaps, someday soon, all of that will be possible.

The post California Farmworkers Stand on Uneven Ground appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Instead, Gonzales is among California’s most vaccinated places. In this Salinas Valley town of 9,000, where fewer than 10 percent of adults have a college degree, 98 percent of eligible residents have received at least one dose.

Readers of this column know that Gonzales is often an outlier of excellence among California communities. But in this case, it’s part of a larger, unexpected success story around vaccination in two of the state’s agricultural areas—the Salinas and Imperial Valleys. Their stories hold lessons that go beyond the pandemic.

The city of Salinas, the de facto capital of the lettuce-growing valley, also boasts a vaccination rate above 90 percent, well above the statewide average and the vaccination rate on the whiter, wealthier Monterey Peninsula. Meanwhile, Imperial County, along the U.S.–Mexico border, is the most vaccinated place in the southern part of the state, as CalMatters first noted. Imperial boasts an 86 percent vaccination rate (at least one dose)— 10 points higher than L.A., Orange and San Diego counties, and 20-plus points higher than San Bernardino and Riverside counties.

The contrast is even more dramatic when you compare heavily vaccinated Salinas and Imperial with the slow-to-vaccinate rural regions—the San Joaquin Valley and the North State—that have seen coronavirus surges paralyze local health systems this fall. Some counties in those regions—including Kings in the San Joaquin, and Lassen and Modoc in the far northeast—have vaccination rates below 50 percent. And perhaps most intriguingly, both the Imperial and Salinas valleys have large populations of younger Latinos working in agriculture and essential industries—the very demographic other parts of the state are struggling to vaccinate.

So, what explains the success of these two valleys, 500 miles apart?

The answers start with vegetables.

The Salinas and Imperial Valleys are California’s two great lettuce lands, leading producers of green vegetables, from spinach to broccoli. As such, they share networks of companies, mechanics, and workers who operate in the Salinas Valley through summer and fall, and the Imperial Valley (and neighboring Yuma, Arizona) in winter. It’s not uncommon to find agricultural workers with residences in both places.

Some of these same workers were among the hardest hit by the first wave of COVID-19 last spring, with 2020 infection rates as much as three times higher than California’s general population. The state was slow to require protective equipment, and testing was unavailable at first. But, after the early months of the pandemic, agricultural networks in the two valleys rallied in a big way.

Tight collaboration among entities that can be at odds—growers, labor groups, local governments, community advocates, and health clinics—was crucial. In the Salinas Valley, the Grower Shipper Association, an agricultural industry group, and Clinica de Salud, a community health clinic, shared an award for their joint efforts to protect workers. Together, they provided workers with personal protective equipment and quarantine housing, and, in 2021, they helped organize mass vaccination campaigns in the fields and at well-known sites like the Salinas Sports Complex. While the growers offered time off and transportation for vaccination, the clinics provided the doctors and nurses to do the jabs.

The Salinas Valley collaborators obtained their own supply of vaccines directly from the federal government, bypassing the state government. The vaccination collaborations also benefited from pre-pandemic organizing campaigns around farmworker health (particularly related to pesticide use) and the 2020 census count.

On the southern end of the lettuce network, county health officials worked with another industry group (the Imperial Valley Vegetable Growers Association), providers (including El Centro Regional Medical Center), and community nonprofits to get people vaccinated in even the smallest settlements of the sprawling valley. They provided transportation to get workers and far-flung residents to mass clinics at malls. And they brought vaccinations to the border, since many Imperial workers must cross to their jobs.

Participants in these efforts say the aggressive early spread of COVID in the community meant there was little vaccine resistance—too many people knew how deadly the virus was. Some also see the vaccination success as a by-product of increases in the county’s health infrastructure in the 10 years since the establishment of Obamacare.

But vaccination, for all the public conversation about national or statewide rates, is a profoundly local function. And Gonzales, which won a major national award for community health before the pandemic, provides a good example of how to do it.

Community health workers were central to the approach. Gonzales managed to hire two in 2020. Then in January 2021, by joining a program called VIDA that brought in county and philanthropic support, the city hired four more, for a total of six.

These community health workers went door to door, and into apartment buildings, schools and businesses, to build relationships with residents. They brought free food boxes, from three local food pantries that the city set up early in the pandemic, to quarantined residents. They also became certified COVID-19 testers. This helped them reach vaccine holdouts, who, after testing negative for COVID-19, were quickly registered for vaccine appointments.

The city’s vaccination campaign has been relentless—with many organizations partnering to host over 20 mass vaccination clinics since February at the high school, the small and independent Gonzales RX Pharmacy, and the local Catholic church. To make sure there were always enough people in town who could give shots, the city had five Gonzales firefighters certified in administering COVID-19 vaccines. In addition to these personnel, nursing students from nearby Hartnell Community College and pharmacy staff also handled inoculations.

“It’s very hard for people to say no, with the accessibility and ease of the process,” Carmen Gil, Gonzales’ director of community engagement, told me.

And therein may lie the prescription for ending this pandemic, even in the most stubborn locations. When so many different people and institutions in a place are working together to get you vaccinated, it doesn’t matter who you are or how small or rural your community is—resistance is futile.

The post Why California’s Lettuce Lands Are Unlikely Vaccination Leaders appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You’ll find one answer to that question in Gonzales, a city of just 9,000 people in the Salinas Valley, where local leaders spent 15 years seeking to connect all residents to the internet.

Right now, even California’s biggest and richest cities are struggling to provide the internet access necessary for their people to work or study from home. But Gonzales solved that problem a few months ago. Before the pandemic hit, the town offered broadband service, free of charge, to all its residents. The story behind its rare achievement—tiny Gonzales is the first Central Coast city to do this—offers all kinds of lessons about power, and how communities can beat the odds.

Gonzales’ leadership is not entirely a surprise. The town, populated by farmworkers and surrounded by fields, is one of our state’s smallest wonders. In a region notorious for high crime and child poverty, Gonzales boasts low crime and high graduation rates. And while other California cities chase sales taxes by developing big retail and tourist attractions, Gonzales focuses on nurturing a diverse industrial base that employs local residents. Its local leadership is well-known for novel partnerships that provide innovative health services and extensive supports for children, who make up nearly 40 percent of the town’s population.

But even for a creative and nimble city, securing broadband has been very challenging. Gonzales’ long path to universal broadband suggests that it will be difficult to turn the temporary internet measures of the pandemic—like short-term service discounts from providers—into long-term bridges over our digital divides.

Gonzales’ broadband quest is also a tale of a David taking on multiple Goliaths. In 2005, internet service in Gonzales was slow and unreliable, and municipal officials couldn’t get service providers to work with the town.

So the city joined the Central Coast Broadband Consortium, which includes governments and organizations that seek better internet access. Gonzales officials also started regularly visiting the state’s Public Utilities Commission in San Francisco to press their case for rural broadband, including a link between Santa Cruz and Soledad.

At some PUC meetings, Gonzales was the only city represented. But as a small town, it didn’t have much leverage—until officials discovered how to advance their case by filing legal protests against corporate mergers and acquisitions.

In 2015, when Charter Communications sought to merge with Time Warner in a $78 billion deal, Gonzales moved to block California from offering its approval of Charter’s acquisition of Time Warner and Bright House cable systems, on the grounds that the deal wouldn’t help small towns. City officials fought so hard that PUC officials urged Charter to negotiate. Ultimately Gonzales dropped its opposition after Charter upgraded the system serving the town, bumping Gonzales’ upload speeds from 1 Mbps to 60 Mbps, and its download speeds from 5 Mbps to 100 Mbps.

A tech backbone was in place, but access to the internet at home still remained a problem for poor families. On my frequent stops to Gonzales in recent years, I saw kids sitting outside McDonald’s, Starbucks or even City Hall, using the free WIFI to do their homework. In 2017, such scenes inspired the city to add a Broadband Strategy to its general plan, with a commitment to “Universal Broadband for All.”

Gonzales then requested proposals from internet service providers to provide universal broadband. Four such proposals were filed, but Gonzales rejected them all, citing slow speeds or holes in the commitment to universal access. Instead, the city began to negotiate individually with providers. The city found a willing partner in T-Mobile.

In Gonzales, Wi-Fi for all. Courtesy of Carmen Gil.

T-Mobile’s offerings were well-suited for Gonzales’ needs. The company has a program called EmpowerED to get students online. T-Mobile also has an unusually dense network of cellular towers in the area—which provide cell coverage to people driving through on the 101. T-Mobile also was willing to shift its model, which focuses on school districts, and work with the city government as well.

The T-Mobile/Gonzales partnership was approved by the city council last October. T-Mobile upgraded wireless internet infrastructure, and donated 2,000 Wi-Fi hotspots—one for every city household. The hotspots offer speeds four times those required by the Federal Communications Commission, and can support up to 12 different devices at once.

The city, not residents, pays monthly service charges, at a discounted rate of $12.50 monthly per household device. Partnership documents value T-Mobile’s donation at more than $504,000. The total annual cost to the Gonzales government is $300,000—paid for with general fund revenues and a special ½-cent sales tax approved back in 2014.

Hotspot distribution started in schools and low-income housing complexes. Anyone presenting proof of residency in Gonzales received them; so did households outside the city who attend Gonzales schools. Since COVID forced shutdowns, the city has offered drive-by service for equipment pickups.

Residents tell me the devices are already activated when you get them, so they are easy to use. And with education and other services now moving online, the hotspots have become indispensable for Gonzales’ many multi-generation families. Grandparents sing the hot spots’ praises, and some college students from Gonzales, now back home, say their city internet connections are better than their campus ones.

“They work really, really well, even with all the people suddenly online—Google Docs, Google Classroom, Zoom, are all working,” says Isabel Mendoza, 17, a Gonzales High senior and commissioner with the Gonzales Youth Council, a youth government with a role in city and school district decision-making. “Before, because we have five people in my house, and a number of electronics, the internet was really slow.”

René Mendez, the longtime city manager, has been fielding inquiries from towns around California asking for broadband advice, and nearby Greenfield is now moving forward with a similar program.

“I think this is doable across the state,” Mendez says, particularly if cities aggressively seek out internet providers and make deals that mix new broadband investment with cost-sharing. “Why can’t you provide broadband for the whole community, just like you do with sewer and water and streets?”

Of course, it should be much easier for poor towns and people to secure internet in California, which invented our tech world, than it was for Gonzales. But the city doesn’t dwell on past struggles—it’s moving forward. Gonzales’ deal with T-Mobile is for two years, but it’s renewable. City officials are planning a trip to T-Mobile headquarters, and plotting the next chapter of universal broadband. It starts with 5G.

The post One Small California Town’s 15-Year Fight for Universal Broadband appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Salinas, California and Yuma, Arizona are quite far apart—485 miles by plane and 600 by car.

But no two cities in the West are closer.

Salinas and Yuma are bound by two unstoppable California forces: salad and consumer expectation. We expect to have fresh salads on our tables year-round. In October, an arduous process makes that possible by linking the two cities. It goes by a deceptively simple name: Transition.

Transition happens twice a year. In the fall, major lettuce and vegetable growers and processors in Salinas literally pack up and move their entire operations—workers, supervisors, and multimillion-dollar processing facilities—to Yuma. In early spring, they reverse the process, returning from Yuma back to Salinas.

The reasons are climatic. Salinas may have California’s best weather in the spring and summer, but, as native son John Steinbeck once noted, “the high gray-flannel fog of winter” can “close off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest of the world.” Yuma, meanwhile, claims to be the sunniest populated place in the United States. So, to assure its official status as “Salad Bowl of the World,” Salinas requires four months of assistance each year from Yuma, the “Winter Fresh Vegetable Capital of the United States.”

But Transition has costs. These start with the logistical challenges of rapidly relocating not just crops but also the increasingly sophisticated technology used in processing what is grown for pre-packaged salads and pre-cut fresh vegetables. The farm operations that make the Transition typically shift a crop’s production in three days—usually over a weekend.

As sales of specialty products like bok choy and heirloom spinach have grown, so has the scale of Transition. During these fall weeks, people in Salinas and Yuma will see hundreds of trucks and pieces of agricultural equipment, sometimes blocking streets as companies pack and unpack. If you spot massive convoys of trucks on highways on an October weekend—one grower required 125 trucks last year—you may be seeing Transition in action.

“If you’re not part of Transition, it sounds ridiculous: ‘You mean, we’re going to tear down our $80 million operation and move it to Yuma and put it back together in three days?’” says Clint Cowden, an industry veteran who is dean of career technical education and workforce development at Hartnell College in Salinas. “But if you are part of it, it’s normal.”

The Salinas-Yuma Transition is the product of consolidation; California once had multiple lettuce districts, but they’ve been gobbled up by other crops and housing development. One of the last remaining such districts, in Huron in western Fresno County, is still a brief side-trip for some Salinas growers, who stop for a couple weeks of harvest on their way to Yuma.

That Arizona city is a natural and longtime California partner. Set at a narrow part of the Colorado River just across from California, Yuma was a major entry point for migrants to California, from the Gold Rush to the Dust Bowl. The area has been an agricultural marvel since the 1912 completion of the Yuma Siphon, a massive irrigation tunnel under the Colorado River.

Today, Salinas, a city of 157,000 in Monterey County, and Yuma, a city of 95,000 in a desert valley of 200,000, jointly support a $3.8 billion piece of the agricultural industry, and so the stakes of Transition are higher.

Climate change has made weather less predictable in both places, so some growers use fields in Mexico as a weather hedge. (Yuma has had unexpected bouts of winter frost and early spring heat that can damage lettuce.)

Transition also has emerged as a suspect in some cases of food contamination; a commission investigating the E. coli found in romaine lettuce from Yuma last season has questioned why such cases appear more likely to happen late in seasons, often right around the time of Transition.

But the biggest costs of Transition lie in the adjustments both cities make as a big piece of their economy departs and returns every year.

Right now, Salinas people can look forward to the lighter traffic of winter. “It becomes a lot easier to make a left turn on Abbott Street,” says former Mayor Dennis Donohue. The city’s airport, though, gets busier, as Salinas-based growers use small planes to commute to Yuma during the week. Salinas teachers say that some students struggle in the winter when farmworker parents head off to Yuma, leaving them with other relatives.

Yuma Mayor Doug Nicholls says his residents have become accustomed to streets that brim with agricultural equipment at this time of year. In addition to the 40,000 people who show up for farm work in winter, Yuma gets another 100,000 visitors to its charming downtown and recreational opportunities, especially along the riverfront. The city’s main challenge is accommodating this seasonal population growth. Nicholls notes that the reconstruction of an Interstate 8 interchange in Yuma has been paused for six months so that it doesn’t slow down agriculture-related traffic.

After decades of Transition, Yuma is becoming less of a little brother in the Salinas relationship. Yuma’s growing season has gotten a little longer, and companies are expanding facilities for storage and processing. Yuma also has become more appealing to workers than Salinas, largely because of California’s housing mess. Traditionally, workers built their lives in Salinas, but some now prefer to make their main residence in Yuma or the neighboring cities of San Luis or Somerton, which produce plentiful and affordable starter homes.

In comparison, Salinas housing is miserably expensive, with workers squeezing into shared apartments or living in trailers or cars. (One-third of students in the Salinas City Elementary School District are considered homeless because they have no postal address.) In response, some Salinas growers, finding it harder to recruit and retain workers to California, have launched major projects to build worker housing, modeled on a $17 million complex in Spreckels, next door to Salinas, that was opened by vegetable grower Tanimura & Antle in 2016.

Salinas and Yuma are actually similar in profile. Both are poorer cities in beautiful settings, with young, majority-Latino populations. But for all the ways that salad shrinks geography and blurs the lines between California and Arizona, there have been few formal collaborations between Salinas and Yuma outside of agriculture and workforce.

Mayor Nicholls and other civic leaders in both places say cultural and educational exchanges would make sense. But when is there time? Both cities are consumed with the never-ending task of meeting the demand for fresh food—and of providing for those who work so we might eat.

The post Salinas and Yuma Are 500 Miles Apart—But Agribusiness Is Growing Them Closer appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Further north, welcome as well to Modesto, Sacramento, Placerville, and Yuba City. And, to the south, you’re invited, too, Santa Cruz, Monterey, San Benito, and Salinas. And while you’re almost in another state, don’t worry, Tahoe City, because the Bay waters are warm.

This expanded notion of the Bay Area’s reach isn’t a joke. It reflects the biggest thinking about California’s future. If you’re in a smaller Northern California region struggling to compete with the advanced grandeur of the Bay Area, why not join forces with the Bay Area instead?

The Bay Area would benefit, too. It is one of four connected Northern California regions—along with the greater Sacramento area heading up into the mountains, the northern San Joaquin Valley, and the north Central Coast triumvirate of Monterey, Santa Cruz, and San Benito counties—that face severe challenges in housing, land use, jobs, transportation, education, and the environment. Since such problems cross regional boundaries, shouldn’t the regions address them together as one giant region?

The Northern California Megaregion—a concept developed by a think tank, the Bay Area Council Economic Institute—includes 12 million people, 21 counties, and 164 incorporated cities. It extends from the Wine Country to the Lettuce Lands of the Salinas Valley, and from the Pacific to the Nevada border.

These places, while different, are already linked, by infrastructure and flows of capital and commodities that date back to the Gold Rush. Today, the Megaregion has grown more integrated as people search a wider geography for jobs and schools, while businesses expand by serving more of Northern California.

The trouble is that this growth is imbalanced. The Megaregion is home to the mega-rich San Francisco and Marin and three of California’s poorest cities: Stockton, Vallejo, and Salinas.

The 21-county, 12 million person Northern California Megaregion, a concept developed by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. Courtesy of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.

The imbalance of high-paying jobs created in the Bay Area, coupled with scant and expensive housing, results in a sky-high cost of living that blunts the benefits of high salaries. It also has produced an out-migration of younger people and companies. Some of these Bay Area refugees head to East Bay exurbs, the Sacramento area, and even to the Northern San Joaquin Valley, where housing prices are one-third of those in the Bay Area proper and still haven’t recovered to their pre-recession highs. But once there, they often find themselves too far away from their jobs and preferred educational institutions. The result is brutal traffic that slows the movement of goods, produces more greenhouse gases, and creates long, unhealthy commutes for workers.

Figuring out how to rebalance the Megaregion and solve such problems is a high-stakes challenge, and not just for Northern Californians. The entire state relies heavily—perhaps too heavily—on the growth and tax revenues generated by the Bay Area, which accounts for one-third of the California economy.

Nationally, too, the future of megaregions matters. Defined as sets of neighboring metropolitan centers that share infrastructure, environmental concerns, and economic connections, Megaregions are projected to be home to 70 percent of the national population growth between now and 2050. During that period, just 11 American megaregions will be home to 80 percent of the country’s job growth.

For all these reasons, the Bay Area Council Economic Institute’s 2016 report, “The Northern California Megaregion,” deserves more consideration because it offers a vision for how the Golden State might spread out prosperity beyond its richest centers, creating a more distributed version of the California dream.

This is not about letting the Bay Area colonize its neighbors. Rather, it’s a mega-rethinking so that planning and development enable the Megaregion’s pieces—Bay Area tech, Sacramento government, Northern San Joaquin Valley trade and logistics, and the Monterey Bay Area’s farming dominance—to magnify each other.

To pick one example, if new state research-and-development tax credits were to target inland companies, an infusion of technology and investment could allow the Northern San Joaquin to make its logistics industry much less polluting in terms of greenhouse gases as it moves the vegetables of the Salinas Valley to market, perhaps through expanded ports in Stockton, West Sacramento, or Oakland.

The think tank report and its co-author, Jeff Bellisario, a man whose colleagues call him “Mr. Megaregion,” offer dozens of similarly transformative ideas. The Northern California Megaregion could create a “more distributed high tech sector,” with more companies, and more jobs inland, by better connecting universities, laboratories, and research institutions with local entrepreneurs.

Imagine, if the center of gravity in Northern California shifted southeast, landing in the fast-growing Tri-Valley, which includes the cities of Livermore, Pleasanton, Dublin, and San Ramon. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, better linked with entrepreneurs and investment, could be a jobs hub that turns into something of a megaregional capital.

Such planning should be performed by new economic development entities that extend across the entire Megaregion; companies that now leave the Bay Area for Austin in search of cost savings might be redirected to Sacramento or Santa Cruz. Such an effort would be strengthened if Bay Area entities jointly lobbied Sacramento to improve education outside the Bay Area. Only half of the people in the Monterey and Northern San Joaquin areas have had some type of post-high school education, as opposed to 70 percent in the Bay Area proper.

The report shows such investments could spin off literally hundreds of new ideas. My favorite: The Megaregion could have its own…well, I’ll call it a Nerd Army of overeducated consultants, or, in the report’s words, “a megaregional corps of consulting post-docs and advanced graduate students” that could be dispatched to solve regional problems and prepare local talent for higher-skill jobs.

Of course, making such a shift would require a well-integrated set of transportation connections from one end of the Megaregion to the other. The goal would be to get trucks and commuters off the hellish 80, 580, and 101 corridors, making it easier for the state to hit its targets for reducing greenhouse gases.

Suggested changes include more service on Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor between San Jose and Placer County, an extension of rail service to Salinas, and support of planned expansions of the ACE (Altamont Corridor Express) train down to Modesto and Merced and up to Sacramento. (Political note: The gas tax increase, on the November ballot for repeal, produces $900 million for these ACE expansions.) And all these changes, in turn, would make the actual completion of high-speed rail more urgent, since the first segment, extended from Bakersfield to San Jose, would connect with this expanded Megaregional transit system.

It is easy to mock such mega-visions. For years, real estate interests have broadcast silly promotions, like touting a major housing development in San Joaquin County as being in the “Far East Bay.” (Local joke: Is that nearer Singapore or Hong Kong?)

But if the Megaregion could harness its joint economic and lobbying power, much of this seems possible. It could even inspire imitators. Could Los Angeles, San Diego, and Las Vegas further integrate into their own Megaregional triangle? And might they throw Tijuana and Mexicali into their planning mix as well?

If it built a record of success, the Northern California Megaregion could expand, connecting to planning efforts in the troubled Northstate, and even extending down the San Joaquin Valley to California’s fifth-largest city.

Welcome to the Bay Area, Fresno.

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