For all these reasons and more, said Somini Sengupta, international climate reporter for the New York Times and moderator of yesterday’s discussion, “How Do Our Cities Prepare for The Post-Apocalypse?,” cities are now in a moment of reckoning.

“As we emerge from this pandemic,” she said, turning to the panel of politicians and scholars assembled online for the third event in the Zócalo/University of Toronto series The World We Want, we get to decide what’s next: “What is going to happen?”

Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, mayor of Freetown, Sierra Leone, stressed that the pandemic has emphasized how fragile the world’s most vulnerable communities remain today—and how that needs to change. Around 35 percent of Freetown’s population currently lives in informal settlements. Upgrading these communities and providing formal housing was something she’d made part of her three-year “Transform Freetown” platform, she said.

COVID showed just how desperate the situation was because the two key things needed to prevent the spread of the virus in the settlements—handwashing and social distancing—were untenable. “It just lit a bigger fire within me—increased that sense of urgency that a solution has to be found, not just in my city, but in cities around the world,” she said. This impacts everyone, she pointed out. “What the pandemic has shown is if we don’t get rid of virus in one country, we don’t get rid of virus anywhere.”

Serge Dedina, mayor of Imperial Beach, California, and executive director of Wildcoast, an international organization that addresses climate change, agreed—cities are part of a global community and need to think that way. Imperial Beach is on the U.S.-Mexico border, and he’s been vocal about ensuring that people across the border have access to vaccines. “If we don’t start working with Mexico to get vaccines going, we’re not going to recover here on the border as well,” he said.

For Samaneh Moafi, senior researcher at the human rights agency Forensic Architecture, the most powerful force to emerge from this year’s calamities was people working together to hold power accountable. “That was something that was so moving,” she said, noting some examples—including how, following the devastating explosion in Beirut last August, people from all walks of life didn’t just bear witness to the event, they recorded what was happening, and created what she termed “a poly-perspectival 3-D model,” which allowed for the development of a truth “that is not the high truth of the courts but a truth that is shared and rooted in citizens’ testimonies and acts of witnessing.”

University of Toronto professor and urbanist Richard Florida, meanwhile, mused on the power of community, which he saw play out on his own front porch. Last summer, he said, his family transformed their Toronto stoop into a space to sit and gather. “I didn’t know my neighbors before the summer,” he said. But the community-building opened up a whole new friendship circle.

Building community, the panelists agreed, is crucial for the health of cities. But for most people living in urban spaces, the pandemic has led to a crisis of connection that has gone unchecked.

“Community and family and connections matter more than ever,” said Dedina. “We’ve suffered as a result of not having those connections.” One way he’s looking to change that is by creating a Parks and Recreation Department for Imperial Beach, which does not currently have one. The city is seeking funding through grants and donations, and will also draw on funds from a new local sales tax, Measure I, to meet the moment. “Parks and Rec is a metaphor for democracy building, for community, for people talking to each other and hanging out with each other and being engaged,” Dedina said.

Aki-Sawyerr affirmed this point, saying that one of the key lessons Freetown learned when it faced the Ebola epidemic was that community had to be part of the solution. “You cannot solve a public health crisis, you cannot solve climate change, you can’t even solve the economic crisis we have without the involvement and the buy-in of the people in your city and the locality that you’re speaking about.”

What are other lessons of previous pandemics, asked Sengupta, the moderator.

Florida pointed out that modern handwashing—the powder room—is just a century old, and its rise followed the 1918 influenza.

Were there public policy interventions that were accelerated after that pandemic, Sengupta asked, which bear lessons for our present moment?

“There’s a good and not-so-good lesson,” said Florida, pointing out that the 1918 pandemic was not followed by a movement for social and racial justice, but instead ushered in the Roaring Twenties: “the most unequal, class-divided age of the robber barons.” So, he speculated, “What happens in the wake of pandemics is people recoil and rebound and maybe don’t double down quite immediately on conquering some of the social and economic challenges.”

On the other hand, he said, in the wake of the pandemic, “we did make basic shifts—not just in public health [but] in architecture,” whether that meant adding public space, parks, or modern restrooms to urban environments. “There were small adjustments in the way our cities were constructed that endured, but it took a while [to happen],” he said.

The panelists also answered questions from the audience that were asked in a live, YouTube chatroom. One participant wanted to know how informal settlements could be improved. Aki-Sawyerr offered a recent example from Freetown, where a fire in a settlement in March left 7,500 people homeless. Because of that catastrophe, she said, city officials decided that every settlement needs to clear out enough space to allow a firetruck to enter—no simple task, since people live in informal settlements because there is economic opportunity nearby, and making settlements safer means some of those people will need to move. “You cannot have the same number of people in that space and bring sanity to it,” said Aki-Sawyerr.

Other improvements to settlements, she said, could include better lighting and sanitation, and expanding roads.

Another audience member wanted to know: Do we stay and fight for cities vulnerable to climate change, or do cities make plans to move to higher ground?

Dedina said that Imperial Beach has some time before catastrophic flooding is expected, so the city has “to focus on adaptation first.” He’s pursuing natural approaches to combatting the effects of climate change and making cities more resilient, including replanting estuaries and restoring rivers. “We can go a long way before we talk about moving cities,” he said.

Looking ahead, Sengupta asked the panelists, what does a post-pandemic city look like?

Moafi hoped one change will be a rethinking of the ways that cities are policed. She called attention to tear gas, specifically. Across the world, from Hong Kong to the United States, its use is connected to “police brutality and environmental destruction,” she noted.

Dedina emphasized that outdoors is the “new tavern” for this generation. “More important than ever is get engaged, get people connected, foster outdoor activities and make the city a place where people can connect to nature”—something, he said, people need more than ever.

For Florida, cities will look, “for better and for worse,” a lot like they already do. “Too much has been made of this urban exodus” of people leaving big, dense cities, he said. He hopes that there’s an opportunity to remake central business districts of cities—“the last gasp of the industrial age” as more robust neighborhoods, but he fears that inequity in urban areas will continue grow. “That’s what really keeps me up at night,” he said.

Aki-Sawyerr said she doesn’t believe there is a post-pandemic world. “We’re in a world where we’re likely to see more pandemics,” she said, “but how do we structure the world where we can deal with this when the next one comes along?”

She shared one of her favorite expressions: How do you eat an elephant? The answer: One bite at a time.

“We have huge challenges globally,” she said. “We need to recognize there are vested interests that want things to stay where they are, and we need to continue to join the dots with those that actually believe that having more people have a better quality of life is overall better for all of us.”

The post To Reckon With the Post-Apocalypse, Cities Need to Better Invest in Community appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Are you a Californian looking for a New Year’s resolution?

You might be thinking about giving up sweets or fried foods, or going to the gym more, or volunteering, or cutting your carbon footprint, or otherwise doing right by your body, your community, or your planet. But, from the standpoint of your fellow Californians, the most effective thing you could do is swear off this phrase: “We want to protect the character of the community.”

The expressed desire to defend community character is a staple of California conversations about development or other changes in neighborhoods. It’s a phrase routinely aimed at developers, planners, or anyone with a big, transformational vision. It’s also official writ in many cities, with places as different as Davis, Menifee, and Los Angeles committing themselves in plans to preserving their community’s character.

In a state that is struggling to keep up with fundamental changes in housing, the economy, and the environment, there may be no more damaging set of words.

The phrase is powerful precisely because of its imprecision. Vague enough to be wrong in so many ways, it is the ultimate dodge, practically meaningless, the NIMBY equivalent of “yadda, yadda, yadda” from the famous Seinfeld episode.

But, in another sense, the phrase can mean everything to almost everybody. It’s a way to express any number of opinions, including: We don’t want this new general plan, this new development, these new immigrants. “Protect the character of our community” is used by poor people protesting development and gentrification that might bring richer people to their neighborhoods, and it’s used by rich people worried that affordable housing, transit, or homeless services might bring poorer people to their neighborhoods. It’s been used to throttle projects that would add to traffic and pollution by promoting sprawl and driving. It’s also been used to oppose development that seeks to reduce traffic and pollution by promoting density and transit.

Perversely, “protect the character of our community” is the phrase that unites us all—even though we use it to divide “us” from “them.”

The defense of community character is a lousy argument in normal times, because neither character nor community is static. Housing, buildings, streets, economies, and public spaces all age, and all must be maintained, updated, and renewed. People don’t stay the same, sitting in one place—they have children, change jobs, learn new things, relocate, and, most of all, they age. And in so doing, they change the character of their communities, because what they need from their surroundings—both physical and social—changes.

No healthy human community can stay the same; the best places become adept at managing change, and improving steadily. Indeed, the very promise of the California Dream was that our communities would incorporate vastly different people from around the country and the world, and transform into larger, richer, and more diverse places in the process.

In our current times, which are anything but normal, the “protect-community-character” argument verges on treason to California and its ideals.

California faces two huge categories of challenges. The first is to catch up on meeting residents’ existing needs, and the second is to reshape the state to meet future challenges. “Protect the character of the community” thinking is a big reason why neither group of challenges has been addressed.

California has a massive infrastructure deficit—totaling an estimated $800 billion in unmet needs. It’s a consequence of decades-worth of homeowners and existing businesses saying: “Why can’t you do this some other place, because we want to protect the character of our community?” And faltering infrastructure isn’t even the most serious consequence of prioritizing the status quo over human needs.

The housing crisis is.

Housing is controlled at the local government level, where “the character of the community” argument is strongest. The results have meant disaster for the state. California housing costs two-and-a-half times the national average, and the state has the country’s longest and unhealthiest commutes, as people only find affordable housing too far from their jobs. Our failure to build sufficient housing, in the face of the community character argument, also forces more Californians to live in older, decaying housing.

As bad as today’s housing crisis is, it pales in comparison to the potential dangers to California’s future presented by the community protection racket. The threat of climate change, in particular, will require transformation in how we live, which by definition will change community character. The design of our homes will change, so that they might run on renewables and keep us cooler in hotter times. Communities may be need to be relocated away from rising seas and out of fire and earthquake danger. And the state needs to invest massively in new transportation infrastructure so that we drive less and burn fewer fossil fuels. No responsible community in California should stay the same in such a time.

Indeed, change in California communities is long overdue. For 40 years now, since the passage of Prop 13, California has prioritized community stability—holding down property taxes so that people stay in their homes and businesses can stay open and stay in the family—at the expense of schools, health care, business development and local services. The state’s tax system has put a heavy burden on new arrivals and younger people—many of them fleeing poorer countries during a generation of mass migration globally—to subsidize older people and older communities and their ideas of “community character.”

It’s time for that era to end. But that will require that we stop singing the praises of community character and start realizing that it’s really the anthem of California’s religion of obstruction. It won’t be an easy shift to make. In their never-ending efforts to block progress, the character protectors have way too many tools at their disposal—zoning, design and environmental reviews that last eons; the California Environmental Quality Act; slow-moving licensing processes; and endless litigation in our budget-starved courts. The worst obstruction takes place close to our job centers, where there is the greatest potential for growth and for new, denser housing.

The dark political genius of the “protecting the character of the community” argument is that it allows those who employ it to avoid responsibility for their obstructionism. They portray themselves as “stakeholders” merely trying to keep their neighborhood from getting hurt. Even worse, at a time that celebrates activism, many of these community-character protectors pose as righteous neighborhood activists.

Please. They are the powerful, not the powerless. They’re victimizers, not victims. And they’ve been getting away with the crime of shutting their communities off from change, and putting big problems onto the younger, poorer, more diverse generations of Californians. It’s no accident that younger residents have been leaving the state in such high numbers; more than two-thirds of people who departed California in the past decade had annual incomes of less than $50,000.

This New Year’s, it’s time for Californians who care about the future, the environment, and our neighbors to banish this noxious phrase from our vocabulary. And when we hear others use the phrase, we should point out what it really means: I got mine, and who cares about anyone else?

And if your fellow Californians still persist in claiming they want to “protect the character of our community,” please feel free to start questioning their character.

The post The Dark Political Genius Behind Protecting a Community’s “Character” appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

How do you learn from a really big mistake?

Walk across it.

Which is why I recently found myself putting on a windbreaker and beginning a long, slow walk across the east span of the Bay Bridge, from Oakland to Yerba Buena Island. This piece of the bridge, completed in 2013, is probably the biggest California mistake of the last generation. The east span was completed a decade late, cost seven times more than official projections, and remains dogged by serious safety concerns.

However, the bridge does have one virtue: It holds lessons for the future, as California faces massive challenges that will necessitate big projects. Indeed, after eight years of the cautious, small-bore governorship of Jerry Brown, new state leaders are preparing to take on big initiatives on infrastructure, taxation, and early childhood.

Before they do, they should read a recently published book I brought on my bridge walk: A Tale of Two Bridges, by Stephen D. Mikesell, a Davis-based historian who previously served as deputy historic preservation officer for the state. Mikesell compares the original 1936 Bay Bridge with the troubled 2013 east span, but his book is really about the special challenges of megaprojects—that is, complex and controversial initiatives costing more than $1 billion.

Today’s cynical conventional wisdom is that big projects are nearly impossible to carry off, and that those that do go forward are destined to fail. But Mikesell argues otherwise. He explains that the original 1936 Bay Bridge met conditions for successful megaprojects.

First, local and state leaders built broad consensus about the purpose and need for the project: constructing a bridge from San Francisco to Oakland was clearly a game-changer for the region in that era. Second, political people made the political decisions about the bridge, and technical people made the technical decisions. While a politically appointed commission approved the bridge and its budget, the details of design and construction were left to technical experts brought in from all over the country. Third, costs were estimated accurately and the bridge came in under budget. And finally, the bridge builders used proven methods for construction and materials, emphasizing functionality rather than trying to make an artistic statement.

The 2013 eastern span didn’t pass all these tests, Mikesell writes. The bridge was a divisive political issue for years. Cost estimates were way off. Technical decisions about bridge design and engineering were made through political processes. And the crucial political decision—to build an expensive new span instead of a less costly retrofit of the old span—was made inside Caltrans. Who were these decisionmaker? Shockingly, Mikesell, a seasoned expert on bridges, writes that the process was so messy it’s impossible to identify exactly who was responsible.

Ultimately, warnings from leading bridge engineers were ignored as Bay Area political leaders chose what they saw as the most visually attractive bridge—a self-anchored suspension bridge—even though this less common design created all sorts of problems.

To walk the span today is to get a firsthand sense of a bridge gone wrong. The walkway itself offers the first clue: It’s on the wrong side of the bridge, the south side, which means that you get a view of the port of Oakland. If the walkway had been on the north-facing side, better views of the north bay, and even the Golden Gate, might have been possible. The walk is also polluted from the passing cars. I was often startled by loud noises from trucks hitting seams on the bridge; the eastbound traffic is so close it feels like it might run you over.

It took me nearly an hour to walk from a small parking lot at the Bay Bridge Trail entry point on Burma Road to the bridge’s signature tower and curve. There is nothing particularly beautiful or interesting about this tower and the cables attached to it. That’s a shame, since this is the section of the bridge that created most of the cost overruns. The tower is also the site of many structural problems, including saltwater intrusion into the foundation, damage to anchor rods, and substandard welds.

The bridge is also a failure because of what it didn’t do. Big projects should be transformational. But this span isn’t. It didn’t increase the bridge capacity or improve traffic flows. It is no artistic masterpiece. Paying for it actually raised bridge tolls. And prominent engineers argue that the new span may be more prone to fail in an earthquake that the old bridge it replaced.

“The 2013 East Bay is notable for how little it actually changed things in the Bay Area,” Mikesell writes.

The bridge was such a fiasco that prominent officials skipped its opening in 2013. It was left to the lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom, to handle the ceremonial chain-cutting. In brief remarks, he expressed hope that the bridge would inspire “a generation to dream big dreams and do big things.”

Now that Newsom is becoming governor—and promising big things—perhaps he can turn the bridge into a perverse inspiration by following its essential lessons. Any big project must be truly transformational, providing a service or a connection that truly changes people’s lives. Paradoxically, the execution of such transformations must be intensely practical and risk-averse, emphasizing function over form.

In other words, when you are pursuing a transformational project, achieving the transformation itself must be the sole focus.

How might such lessons be applied? If Newsom wants to build a single-payer health care system, it shouldn’t be the gold-plated model that progressive groups have been advocating for, but rather something simple, cheap and sturdy, covering everyone. He’ll need to resist efforts to make his promised new systems for taxation, homebuilding, and early childhood highly complex with loads of new formulas; the simplest systems are more likely to be durably transformational.

After reaching Yerba Buena Island, I walked around and enjoyed views of Newsom’s city of San Francisco for a few minutes. Tired and sweaty, I called for a Lyft to take me back to Oakland. But no driver would come. So I trudged all the way back, on sore feet, repeating my earlier mistake.

The post Can a Troubled Bridge Show California How to Avoid Big Errors? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Many might be surprised to learn, therefore, that at one particularly precarious point in the city’s history during the War of 1812, Congress seriously debated abandoning the site and moving the capital to another location. Rooted in the ideological and regional disputes of the time, the moment highlighted the deep symbolic value Americans placed on Washington long before it evolved into a showplace of American culture, learning, and history as well as a stage for marches, protests, and rallies.

Disputes over the physical form and development of what would become Washington, D.C. began almost immediately after President George Washington chose the site for the city in 1791, with opposing political camps hoping that the new capital might be molded to reflect their particular visions for the new nation. Two major political parties had congealed in Congress during Washington’s administration: the Federalist Party, which envisioned a strong federal government at the helm of an increasingly powerful American nation, and the Democratic-Republicans (also referred to as the Republicans or Jeffersonians, after their leader Thomas Jefferson), who believed in a smaller and weaker national government, one lacking both the power and the funds to tyrannize Americans as the British government had prior to the Revolution.

George Washington never belonged to either of these parties, but his political beliefs leaned toward those of the Federalists—and the architect he chose to plan the new capital, the French-born Revolutionary War veteran Pierre Charles L’Enfant, delivered a grand and impressive city plan that reflected a Federalist perspective on U.S. power, prestige, and government authority. L’Enfant’s design placed the President’s Mansion and the Capitol Building atop existing hills, allowing each to loom over sections of the city. It featured long, uncommonly wide avenues, emphasizing the breadth and grandeur of the cityscape. It called for individual states to erect “statues, columns, obelisks, or any other ornaments” to commemorate Revolutionary War heroes. And, in terms of sheer size, L’Enfant’s capital dwarfed the footprints of other American cities, spreading across an area more than six times the 1.5 square miles at the southern tip of Manhattan that made up New York in 1800.

Unfortunately for the Federalists, the infant republic lacked the means to build on such a grand scale. In 1800, President John Adams and Congress moved into half-finished and just barely functional versions of the White House and Capitol Building. Summing up the state of the capital, Connecticut Congressman John Cotton Smith remarked that “instead of recognizing the avenues and streets, portrayed on the plan of the city, not one was visible, unless we except a road with two buildings on each side of it, called the New Jersey Avenue. The Pennsylvania Avenue, leading, as laid down on paper, from the Capitol to the Presidential Mansion, was then nearly the whole distance a deep morass, covered with alder bushes.”

After Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans swept to power in the election of 1800, they followed through on their small-government convictions and left responsibility for further construction and development of the enormous city to the local residents. Over the next three decades, Jeffersonians confined federal government support for projects in the city almost exclusively to the stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the Capitol. Calls for assistance from the locals, whose tiny tax base could not begin to support management and development of a city the size of Washington, went largely unheeded.

It was this context into which British troops marched during the War of 1812, which had started when the United States attacked British Canada in the hopes of resolving ongoing disputes with the British Empire over interference with Native Americans, and over British naval policies that affected the United States during the Napoleonic Wars. But in August 1814, after easily defeating American soldiers and militiamen at Bladensburg, Maryland, British marines captured the otherwise undefended American capital. Happily repaying the Americans for the burning of the Canadian capital of York (now Toronto) earlier in the war, British troops set fire to the public buildings in Washington. The White House, the Capitol Building, the executive office buildings, and the Navy Yard all burned.

The U.S. Capitol after it was burned by the invading British during the War of 1812. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Although their homes and private businesses had been spared by a summer storm that prevented the fires from spreading, weary Washington residents suddenly found themselves facing another—possibly even greater—threat to their livelihoods. Almost immediately, members of the House of Representatives, who had been burned out of their chambers, began debating the removal of the federal government from the District of Columbia. On September 26th, meeting in the largest building still standing in Washington, a converted hotel that housed the Patent Office and the U.S. Post Office, Congress began to debate the future of the capital. Congressman Jonathan Fisk, a Democratic-Republican from New York, first proposed the formation of a committee to “inquire into the expediency of removing the Seat of Government.”

Largely hailing from the Northern states, proponents of removal argued that Washington had been proven insufficiently defensible and that a safer location should be found for the government. They also decried the inconveniences of cramming themselves together in too small a building and the indignity of what one member referred to as “making laws among ruins.” These latter complaints might have been remedied by temporary relocation of the government while the Capitol Building was reconstructed. But supporters of Washington feared that, once out of the District, Congress might never choose to return. These fears must have been exacerbated when advocates for removal raised longstanding complaints about Washington that stemmed from both its lack of development and from its location in the South, several days’ travel beyond the Northern cities that housed most of America’s banking and financial interests. Congressman Fisk noted, for example, that Congress would benefit from being “where they could have better opportunity to call into action the resources of the nation.”

Defenders of the Potomac capital asked what message departure would send to the American people and to their British enemies. Would they double the victory already won by the British by abandoning the site of their capital altogether? Would they leave behind the local residents of the District, many of whom had invested in land and businesses there? And what precedent would be set if the capital were moved? Nathaniel Macon, a Democratic-Republican from North Carolina, warned that, “if the Seat of Government was once set on wheels, there was no saying where it would stop.” Was Congress prepared to perpetually fight over the location of the capital?

On October 15, after three weeks of debate and two successful procedural votes to continue discussion of the motion, the issue was settled when the House voted 83 to 74 against removal. While views on the proper size of the city and the government’s role in its development had long been party battles, the subject of removal proved to be more tied to regional geography. Not surprisingly, Congressional delegations from those states nearest to the District, including Southern states, voted most overwhelmingly against removal, while congressmen from the North favored it. Delegations from states west of the Appalachians largely split their votes.

For their part, local residents banded together during and after this close call in Congress to ensure that the government remained in Washington. Even as the House debated removal, District banks offered $500,000 in credit to Congress to fund reconstruction, and the following February, Congress took them up on their offer. Also, recognizing that the cramped accommodations at the former Patent Office upset Congress, local residents formed a joint stock company which eventually spent $25,000—several hundred thousand dollars in today’s terms—to construct a temporary meeting place for Congress. Over the four years that Congress met in what came to be called the Old Brick Capitol, from 1815 to 1819, the federal government paid the Company a mere $6,600 in rent.

Although the locals didn’t come close to recouping their investment, their actions helped to reaffirm the District as the permanent home for the government. With the removal bill defeated and the reconstruction of the public buildings begun, Congress closed for good the question of the location of the capital city. National politicians, local residents, and all Americans now could return to debating every other aspect of the city’s form, function, and funding. By the 1830s, Jacksonian Era politicians had begun to leave behind the Jeffersonian insistence that the District fend for itself on matters of funding and development. And over the next two centuries, the city not only grew into but also, in many ways, lived up to and even surpassed the grand plans laid down by Washington and L’Enfant.

The post The Washingtonians Who Fought to Keep Their City as the Nation’s Capital appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A comprehensive survey of Hatakeyama’s work is the subject of a new book, Excavating the Future City, co-published by Aperture and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. In these remarkable photographs, we see new urban landscapes arising from the rubble of the past. We perceive that our ability to recreate our world, over and over again, is limited only by the power of our imaginations.

The post Excavating the Future City appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As the ACE Train pulls into the Santa Clara station, the conductor pops out—and begins apologizing for his train.

“I’m sorry, but this is not the Amtrak!” he bellows, loud enough to be heard by all boarding passengers on the long platform

“And this is not Caltrain! If you want the Caltrain to San Francisco, do not board this train!” he yells.

This warning is useful: The ACE Train uses some of the same tracks but doesn’t go the same places as Amtrak and Caltrain. It’s also fitting: The ACE Train is important to California because of what it is not.

It’s not a service that operates around the clock, like L.A.’s Metro. It’s not charming and tourist-friendly, like San Diego’s trolley, and it doesn’t connect our fanciest precincts and companies like BART. It’s not expensive to construct, like the high-speed rail project. And it’s not losing riders, like so much transit these days.

Here’s what the ACE Train is: a real, live, and unappreciated story of successful transportation in California. And while its story is modest and narrow for now, it is planning expansion in ways that—if Californians can move past the brain-dead populist politics of the gas tax—should point the way to a future in which Californians can move around more easily.

The ACE—for Altamont Corridor Express—is modest. Its service consists of just four round trips each weekday—limits that reflect the fact that it shares tracks with Union Pacific. ACE sends four trains from Stockton to San Jose, via the East Bay in the morning, and sends four trains back from San Jose to Stockton at the end of the day.

The ACE Train works because it is pure commuter rail, addressing the mismatch between where the jobs are in the Bay Area and where people can afford to buy homes. Every morning ACE takes residents of places like Livermore, Lathrop, Tracy, and Manteca to their jobs in the East Bay and Santa Clara County, and returns them home in time for prime time television. In the process, it keeps them off the madness-inducing parking lot that is the 580 freeway.

ACE started 20 years ago with just two daily round trips, backed by a joint powers authority and funded by a sales tax increase in San Joaquin County, whose residents suffer from some of America’s longest commutes.

The last six years have seen the ACE Train double its ridership to more than 5,000 people per day and more than 1.3 million people annually. At a time when transit use has been flat in major metros, ACE is one of the fastest growing train lines in the country.

ACE’s success suggests that California needs a conversation about inter-regional transit that is more thoughtful than our current one, which focuses almost exclusively on the costs of the high-speed rail project. What we should be talking about is whether high-speed rail will offer smart and seamless connections to other modes of transportation, making it easier for Californians to get where we need to go. The example of ACE suggests that by smartly expanding our lesser-known commuter rail lines—like the Metrolink in Southern California, the Coaster in San Diego, the SMART Train in the North Bay, and the aforementioned Caltrain on the Peninsula—we could build an integrated web of transit that would make our daily lives easier.

One of Joe Mathews’s sons savors the view, and his dining experience, aboard the ACE train. Courtesy of Joe Mathews.

The ACE train is an example because it has improved thoughtfully and incrementally, keeping the needs of its riders in mind. Right now, ACE is expanding service on its existing route by buying cleaner-burning locomotives that allow it to expand from trains that are currently seven cars to 10-car ones. It could add Saturday service in 2019.

In the next few years, the service is scheduled to expand its geographic reach. Under the mantle of creating “Valley Rail,” ACE will push in two different directions at once. In the 2020s, one new branch of the service will head up to the state capital, with new stations in Lodi, Elk Grove, Sacramento, and Natomas, ending with a shuttle to Sacramento International Airport. The other branch will extend south to the cities of Modesto and Ceres before eventually connecting to Merced. In that way, ACE, in combination with expanded service on Amtrak’s San Joaquin line, would form a triangle between three regions—the Bay Area, the Capital Region, and the San Joaquin Valley.

This will also put ACE at two of the most important new transportation hubs of 21st-century California.

The first is San Jose’s Diridon Station, which already links together Caltrain, Amtrak, and Santa Clara’s VTA light-rail system. High-speed rail’s first phase would end there, and the station is also next door to the site where Google wants to build a massive new “village.”

The second hub is downtown Merced, which would be both an ACE terminus and a stop on high-speed rail. That old downtown is already transforming, as the University of California’s newest campus, which was built in the fields outside Merced, expands into its downtown.

Unfortunately, this second extension—to Merced and Modesto—is endangered because it is funded by the controversial gas tax increase that Proposition 6, on this November’s ballot, would repeal.

The gas tax is a statewide political battle, but the geographic center of the fight is the ACE corridor. Two lawmakers from there—State Senator Anthony Canella, a Republican from Ceres, and Assemblyman Adam Gray, a Democrat from Merced—provided their votes in favor of the gas tax in exchange for $400 million for the ACE expansion to serve their communities.

If Prop 6, which is popular among Republicans, passes, the ACE expansion will be threatened. Democratic congressional candidate Josh Harder has cynically come out in favor of Prop 6, even though it would hurt his hometown of Modesto, to create political problems for the area’s incumbent Republican congressman, Jeff Denham, who is heavily funded by transportation lobbies. Denham was previously such a champion of ACE that he held a town hall on the moving train. Now Denham is trying to play the issue both ways: He has quietly endorsed Prop 6 to appease his tax-hating GOP base, while also refusing to give the measure money or vocal public support.

Fortunately, riding the ACE is less complicated than voting on it. One recent afternoon, I boarded the train at its origin, Diridon in San Jose, and then marveled at the big crowds that embarked at the next two stations. The first, Santa Clara, has a shuttle bus to San Jose’s airport, while the second, Great America, is next to the 49ers’ new stadium. The platform there was mobbed with employees of Cisco and other tech firms that run company buses between their offices and ACE.

By the time the train had passed a beautiful stretch along the southeast edge of the bay and stopped in Fremont, there was no longer a seat to be had. A group of Cisco engineers held a business meeting around one table on the second floor of the rail car. At the Pleasanton stop, new riders, who use a shuttle bus connecting with the BART system there, squeezed on.

The train slowly emptied out over the next four stops—at Livermore, Vasco Road, Tracy, and Lathrop/Manteca—as people poured into jammed parking lots to retrieve their vehicles. Some had brought bicycles and rode off on them. ACE riders told me that the traffic jams getting into these station lots is the most difficult part of their whole trip. The crowding might get worse: New construction of housing and retail was visible near most stops. The other complaints I heard were about the strength of ACE’s Wi-Fi, and the cost of the train (monthly passes can run more than $300, and round-trip tickets can exceed $20). But the trip is still cheaper and easier than driving.

My train was mostly empty on the last leg to the lovely Cabral Station, on the edge of Stockton’s downtown. From there, I would walk to a dinner interview at Angelina’s Spaghetti House, a great and unfussy old Italian restaurant. And I didn’t have to hurry—the ACE had arrived five minutes early.

Let’s hope California’s rail future has similar timing.

The post Take the ACE Train appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The American military may be the finest fighting force in the history of the world. But how long can it defend Camp Pendleton?

Marine Base Camp Pendleton is best known as our state’s signature military facility, a center for training the men and women who fight for our country.

But Pendleton is also one of our state’s most desirable pieces of land, making it an increasingly inviting target in a coastal Southern California starved for housing, parks, infrastructure, and transportation. In the years to come, trends in economics, budgets, politics, demographics, environment, and warfare itself will create pressure for Californians to take at least some of it back from the federal government.

The military’s defenders will ridicule this suggestion, but here’s the reality on the ground, soldier: Camp Pendleton may be too wonderful for the Marines to hold it forever.

It’s the largest coastal open space between Santa Barbara and the Mexican border. At 200 square miles, it covers more ground than the sprawling city of San Jose and is four times larger than San Francisco. Its beauty is legendary: Major General Graves Erskine, the base commander after World War II, called it “the finest post in the world.”

But Pendleton’s future hasn’t received much public attention, even though it touches contested Congressional districts at the front lines of this fall’s political wars. This may be because Pendleton’s charms remain mostly hidden.

Many Californians think of Pendleton as merely the 17 miles of coast it occupies along Interstate 5 between L.A. and San Diego, but that’s only a fraction of a vast compound running 10 miles inland, nearly to Riverside County. The property offers scenery so diverse—mountains, canyons, bluffs, mesas, estuaries, coastal plains, beaches, lakes, a bison preserve, and a free-flowing river—that it can feel like a militarized microcosm of California itself.

This diverse geography explains the place’s military value. Camp Pendleton is the Marines’ largest West Coast expeditionary training facility, offering a wide variety of training not only for Marines but also other U.S. military branches and civilian agencies. The grounds have prepared marines who raised the flag at Iwo Jima, landed at Inchon, and fought in Vietnam’s jungles, Afghanistan’s mountains, and Iraq’s sands.

Today, tens of thousands of people live on the base, and the daytime population can swell to 100,000, though people occupy less than 20 percent of the camp’s land. Small-town settlements of housing and training facilities are scattered around the base (like in the San Mateo area toward Orange County, where signs display the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines’ memorable motto, “Make Peace or Die”). But most development is on the base’s southern and eastern sides, near the northern San Diego County communities of Oceanside, San Luis Rey, and Fallbrook (the last of which has been engaged in a decades-long legal battle with the base over water rights).

Those who live and work at Camp Pendleton lack for little in services. The base has a new half-billion-dollar naval hospital, car washes, grocery stores, a scuba center, theaters, a museum, a YMCA, the Leatherneck Lanes bowling alley, most established franchise eateries (from McDonald’s to a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf), a championship golf course, a par-3 golf course, mini-golf, a lake with fishing and campgrounds, 11 fire stations, five public schools, four ranges for recreational shooting, three chapels, two hotels, two travel agencies, three recycling centers, 14 barbershops, eight dry cleaners, and two tailors. The official base guide estimates the total value of land and improvements at more than $1.7 billion, but that seems low.

Indeed, Pendleton has been quite an investment. The land—a rancho that once belonged to the brothers Andrés and Pio Pico—cost just $4.2 million in 1942 when the military, seeking a training base for the Pacific theater, seized it. It was named for Marine Major General Joseph Pendleton, a Coronado mayor who had lobbied for a West Coast training base for Marines.

For decades, the Marines have successfully defended the base against those most rapacious of California enemies—real estate developers—who sought to build retail, housing, and airports. The military has made some strategic concessions, permitting the popular San Onofre State Beach and the San Onofre nuclear power plant to operate on its property.

Indeed, Camp Pendleton’s record as an “ecological buffer,” as the base site puts it, has been a wise strategy for defending the base from incursions. Generations of commanders, backed by environmental staff and research and state partners, have protected 18 threatened and endangered species (notably a small songbird known as the least Bell’s vireo) and revived native habitats, particularly near the Santa Margarita River, which flows freely for 10 miles through the base to the Pacific.

“Camp Pendleton has proved that national security and natural security do not have to be mutually exclusive,” writes environmental journalist Marilyn Berlin Snell in her smart new book, Unlikely Ally: How the Military Fights Climate Change and Protects the Environment. She writes that Pendleton also advocates for environmental protection off-site, so the base does not become a “last refuge” for species, which would limit its flexibility in military training.

But having such a magnificent piece of land in the midst of urbanizing Southern California is provocative. The first frontal attack on Pendleton’s perimeter has come from San Diego business interests desperate to add an airport before Lindbergh Field reaches capacity in 2035. Cal State San Marcos researchers found that the best place for a large, international airport serving all three counties is Camp Pendleton. Such an airport would provide at least 100,000 jobs and billions in economic activity, while requiring less than 5 percent of the base’s acreage.

Pendleton has fought the airport and Orange County proposals for a toll road through the base. But Pendleton, which already is traversed by three different rail services, is a possible hub for future transportation networks. In a state that is not producing enough college graduates, Pendleton’s open space and location makes it a natural future home for universities seeking expansion. And as California’s housing crisis deepens, how long before developers look to Pendleton as part of the solution?

Pendleton also is likely to become part of the debate over Californians’ access to the coast. Today, in defiance of the state constitution’s guarantees, many wealthy landowners are restricting such access. But the public owns the Camp Pendleton property, through the U.S. government, which makes it a natural place for a massive new state park or nature preserve.

The military maintains that surrendering any Pendleton land undermines its training mission. But in an era in which wars are conducted by drones or online, how much does the military need Pendleton? Yes, the coast provides amphibious training, but there hasn’t been a major Marine amphibious assault since 1950. And North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune is another Pendleton-sized base that accommodates varied training.

If Americans ever consider larger questions of budget policy, Pendleton could become an easy target. Does the United States, with $1 trillion annual deficits and having spent trillions on Iraq and Afghanistan, require a secondary land force in the Marines? Is military training the highest-and-best use of valuable California land?

There’s also this unpleasant reality: Pendleton serves a Commander-in-Chief who treats California like an enemy nation. A Time report said Trump plans to detain 47,000 migrants at Camp Pendleton under border policies that include child detentions and systematic violation of refugees’ rights. If Pendleton were actually used for such outrageous purposes, California’s leaders would be justified in demanding that the feds leave.

The notion of a Camp Pendleton with a diminished military presence, or without the military at all, might seem unthinkable. But, at one time, so was the idea that the military would depart the Presidio in San Francisco or Fort Ord on Monterey Bay. Both have productively transitioned to civilian use. Like them, Camp Pendleton is a California place big and beautiful enough to serve us all.

The post How Long Can the Military Defend Camp Pendleton? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Though Candyman is rumored to dwell inside one of the looming high-rises, what’s most terrifying here is really the idea of the inner-city location. Decades before writer-director Bernard Rose’s horror flick arrived in theaters, public housing for many Americans had come to represent the unruliness and otherness of U.S. cities. And Cabrini-Green stood as the symbol of every troubled housing project—a bogeyman that conjured fears of violence, poverty, and racial antagonism.

Like many mid-20th-century public housing projects across the Northeast and Midwest, Cabrini-Green was conceived as a model of civic redevelopment, and as a source for a more democratic form of urban living. It was built in stages on Chicago’s Near North Side beginning in the 1940s—first with barracks-style row houses and then, in the 1950s and 1960s, augmented by 23 towers on “superblocks” closed off to through streets and commercial uses. It contained 3,600 public housing units in total, with a population exceeding 15,000, packed tightly into a mere 70 acres of land.

The Cabrini-Green area, along the banks of the Chicago River’s North Fork, previously had been an industrial slum, home to a succession of poor immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Sweden, and southern Italy, in addition to a growing number of African Americans who had fled from the Jim Crow South. The smell of sulfur and the bright flames of a nearby gasworks had given the river district the nickname “Little Hell.” House fires, infant mortality, pneumonia, and juvenile delinquency all occurred there at many times the rate of the city as a whole.

Public housing was seen as a cure for the area’s decay and disrepair. At the dedication of the Cabrini row houses, in 1942, Mayor Edward Kelley declared that the modest and orderly buildings “symbolize the Chicago that is to be. We cannot continue as a nation, half slum and half palace. This project sets an example for the wide reconstruction of substandard areas which will come after the war.”

Then, as now, the for-profit real estate market had failed most low-income renters. During the 1940s, the rental vacancy rate in Chicago fell to less than one percent. A quarter of the existing homes were falling apart and needed to be replaced. In the city’s segregated black neighborhoods, families were excluded from the open housing market, and conditions there were even more dire. New public housing offered renters a kind of salvation—from cold-water flats, firetraps, and capricious evictions. For many families, the Chicago Housing Authority promise of a “decent, safe and sanitary home” felt like a leap into the middle class.

But as time went on, the Chicago Housing Authority, like many big-city authorities, was perennially underfunded and disastrously mismanaged. In Chicago, as elsewhere, high-rise developments were built intentionally in neighborhoods that were already segregated racially. After the 1950s, as large numbers of Chicagoans fled the city for the suburbs, and manufacturing jobs disappeared as well, public housing populations became poorer and more uniformly black. The amount collected in rent—as a proportion of a resident’s income—declined. Deficits ballooned; maintenance and repairs lagged.

The developments, with their isolation and high concentrations of poverty, were treated increasingly as isolated vice zones by both police and criminals. By the time of Candyman, Chicago was home not only to three of the country’s 12 richest communities but also, amazingly, to 10 of the country’s 16 poorest census tracts, all of them including large public housing complexes.

Partly because of its proximity to Chicago’s ritzy Gold Coast neighborhood, Cabrini-Green became “notorious” for crime, but this reputation was complicated. Other public housing developments in the city were larger, poorer, and had higher rates of crime. In the extreme segregation of Chicago, though, Cabrini-Green remained that uncommon frontier where whites still crossed paths with poor blacks. The complex was noted as a place to avoid, or to go to, for felonious offerings.

Cabrini-Green, therefore, entered the popular imagination as the embodiment of the “inner city,” becoming the setting of the prime-time sit-com Good Times, of movies, urban crime novels, documentaries, rap songs and endless media coverage. There was a recurring Saturday Night Live skit in the 1980s about a teenage single mother—her name was Cabrini Green Harlem Watts Jackson. The public housing project had made it onto a Mount Rushmore of scariest places in urban America.

What Candyman captures is this muddling of what is real and imaginary. Cabrini-Green was both an actual place with an array of serious problems, and a nightmare vision of fear and prejudice. A horror movie is often about what isn’t seen; it requires menacing visions to fill in the shadows of the unknown. The real Cabrini-Green had plenty of violent crime, but it was also home to thousands of families who had formed elaborate support networks and lived everyday lives. The fictional Cabrini-Green in which people believed in a murderous, hook-handed spirit was the pure creation of that fear. “The old dark house on the hill has always been the standard setting of horror,” director Rose explained. “But it seemed to me that the big public housing project was the new venue of terror.”

Rose created an elaborate backstory for his film’s killer that tapped into numerous racial tropes. In his previous life, Candyman was a gifted portrait artist, the son of a slave at the turn of the 19th century whose father earned a fortune after the Civil War by inventing a means to mass-produce shoes. Candyman fell in love with and impregnated one of his subjects, a white woman, and the girl’s father hired thugs to lynch him, chasing him to the site of the future Cabrini-Green, sawing off his painting hand before setting him on fire. In his reincarnated form, Candyman (Tony Todd) appears in the movie gaunt-cheeked, towering in a fur-lined trench coat, possibly as hell-bent on miscegenation—Virginia Madsen’s Helen is a dead ringer for his postbellum beloved—as on murder.

“Just as urban legends are based on the real fears of those who believe in them, so are certain urban locations able to embody fear,” Chicago film critic Roger Ebert wrote in his three-out-of-four-star review of the movie in the fall of 1992.

Poster for the 1992 horror film Candyman. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Candyman arrived in theaters as the very meaning of “inner city” was already changing again, a signifier not only of danger but of wealth and a mounting wave of gentrification. At the beginning of the 1990s, Chicago’s population ticked up for the first time in 40 years. The area around Cabrini-Green was booming with new development and an influx of young white professionals. It’s at this moment that the ghetto actually became scarier. The era’s yuppies inhabited “transitioning” neighborhoods, and reports of crime were being imagined as near-misses—just a wrong turn away. You can see these anxieties in the alarm bells then sounding over the coming tides of “crack babies,” “wilding” teens, and “super-predators” (as well as in other similar films of the era such as After Hours and Judgment Night).

In one scene in Candyman, Helen reads about a real-life crime that occurred in Chicago public housing: A man was able to enter neighboring apartment units through connected bathroom vanities so cheaply constructed that he simply pushed in the mirrors to create a passageway. Returning home, she discovers that in her own high-end condominium bathroom the same is true. Helen learns that her building was originally part of Cabrini-Green. It’s a preposterous plot turn that feels true to the moral panic of the moment. In only a matter of time, Candyman himself invades her apartment.

In the years since Candyman came out, more than 250,000 units of public housing have been demolished across the United States. The last Cabrini-Green tower—and the final public housing high-rise in Chicago not reserved for the elderly—came down in 2011. The clearing of these high-rises was touted as an effort to revive the city and to rescue the families who had been trapped in the generational poverty of public housing. Mayor Richard M. Daley promised that former residents would now be able to share in the benefits of the resurgent city. “I want to rebuild their souls,” he declared.

Less looming mixed-income developments—blending market-rate and heavily subsidized households—replaced many of the same public housing buildings that were used to clear the slums of a half-century before, but by design, only a small number of the old tenants were able to move into the new buildings. With Section 8 housing vouchers, most former residents (along with their souls) ended up renting private housing in predominantly black and under-resourced sections of Chicago’s South and West sides. The demolitions didn’t do away with the poverty and isolation that afflicted the city’s public housing; these problems were moved elsewhere, becoming less visible and no longer literally owned by the state.

Today, only one in five U.S. families that are poor enough to qualify for a subsidy receive any sort of government support as city rents rise while wages for all but the highest earners stagnate. Half of all renters now pay more than 30 percent of their income for rent; a quarter pay more than 50 percent. Fewer and fewer people can afford to live close to the economic activity of the inner city. For the first time, the United States has a greater number of poor people living in suburbs than in cities.

At the end of Candyman, the residents of Cabrini-Green gather together outside their high-rises and light an immense bonfire. It’s a purge that exorcises the phantasm as well as the horrors of public housing. In 2014, twenty-two years after the film’s release, the Chicago Housing Authority opened up a lottery for people to get onto the waiting list for either a public housing unit or a voucher. Despite the stigma of dysfunction, danger, and dilapidation, one in four of Chicago’s million households entered the lottery for a Chicago Housing Authority home. The real horror of people going without adequate housing remains.

“Candyman. Candyman. Candyman. Candyman….”

The post The 1992 Horror Film That Made a Monster Out of a Chicago Housing Project appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Maya farmers in the area, who rely on rainfall to nourish crops, offer up different prayers. For over 4,000 years, Maya families, commoner and wealthy, have relied on water from the skies. Without rain, crops are decimated, river trade ceases, and drinking supplies diminish. Extended dry seasons create a massive tinderbox where one lightning strike can destroy everything in a blazing inferno.

In my anthropological work in Central America, I have spent nearly 20 years looking at the role that water played in Maya history. Water and environmental crises that arose in the region more than a thousand years ago shed light on key parts of the Maya belief system, which offers some useful perspectives on responding to climate change in the 21st century.

The Maya managed to build an early civilization that farmed beans, corn, and squash—sometimes using advanced techniques like terracing and raised fields. More famously, during the Classic Period from the third to the late ninth century in the southern Maya lowlands (comprising present-day northern Guatemala, Belize, and southeastern Mexico), the Maya built hundreds of urban centers. Each center had a king, as well as royal temples and elaborate tombs, palaces, inscribed monuments, and large reservoir systems.

The most powerful kings emerged and thrived in areas with large amounts of fertile soils for agriculture. Such places didn’t necessarily have fresh water nearby. In fact, the two largest Maya centers with the most powerful kings, Tikal in Guatemala and Calakmul in Mexico, emerged in areas without lakes or rivers. But successful Maya royals had to have access to water to retain control.

As well as being sources of water, these centers became the sites of community interaction, including markets, ballgames, and ceremonies that took place in large open areas surrounded by temples and the royal palace. The region had a fantastic variety of plant and animal life, which was widely scattered, as were farmsteads and subjects. Reservoirs brought people together, fulfilling both agricultural and political needs.

While lots of rain falls during the seven-month rainy season, much of it seeps into the porous limestone bedrock. In areas without lakes or rivers, the Maya devised means to divert and contain water beginning over 2,000 years ago, eventually resulting in the development of intricate catchment systems centered on large reservoirs. From the third to the late ninth century, classic Maya kings depended on these reservoirs to attract subjects to urban centers during the five-month dry season between February and June.

Quarrying the reservoirs also provided stone to build monumental temples, palaces, and ball courts next to them, allowing kings to directly control their access. The Maya accomplished all of this with only stone tools, human labor, and ingenuity.

Across millennia, the Maya also lived their worldview, a cosmology of conservation in which humans constituted one of many elements along with animals, birds, trees, clouds, stone, and earth. Humans were not seen as superior to other life forms or elements in this system, and they had a responsibility to maintain the world they shared.

This relationship is expressed even today in the nature of current Mayan languages. Among the Tojolab’al Maya of Chiapas, Mexico, for instance, their linguistic structure de-emphasizes the role of the individual as an actor and instead emphasizes a collective “we.” That “we” includes clouds, plants, rivers, mountains, and animals. They do not have terms for “religion” nor “nature,” as these concepts are already integrated into their daily interactions with the world.

This cosmology and the Maya transformation into many kingdoms worked in sync for centuries. As the population grew, the Maya expanded their water systems, which became inextricably linked to urban layout—dams, walkways, and channels—and royal power. Reservoirs supplied water to tens of thousands of people in larger centers for nearly a thousand years.

Yet the more that Maya kings relied on increasingly complex water systems to support their political economy, the more vulnerable they and their subjects became to disruptions. And disruptions did come, in the form of several multiyear droughts beginning early in the ninth century.

Maya farmers, who had contributed their labor, services, and goods for access to water during annual droughts, ceased to do so when kings failed them as water managers. Gods and ancestors were believed to have deserted royalty, which had not maintained beneficial long-term relations with the environment.

An urban diaspora resulted, as hundreds of thousands of Maya abandoned hundreds of centers and kings in the dry southern lowlands. They never returned.

We know the long-term Maya cosmology and the land management strategies that accompanied it worked on a practical level, because Maya culture did not die out with the demise of kingship. Maya farmers emigrated in all directions and started new lives near lakes, rivers, and coastal areas. Temples and palaces were surrendered, eventually becoming overgrown and swallowed back into the rainforest, while existing political structures vanished. Kings disappeared for good in the southern lowlands, as people carried their languages, their cosmology, and their agricultural methods to new areas, where they have farmed the land sustainably for more than a thousand years post-collapse. Millions of Maya currently live in Central America and elsewhere.

The Maya paid attention to diversification in ways that might be familiar to us today. For instance, we are taught to diversify our financial portfolios to avoid risk, as well as our diets and exercise regimens to preserve our health. The Maya had a similar concept, except that it was applied on a daily basis to maintaining universal balance.

One way of maintaining balance was through forest management. Hundreds of items from tropical forests were used for food, medicine, construction materials, and tools. As one student of mine said several years ago when one of my Maya field assistants was showing her uses of various trees and bushes, “The jungle is like a refrigerator.”

The Maya plant their home gardens and fields to mimic the diversity seen in the jungle, which likewise serves as a risk management strategy. The Maya also limited their interaction with the environment: They did not hunt, cull, or farm in ‘sacred’ places, such as pilgrimage destinations located along ceremonial circuits. Consequently, flora and fauna flourished, which promoted biodiversity and conservation.

I work in one such area—Cara Blanca in central Belize. There, openings in the earth, such as caves and bodies of water, are considered portals to the otherworld where Chahk resides and people communicate with ancestors and gods via prayers and offerings. People lived near shallow Cara Blanca lakes, but only periodically visited cenotes (deep collapsed sinkholes fed by groundwater) to commune with gods and ancestors.

These pilgrimages increased in number and scale during the century-long period of droughts. For the first time, the Maya infringed on a sacred place. They built water temples and other ceremonial buildings. However, when conditions worsened as droughts wore on, they never built houses nor farmed there. Even then, their worldview emphasized maintaining a balance, sometimes at short-term expense to their own well-being.

The Maya cosmology of conservation is not often found in our industrial world, which embodies a worldview in which nature is divorced from culture, prioritizing humans over everything else in a manner that is becoming less sustainable each day. What the Maya learned, which we continue to struggle with today, is that ignoring long-term climate crises for political gain is short-sighted, and ultimately destructive to a political system. More centrally, maintaining an ecosystem is not merely the responsibility of a society’s leaders but requires sustainable practices—and sometimes sacrifices—from everyone.

Of course, the Maya made mistakes and overused resources at times. But they learned from their mistakes, repositioning their actions to avoid upsetting the balance of their world. Today, adopting and updating their approach would be a good start in the vital task of saving not only ourselves but our planet.

The post The Ancient Maya Cosmology of Conservation 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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