More than half of America’s unsheltered population lives in just three states—California, Oregon, and Washington—and West Coast voters are demanding a response. Homelessness ranked as the top concern in a recent poll of likely voters in the Los Angeles mayor’s race. Last year, Seattle residents replaced a long-serving progressive city attorney with a Democrat-turned-Republican who vowed to clear encampments. And San Francisco’s progressive district attorney may be headed for defeat in an upcoming recall election, in part because of spiraling crime rates in neighborhoods with large homeless populations.

Much of the policy debate about homelessness has focused on high costs of living and a lack of public services, while politicians and activists largely have avoided trying to curtail one of the most consequential factors of all: the misuse of drugs. Policymakers don’t seem to want to say it, but going all out to help some homeless people stop using drugs has to rank alongside housing as a top priority.

Chronic drug and alcohol use are major contributors to homelessness. In a 2019 national survey of unhoused people, more than half of respondents reported that “use of drugs or alcohol had contributed to loss of housing.” In Seattle, which conducts a detailed annual census of its homeless population, the top self-reported reason for chronic homelessness—lacking shelter for more than one year—was “alcohol or drug use.” A 2019 analysis found that close to two-thirds of chronically homeless individuals in San Francisco reported misusing drugs or alcohol, and a quarter cited “substance use as the primary cause of their homelessness.” Drug or alcohol overdose was the leading cause of death among homeless people in Los Angeles County in 2020, similar to findings in other major American cities.

Federally-funded permanent supportive housing initiatives are prohibited from mandating sobriety as a condition for shelter. The federal policy known as Housing First, adopted during the George W. Bush administration, prioritizes securing stable housing for homeless people, regardless of their drug use, mental health status, or ability to support themselves, as a prerequisite to solving other problems. Housing First has been effective at keeping people housed for at least a year and reducing emergency medical services use. But there’s little evidence it helps people resolve substance use problems, gain employment, or retain housing over the long term.

Lacking a federal plan for addressing drug and alcohol use among the homeless, cities and states have had to come up with their own strategies—and many have embraced harm reduction, an approach that dovetails with Housing First’s priorities by ameliorating the problems associated with drug use without requiring people to quit. Harm reduction seeks to reduce overdoses and communicable disease by relying on needle exchanges and other initiatives that make drug use safer, rather than punishing users. Public health experts embrace the approach, as do criminal justice reform advocates and proponents of drug decriminalization.

The San Francisco Department of Public Health formally adopted harm reduction as city policy in 2000; it is also the stated policy of L.A. County’s homeless services agency. Proponents say harm reduction is more effective than sobriety-based treatment because it shows respect for drug users’ autonomy and does not rely on law enforcement. Practitioners describe their work as engaging drug users “where they are” and fostering trusting relationships with service providers. During a 2019 presentation about the method, Nathaniel VerGow, now the Los Angeles agency’s deputy chief, reminded participants that “many drug users can be happy, loving, trustworthy, productive people! Many sober people are NOT!”

Harm reduction methods can be effective at keeping drug users alive and stopping the spread of disease. But nowhere have they been shown to help large numbers of problem drug users regain control of their lives. And they’re highly resource intensive. In a recent University of Washington evaluation of JustCARE, a harm reduction homeless services program in Seattle, providers described round-the-clock efforts to placate methamphetamine-using clients “running around naked” and “pounding a door at 3:00, 4:00 a.m.,” or disassembling televisions in the converted hotel rooms where they were being housed.

Leaders grapple with how to afford such service-intensive programs. Fully funded, JustCARE would cost roughly $20 million per year to serve up to 288 people. Since its start in 2020, the program has served 225 participants and moved fewer than one-tenth into permanent housing. There are close to 12,000 homeless people in Seattle and surrounding King County.

Politicians often promise simple solutions with splashy policy initiatives—crackdowns, shelters or, lately, expensive permanent housing. In his most recent State of the City speech, departing L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti reaffirmed the value of a $1.2 billion homeless housing measure passed by voters in 2016. The measure, slated to fund construction of roughly 12,000 housing units by 2027, has been faulted in multiple audits for delays and cost overruns. Still, Garcetti insisted on permanent housing as a solution to homelessness: “[I]f we don’t double down on our housing momentum, the California Dream will be an old chapter in a history book.”

But drug treatment experts say cities need a multipronged approach. Psychiatrist Keith Humphreys, of Stanford University, said research shows that people with substance use problems are best helped with a combination of some harm reduction methods—especially medication-assisted treatment for opioid withdrawal—and an ultimate focus on getting and staying sober.  The odds of recovery from a substance use disorder “are at least 50 percent higher” in sobriety-based programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous, he said. Scott Chin, president of the privately-funded Union Gospel Mission in Seattle and a former homeless heroin user himself, said that half of participants in his program, which requires sobriety, graduate and eventually find employment and stable housing.

Humphreys said cities relying solely on harm reduction should be aware of results in Vancouver, Canada, which pioneered the method in North America. The city reported a record number of overdoses last year and its homeless population grew by more than a fifth over the past decade.

There are signs of change. California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently proposed what he called a “Care Court” that would compel people with serious mental health or substance use disorders into treatment, for up to two years. The plan was immediately endorsed by a bipartisan group of big-city mayors and opposed by civil libertarians and advocates for the homeless. “We may have to use force to get [people] into treatment,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed said, in a recent podcast interview. Preliminary results from an annual nationwide homeless population count suggest that San Francisco’s efforts to battle homelessness have begun to pay off. The city recently reported a 15 percent decrease in its unsheltered population since 2019.

Josephine Ensign, a longtime homelessness researcher at the University of Washington who herself experienced homelessness as a young adult, said that amid all the debate, it is important to recognize two qualities essential to any effort to help homeless people: compassion and a healthy respect for complexity. Many forms of support for homeless drug users—Housing First, harm reduction, 12-step sobriety programs, faith-based services—can improve outcomes and save taxpayers money by keeping people off the streets and out of jail, Ensign said. The key is flexibility—finding the right service for each person and not getting stuck in ideological rigidity.

“Having choices for people is hugely important,” she said. “It’s getting the political will among voters to understand the complexities of homelessness, and address it.” In cities up and down the West Coast, contentious upcoming elections will show whether voters agree.

The post Why Won’t Policymakers Talk More About Drugs and Homelessness? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Fifty years after the storm ripped through the Pacific Northwest, meteorologists still marvel at its might. “There has yet to be another tempest that even comes close to the furor of the Columbus Day Storm,” said Steve Pierce, president of the Oregon Chapter of the American Meteorological Society. This storm was so violent, and so unprecedented, that it changed not only the forests of the Northwest, but also the way the economy and the culture around them functions—and its effects continue to be felt today.

The Columbus Day Storm reshaped the Pacific Northwest timber industry, which had been the mainstay of the region’s economy since the mid-19th century. Blowing down vast swaths of trees, the storm prompted an explosion of roadbuilding to help loggers reach fallen timber, giving birth to a new log-export trade with Asia, and causing timberland owners to change the way they manage forests under the threat of natural disasters. These new forestry practices, in turn, inspired an environmental movement that remains a powerful counterforce in the region today.

The storm hit some of the mightiest conifer forests known to man: the softwood forests of the Pacific Northwest that cover roughly half of the land mass in Washington and Oregon. Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) is the dominant species in the region. A heavy-limbed evergreen tree with a trunk that can reach diameters of 10 feet or more, it can tower higher than 200 feet. If left alone, a Douglas fir can live five centuries or more.

When American conservationist John Muir visited Puget Sound in 1888, he marveled at the ancient trees that pressed “forward to the water … coming down from the mountains far and near to offer themselves to the axe, making the place a perfect paradise for the lumberman.”
And indeed, the lumbermen came in droves. By 1910, the U.S. Bureau of Corporations reported, 63 percent of working people in Washington owed their jobs to the forestry industry, directly or indirectly, and the state had become the nation’s top timber producer. A few decades later, Oregon’s logging business would surpass Washington’s, but by 2017 Oregon and Washington still ranked first and second, respectively, in lumber production in the United States.

Over the years, the logger’s axe gave way to chain saws, and fallen timber that once made its way to sawmills over rivers began traveling on trains and logging trucks. Twenty years before the epic windstorm, only about 40 percent of the 200-year-and-older trees in Washington were still standing. By 1962, any old-growth trees that remained were mostly at hard to reach elevations above 2,000 feet.

The forested landscape was still vast, but it was interrupted by a creeping checkerboard of clear-cuts and lightly managed forests. On tens of thousands of acres, trees gave way to postwar, suburban sprawl—housing subdivisions, strip malls, and parking lots. In the meantime, private timber companies and state and federal agencies scrambled to meet an insatiable appetite for wood products, including trusses, beams, flooring, plywood, particleboard, pulp, and paper.

Even in such a somewhat-thinned landscape, the Columbus Day Storm packed a brutal punch. Hurricane-force winds chewed their way through more than half of the region’s remaining forests, tearing down enough wood to build a million homes—an estimated 15 billion board feet of timber (a board foot is the measure of the usable wood in a tree, equivalent to a piece of lumber one foot long, one foot wide, and one inch thick.)

As dawn broke on October 13, 1962 in Pacific Northwest timber country, locals began to get a sense of the storm’s toll. “I don’t suppose I’m going to be going hunting this year,” Glen Hawley, a forestry manager in southwest Washington, mused to his boss that morning, which was the opening day of deer hunting season. Hawley was right. He would be preoccupied by timber salvage operations for months. Hawley’s Kelso District typically yielded a harvest of 40 million board feet of timber per year, but over the next three years his crews would clear away nearly 22 times that amount.

Salvage operations needed to move quickly to ward off a crippling infestation of the Douglas-fir beetle, which would lay eggs in the dead timber. Those eggs would morph into young adult beetles, emerging in the spring of 1964 eager to devour standing timber, too. On October 15, timberland owners met in Portland to figure out how to get as much wood as possible off the ground over the next 18 months.

The other major threat was wildfire fueled by the downed timber, which was everywhere. Washington state forester Roy Friis described what it was like to navigate the forest floor. “A lot of times you were ten or twenty feet off the ground, walking on fallen trees and limbs. You could cruise all day without your feet touching the ground,” he said.

Men clearing the forests worked unencumbered by regulations to protect fish, wildlife, and water quality—those all came along in the ensuing decades. “The good ol’ boys went to the back room, had a couple of beers and decided what to do,” recalled Kenhelm Russell, a Washington state forester who chaired the October 15 meetings. Timber sales took place practically immediately. On the rain-soaked Siuslaw National Forest along the Oregon coast, the first sale was advertised just four days after the storm.

The hasty cleanup ignited a flurry of roadbuilding. The Weyerhaeuser Company, a private timber giant based in Washington state, estimated that as much as 70 percent of the three billion board feet of storm-damaged timber on its property could not be reached without new roads. In the Siuslaw National Forest, the network of logging roads grew by more than 35 percent.

All of this activity resulted in a timber glut that transformed the marketplace. The volume of timber blown over by the Columbus Day Storm far exceeded the capacity of mills in the Pacific Northwest and other domestic markets, so the industry turned to Japan, a country that needed wood to fuel its own growing, post-World War II economy, and which had ample mill capacity but scant timber supplies.

For Japan, the Columbus Day Storm was a perfect storm. Seemingly overnight, the 375 million board feet shipped from the Pacific Northwest to Japan in 1961 steadily rose to two billion board feet in 1968. By 1988, the figure was 3.5 billion board feet. This rapid growth in the log export market was controversial. Timber companies, longshoremen, and free trade boosters were thrilled, because logs sold in Asia commanded higher prices than those sold domestically. But small mill owners and conservationists decried the loss of raw material for local mills, and worried about preserving the old forestry culture of the region.

The Columbus Day Storm delivered a dramatic reminder that forestland owners’ harvest plans could be upended overnight by a mighty windstorm or wildfire—and as a result the practices of the timber industry were transformed. High-yield forestry emerged, designed to grow trees faster and boost the volume of wood per acre. With Weyerhaeuser paving the way, timberland owners grew tree seedlings in controlled orchard settings, keying on genetically superior seed stock. They began fertilizing the forest soil, thinning tree stands to promote vigorous growth, and spraying herbicides broadly to combat brush and unwanted trees, including alder.

By 1975, Weyerhaeuser’s high-yield forests in the Pacific Northwest were growing twice as much wood as unmanaged forests, and breathing new life into what had been a shrinking business. “The Columbus Day Storm jumpstarted the timber industry,” noted Bob Dick, a forester whose father, Malcolm Dick, helped establish Weyerhaeuser’s Japanese log export market. “It forced landowners to really start managing their lands.”

But as high-yield forestry took hold, a newly ecological view of the region’s forests grew, too. Buoyed by federal laws such as the 1972 Clean Water Act and 1973 Endangered Species Act, conservation groups began working to save what remained of the Pacific Northwest’s old-growth forests. By the end of the 20th century, timber harvesting on federal land in the region had ground nearly to a halt, reducing regional timber harvests by some 50 percent.

The spate of roadbuilding for logging, spurred by the Columbus Day Storm, also brought environmental destruction. The roads, many carved out of hillsides at high elevations, served as conduits during rainstorms, delivering tons of sediment to rivers and streams, and smothering salmon spawning habitat critical to the recovery of depleted salmon runs. By the 1990s, public and private timberland owners were spending tens of millions of dollars to decommission orphaned and substandard roads, many of them the by-products of the Columbus Day Storm. The road removal budget for some timberland owners equaled what they spent on new, more fish-friendly roads.

Today in the Pacific Northwest two big outgrowths of the storm—high-yield forestry and old-growth environmentalism—share an uneasy truce in the face of climate change. Scientists predict that global warming will lead to more frequent and intense wildfires in the Pacific Northwest. The forests of the region have proven resilient in the past when confronted by severe weather. They will be tested again.

The post The Long, Violent 1962 Storm That Inspired the Environmental Movement appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Created by constitutional fiat and controlled by Congress, the District of Columbia is the undemocratic capital of this democracy. Washingtonians have no representation in Congress, and the decisions of their municipal government are subject to congressional veto. Furthermore, the city’s lack of political power and basic self-determination has had a profound influence on its history, placing it at the mercy of the federal government and forcing the city’s residents into a frustrating role as dependents and claimants, rather than full citizens.

At the center of the district’s struggle for democracy is the rawest issue in American history and politics: race.

Democracy and race have been inextricably intertwined in Washington since Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton cut a deal to place the nation’s capital on the shores of the Potomac. Safely ensconced between two slave states, the new federal district supported slavery and the slave trade from its inception, becoming the nation’s largest slave-trading city in the 1830s.

But, during the Civil War, D.C. became a magnet for former slaves, who helped create a progressive, biracial local government during Reconstruction. This exercise of black political power created a backlash, leading Congress to strip the vote from all Washingtonians, black and white, in 1874, ushering in a century-long period of disfranchisement and racial segregation.

Eventually, a locally driven, post-World War II civil rights movement toppled legal segregation and won the right to vote in local elections, but persistent racial inequalities remain to this day. An Urban Institute study found that in 2013 and 2014 white wealth in D.C. was 81 times greater than black wealth, and astronomical real estate values make it increasingly difficult for low-income residents to remain in the city.

As black educator and D.C. activist Mary Church Terrell articulated more than 100 years ago, no city better captures the ongoing tensions between America’s expansive democratic hopes and its enduring racial inequalities than the nation’s capital.

“Surely nowhere in the world do oppression and persecution based solely on the color of the skin appear more hateful and hideous than in the capital of the United States,” Terrell said, “because the chasm between the principles upon which this Government was founded, in which it still professes to believe, and those which are daily practiced under the protection of the flag, yawns so wide and deep.”

Terrell knew that what she was saying was not literally true. She herself embodied the potential and achievement of the D.C.’s black elite. The daughter of former slaves who became wealthy business owners, she graduated from Oberlin College, traveled the world, and taught at D.C.’s M Street High School, the top black secondary school in the country, before being appointed to the city’s school board. Washington offered Terrell and other black people significant opportunities unavailable anywhere else in the South, which in the early 20th century sank into an abyss of lynching, debt peonage, and codified segregation. There were indeed more hateful and hideous examples of racism and persecution than what she experienced in Washington, D.C.

An 1867 cartoon by Thomas Nast depicts an African American man casting his ballot in the mayoral election for Georgetown, which was a separate municipality from Washington, D.C. until 1871. Image courtesy of the New York Public Library Digital Collection.

Yet her point underscored something critical about Washington: It is the stage for American democracy, the parade ground where we celebrate our ideals and put them on display for the world. Whether considered to be “an example for all the land” (as Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner called the district during Reconstruction) or “the showpiece of our nation” (as President Dwight Eisenhower claimed in the 1950s), D.C. is a symbol of the country and the embodiment of its democratic hopes.

Because of this symbolic significance, D.C. also has long served as a battleground for major political fights over race. During the long struggle over slavery that consumed much of the nation’s first century, the city became a focal point. For abolitionists, Washington was, as William Lloyd Garrison declared, “the first citadel to be carried” in the battle to end slavery nationwide. For Southern slaveholders such as South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, Washington was a crucial barometer of Southern power: If D.C. should fall to abolitionism, then so too would the rest of the South, they feared. Abolitionists flooded Congress with so many petitions demanding an end to slavery and the slave trade in D.C. that in 1836 Congress imposed the infamous “gag rule” prohibiting any public discussion of the issue in the national legislature.

D.C. is also a fertile laboratory for ideas. Because Congress has ultimate authority over the district, its members often use the city as a petri dish. Sometimes, this approach benefits the cause of racial equality. During the Civil War and Reconstruction, Radical Republicans in Congress ignored the vocal opposition of white voters in the city to push through a series of racial reforms, including emancipating D.C.’s enslaved population in 1862, establishing black public schools, and granting black men the right to vote in 1866. It was an extraordinary and important social revolution—but it was not democratic.

At other times, national meddling has proven catastrophic to the city. In the 1950s, federal lawmakers, urban planners, and city boosters used Washington as a testing ground for “urban renewal,” a federally supported effort to use modern planning to revitalize and redevelop crumbling residential areas.

With sanction from the Supreme Court in its 1954 Berman v. Parker decision, which allowed public officials to take property and give it to corporations for redevelopment, urban renewal led to the wholesale destruction of poor, predominantly black neighborhoods in D.C.’s Southwest quadrant. At a cost of about $500 million (about $4.6 billion in 21st-century dollars), developers destroyed 99 percent of Southwest’s buildings, forced 1,500 business to move, and displaced 23,000 residents. In their place came 5,800 new housing units for a population half its original size. The racial demographics of Southwest flipped. In 1950, the area had been almost 70 percent black; in 1970 it was nearly 70 percent white, at a time when the black population was growing rapidly in the rest of the city.

The catastrophic impact of urban renewal helped inspire an era of grassroots citizen activism throughout the city. From the late 1950s through the late 1970s, black and white activists fought back against the business interests and unelected officials who ran Washington, challenging embedded economic inequalities in the black-majority city. Mobilizing citizen power, they pushed for self-determination, community control, and participatory democracy.

Some of these battles have been won. After a century of complete disfranchisement, in 1973 city residents regained “home rule” (municipal self-government), including a remarkable space for neighborhood autonomy in the form of elected Advisory Neighborhood Commissions. The early 1970s also witnessed the triumphant climax of the anti-freeway movement, an interracial, cross-class coalition that successfully challenged the vast network of city freeways envisioned by Congress, local officials, urban planners, and boosters in the press. And in those neighborhoods saved from the wrecking ball, tenants organized against slumlords and gentrification to establish their right to the city.

Other battles are ongoing. Local activists still struggle to build adequate, affordable housing and prevent displacement amid a new, 21st-century burst of gentrification. And the district still lacks any representation in the national legislature (a fact emblazoned in capital letters on D.C. license plates).

With these battles still to be won, it is no wonder that Washingtonians, people who daily live in the shadow of the great temples of American democracy, cast a critical eye on the celebrations of American freedom that take place therein.

The post Why Washington, D.C., Is the Most Undemocratic of Capitals appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

No one, the Spokesman argued, objected to a reputable variety performance. The trouble came with the boxes, where “women employ their sensual charms” to entice “young men for whom this feverish life has a peculiar fascination.” Other Western cities had abolished this “hurrah” element, the newspaper continued, and prospered accordingly. Spokane enjoyed a beautiful natural setting; plainly put, “if the dives and the hurdy-gurdy resorts were suppressed,” the city would be altogether attractive.

On the surface, the newspaper’s critique was a matter of morals and prudishness, but in fact it was also part of what would become a decades-long debate about Spokane’s ability to control its own future. By the final years of the 19th century, Spokanites could proudly claim that their booming city was the urban hub—the center of transportation, commerce, and culture—of a large area of the Northwest they called the Inland Empire. Ministers, newspapermen, and reformers longed for Spokane to become a settled, cultured city, one they described lovingly in promotional brochures as graced by churches, middle-class homes, respectable theaters, and music clubs. But their vision faltered against the reality of entrenched business interests, who catered to the resource extraction industries that kept the town afloat.

Spokane’s dilemma was a problem that echoed throughout the American West, where towns yearned to come into their own, but remained economically dependent on the East. Spokane began its career as did many American hamlets: inconspicuous but ambitious nonetheless. The falls of the Spokane River were a gathering place for Native Americans, and a fur trading post existed in the region in the early 19th century. With the arrival of the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1881, and the mineral discoveries in the Idaho panhandle that began in 1882, the town became a mining headquarters. Railroads made Spokane the supply and distribution point for the rich wheat farms of the Palouse. By 1888, rail lines stretched east, west, and south from Spokane, connecting Northwestern mines and farms with Eastern markets. The region’s population mushroomed from 350 in 1880 to 19,922 in 1890, a nearly 6,000 percent increase that was accompanied by a feverish building boom.

None of this development could have occurred without financing, markets, and transportation systems that Spokanites, in large part, did not control. The improvidence of the situation became clear with the Panic of 1893, when a burst railroad bubble and a precipitous drop in the gold supply plunged the U.S. into depression. Seven of Spokane’s ten banks closed in the panic, and, as the crisis progressed, 25 percent of Spokane’s buildings passed into the hands of a single European bank. But by the late 1890s, investors had recovered, and the city was again experiencing great growth.

Another important source of income for the town were the thousands of migratory, unattached young men, who worked in the mines, logging camps, and farms and came downtown, eager for diversion and companionship after months on the job. In the area between the Spokane River and the railroad tracks, these men found a carnival of saloons, brothels, lodging houses, gambling joints, dance halls, and variety theaters.

It was emblematic of the city’s resource-driven economy that the kingpins of Howard Street were Jacob “Dutch Jake” Goetz and Harry Baer. Goetz and Baer had staked early and lucrative claims in the fabulous Bunker Hill and Sullivan silver mine of northern Idaho, cashed out, and come to Spokane in the late 1880s. In time they built the deliciously ornate Coeur d’Alene resort, which catered to the fast crowd and to the laborers who poured into town. By May 1899, Goetz could brag to the Spokesman-Review that the Coeur d’Alene had a weekly payroll of $1,400, more than the electric and streetcar companies combined.

A vocal element in Spokane rejected the idea that the city had to accept an unbridled atmosphere in order to remain prosperous. In 1897 and 1899 they launched morality drives, aimed at the Howard Street establishments. These efforts followed similar paths: ministerial outrage, political promises, public debate, temporary victory, and ultimately, quiet failure.

Reformers wondered whether Spokane’s vice district marked it as a place outside the pale of decent American life. If Spokane could not lay claim to solid, Victorian decency, why would good families move there? How could the city enjoy above-the-board growth if it felt like the setting of a cheap western novel? As one Protestant minister put it in January 1897, his neighbors had to recognize that theirs was a hometown, “not a mining camp on the border of civilization.”

But even as Spokane’s reformers railed, its fortunes roared along and Howard Street became even more depraved. Slot machines proliferated in the red light district, the seedier saloons had introduced cubby holes—the purpose of which was obvious—accessible from side doors, and the boozy carousing in the private theater boxes had surely not abated. Worse yet, violations of the law occurred with the winking consent of some authorities. By 1899, only two years after its earlier exposé, the Spokesman-Review was still targeting the Coeur d’Alene resort—with its theater, bathhouses, and gambling halls right next door to City Hall—arguing that it would be shut down anywhere else in the U.S. Men fresh from the Klondike, the newspaper opined, had seen nothing so wicked in the wilds of Dawson City.

Things escalated that fall, just days before the opening of the Industrial Exposition, a fair promoting the products of the Inland Northwest. Great numbers of visitors were expected, many of whom considered variety theaters amongst Spokane’s most attractive diversions. At the last minute city fathers engaged in a battle royale over the renewal of business licenses for the Stockholm, Comique, and Coeur d’Alene resorts.

On paper, Spokane’s 1899 city council looked like a group that could agree with itself: white, Republican, middle-aged businessmen who had lived in Spokane for some time. Yet they split evenly on the question of variety theater licensing. At one point, after the reform crowd had momentarily gained the upper hand, councilman James Omo rejoined with a gambit, a set of “shut tight” resolutions that would align Spokane to a strict moral standard: Variety theaters closed, gambling laws enforced, Sunday closures instituted. The choice between profits and morality was at the heart of Omo’s bluff, though he claimed that the $30,000 the city gathered annually from vice district licenses and fines on gamblers and prostitutes was immaterial to him. Remarkably, Omo’s resolutions passed.

But that lasted only for one day. A large group of wholesalers, retailers, property owners, and community giants immediately submitted a petition requesting licenses for decent variety shows. With all of their investments in Spokane, these merchants did not want to hamper the “growth of natural prosperity in the community.” The petition contained an important caveat: the variety theaters must abide the law; more to the point, the private boxes, with their obvious sexual purpose, must close. Perhaps the theaters did present mindless, romping shows, but if their worst features—namely, sex and gambling—were eliminated what, precisely, was the problem?

Local clergymen tried to shame the bourgeoisie into accepting reform (was money their god? an Episcopal bishop asked), but with proposed revenues in the offing, the city council rescinded the “holiness” resolutions and licensed the three theaters just in time for the Exposition. With this conclusion to the 1899 affair, Spokanites showed themselves to be more concerned with the immediate realities of the bottom line than with staid, Victorian ideals, or some future Spokane that only existed in their dreams.

The town continued to boom along with extractive industries—especially lumber—in the first years of the 20th century, when its population rose from 36,848 in 1900 to 104,402 in 1910. This growth meant real power for the Howard Street kingpins, heightening the variety theater dilemma. The municipal elections in 1901, 1903, and 1905 yielded administrations friendly to the vice district.

It was only in 1908, after years of morality campaigns, that a coalition of ministers, temperance advocates, civic boosters, and progressives mustered the political will needed to enforce the anti-vice laws. They did so, in large part, by convincing their fellow Spokanites that more sustainable growth would come through building a “home city” than a place that capitalized on the fluid lives of migrant laborers.

On January 10, 1908, the chief of police notified downtown resorts that either the liquor or the women had to go. Honest application of the law spelled the end of Spokane’s variety theaters, which gave their final performances on January 11, 1908. After all, as Dutch Jake remarked, there was no money in it without the women. With that, middle-class Spokane cast its lot with bungalows and schoolhouses rather than flophouses and honky-tonks. The market for sin did not, of course, entirely disappear, and neither did the city’s dependence on outside investment. What changed was the willingness of the bourgeoisie to accept a reputation for frontier revelry in the name of profits.

The post When Variety Theaters Tantalized the Frontier West appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

With all the hype, and the Wile E. Coyote-evoking image of the cliff, it’s hard to remember that the potential year-end hit to the economy is not an act of nature or something forced on the United States by cruel outsiders. The Fiscal Cliff is instead a crisis manufactured by a divided Congress that doesn’t trust itself to do the right thing in the absence of a crisis. So, absent a financial deal between the two parties, we’ll get hit with a bruising double-whammy of higher taxes and automatic cuts to government spending. As a form of motivation, it’s both brilliant and perverse, like a diet that requires you to shoot yourself in the foot in three months unless you have started running daily.

As for the backstory, each faction in this drama has its own partisan CliffsNotes (sorry, couldn’t resist), but some facts are unassailable. The first is that democracies have an easier time raising spending than they do raising taxes, especially when credit is readily and cheaply available, as it has been these past few years. Second, federal deficits of the past three years have been alarmingly high (this year’s is projected to come in at more than 7 percent of Gross Domestic Product), and they contribute to a mounting national debt (now in the neighborhood of 100 percent of GDP). And the third unassailable fact, confusingly enough, is that Washington’s biggest problem in dealing with its fiscal mess may be that financial markets don’t appear to think there is much of a problem.

Before delving into that last head-scratcher, step back and consider the overall pie. Over the past 40 years, federal tax revenues have averaged 19 percent of GDP. This percentage, measuring the slice of the overall economy claimed by Uncle Sam, has held remarkably steady, despite dramatically varying policies and tax rates (top marginal rates were well over 50 percent for much of the postwar era). Only once, in the capital-gains-rich year of 2000, did tax receipts exceed 20 percent of GDP. Federal spending, meanwhile, has averaged about 22 percent of GDP over the past 40 years.

In the past few years, we’ve deviated from these trend lines, as the so-called Great Recession dried up tax revenues and necessitated extra spending. The amount Uncle Sam is currently hauling in amounts to only 17 percent of GDP, while Washington is spending an amount equal to roughly 24 percent. The long-term projections look even grimmer, on account of the coming spike in entitlement spending produced by an aging population and escalating healthcare costs.

So, to recap, we’re having a hard enough time as it is getting back into equilibrium (defined not as balanced budgets but as manageable deficits in the range of 2 to 3 percent of GDP). But in the long term we’re in even bigger trouble, as federal spending is projected to creep past 30 percent of GDP in the next 20 years if current entitlement obligations and costs—or economic growth rates—don’t change dramatically. Jumping off the cliff addresses the short-term problem by raising revenue (via the expiration of Bush-era “temporary” tax cuts) and by implementing severe budget cuts. Great idea—unless, as economists are quick to caution, the economy contracts as a result of this self-imposed austerity and starves the government of the additional revenues it was hoping for, which would give us a short-term fix but bring us no closer to solving the longer-term crisis.

Mind you, that word “crisis” is one I use advisedly because, as teased earlier, the financial markets have remained nonplussed by the scary fiscal projections, credit rating downgrades, the political dysfunction, and the alarmist countdowns. Despite all of these red flags, it’s never been cheaper for Uncle Sam to take out a 10-year loan than it has been this year. The interest rate on the 10-year Treasury bill dipped below 2 percent earlier this year, an all-time low.

Countless future economics Ph.D.s will be minted seeking to explain how and why Uncle Sam’s cost of borrowing could have kept going lower as the federal debt burden (and indicators of federal dysfunction) kept shooting higher. Among possible theories: The United States still looked like a sound investment when compared to places like Europe; controlling the world’s reserve currency allowed Americans to have their cake and eat it too; a soft economy allowed Uncle Sam to soak up excess available cash that the private sector (and foreign central banks like China’s) didn’t want to invest; no one wanted to count out a nation capable of inventing a Fiscal Cliff to try to spook itself into getting its act together.

I would even offer up the Micawber Theory, a nod to the hard-up Dickensian character in Great Expectations who always believes “something will turn up” to transform things. We’re still considered, by domestic and foreign lenders, to be a charmed nation with a knack for coming out ahead—in short, a good credit risk.

Whatever the reasons for the stubbornness of the market’s confidence in Uncle Sam, we’re a long way from the ’90s, when Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin could point to an uptick in interest rates to insist that the administration and Congress get serious about embracing fiscal responsibility. While both parties at the time bought Rubin’s argument that government borrowing needed to be reined in because it “crowds out” borrowing by consumers and businesses, Republicans later took to mocking “Rubinomics” when they became the party of large deficits under President Bush. Democrats on the left don’t feel too differently.

All of this is maddening to Wall Street and Washington budget hawks (among whom I count a number of colleagues and friends), who understandably want us to live within our means and believe there will be dire consequences if we don’t. A couple of years ago I teased a budget-hawk colleague that she must, in her darker moments, wish for signs of inflation in order to get us all on the program. Of course, she denied having such hopes—and reminded me that it’s easier for you to get your house in order before a crisis forces you to do so. True, no doubt, but so difficult in a democracy (see “Global Warming, responses to”).

That’s why the smart money in Washington is on some short-term compromise at year’s end or in January—to buy some more space and time to procrastinate on any of the really hard stuff. Keep an eye on interest rates and the stock markets, for any real urgency to make meaningful decisions can only come from them.

And what about “the people” beyond the Beltway, the great American electorate that hired both President Obama and the Republican House? Voters are routinely mocked by Washington insiders and media elites for being out of touch with reality, for expressing concern about deficits but no real appetite to pay more taxes or to identify any material cuts to government programs. But does this make them naïve and spoiled, as is often assumed in my circles—or wiser? Could it be that most Americans look at the petty insider game and are right to scoff at the choices laid out by keepers of the conventional wisdom?

Maybe the American people keep electing a divided government so as to neutralize Washington while something else, something more ambitious and becoming of America, turns up, as Micawber would say. One game-changer that could alter all dire scenarios would be a combination of higher economic growth and declining healthcare costs. The healthcare sector has proven resistant to the efficiencies that new technologies have forced on most other industries, but is it crazy to think that could change?

For now, either way, the cliff is upon us. It may turn out to be as anticlimactic a crisis as Y2K, or it may yet trigger a panic. Living inside the Capital Beltway, though, I would be rude to pretend that the sanguine financial markets and disinterested American public were onto something my neighbors and colleagues are not. I should probably stock up on extra water, if only for the sake of appearances.

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“Does this cupcake have nuts in it? I’m allergic,” I typically ask the clerk at the counter.

“No … it … doesn’t,” he responds slowly, thinking hard. This is not comforting.

“Do you have a list of the ingredients I could look at, just to make sure?” I follow up.

“Um, no, we don’t.”

I leave empty-handed after each of these encounters. Until recently, I feared I would never find a bakery to sate my cravings for nut-free cupcakes and cookies.

All that changed a year and a half ago. When I moved to Washington, D.C., a friend told me about the “unreal” cupcakes at Baked & Wired, a bakery and coffee shop in Georgetown. I dismissed it almost immediately, sure that this bakery would disappoint me like all of the others.

But one afternoon last winter, I was in desperate need of chocolate. I took a chance on the little shop with the pink and brown sign. Inside, each pastry was adorned with a colorful handmade sign. I stepped to the back of the line, which often stretches out the door day and night.

I cautiously approached the row of plump cupcakes in the front of the baking counter. Each one had a name–like the purple buttercream–frosted Uniporns and Rainhoes (a take on vanilla Funfetti cake, with embedded colored sprinkles) and Pretty Bitchin’ (golden, whipped peanut butter frosting on a dense chocolate cake). I counted at least 25 flavors in all.

I asked the clerk my usual question about the cupcake ingredients. When he showed me the list I almost passed out from shock. Then he told me that the bakers take nut allergies very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that they place a nut on top of any cupcake with nuts inside of it. This is valuable because sometimes baked goods contain fatal mines of almond extract and hazelnut cream.

So began my non-nutty love affair with Baked & Wired. It almost didn’t matter what the cupcakes tasted like.

Almost. And then I took my first bite of Karen’s Birthday, a chocolate cupcake with vanilla buttercream frosting. The cake was moist and soft. But this was no mild-mannered devil’s food cake. It was a deep, serious chocolate. The frosting was smooth and buttery. It was cupcake heaven.

I’ve been back at least once a week ever since.

Elizabeth Weingarten is an editorial assistant at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C.

*Photo by Elizabeth Weingarten.

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Bakersfield, my hometown, sits at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley just 100 miles north of the glittering lights of Los Angeles. The population, now more than 350,000, has nearly tripled in size since I was born in the ’80s. Most of that growth manifested itself in chain restaurants and shopping malls. As a teenager, I longed for those sorts of outlets, but now they all blur together. Summer days in Bakersfield are hot, often in the triple digits, and rain is infrequent, but the soil is fertile and sodium-rich. It is a mecca for farmers of nearly all crops.

The fog is something I can try to describe in a series of corny colloquialisms, but I ultimately fail to capture it. Bakersfield is like that, too. It’s a city where in the same breath its residents will knowingly laugh and admit it is no cultural rival of San Francisco–and then fiercely defend it for what it is.

It is ours.

You know you’re in Bakersfield by an enormous curved yellow arch spelling out “BAKERSFIELD” that stretches across Buck Owens Boulevard on the northwest edge of the city. It’s like a neatly printed “FIDO” on the tag of a mangy family pet. This town is built on steel-pedal country music, a natural wealth of petroleum, NASCAR, and a population of Dust Bowl Okies, Basque people, Mexican immigrants, and farmers who have put all their savings into the next big crop. My parents are transplants, and I am a native, but it took me years of living on the east coast to realize that simple fact. I am not a native of “just north of L.A.” nor of a place known as “my father is from the Bay Area and my mother is from North Carolina.” I am simply from Bakersfield.

With each year that I live in Washington, D.C., I am a less frequent visitor home. I moved to D.C. to become a big-city reporter, an idea I conjured up from 1940s movies where wisecracking gals get their story and hard-nosed editors learn a lesson. I’ve grown to love the place–its cosmopolitan feel, its lamp-lined streets, its history, and its frenetic pace. I have loyalties to two cities now, and my divided allegiances are revealed during moments when I am least prepared to defend one place or the other. (I can respond fine with some time to think, but I’m not always so quick on my feet when it comes to verbal challenges. One reason I like writing.)

A late-night encounter with some haughty northern Californians in a D.C. fast-food joint ends with my usually poised sister snarling that our hometown is more than just a collection of meth addicts. At a Bakersfield wedding reception, I find myself pitied for living in close proximity to so many “liberal Democrats” in D.C. I’m tongue-tied on a job interview when a former Californian asks me what it’s like to grow up in a city that is often the butt of Jay Leno’s jokes. Do I defend my beloved “Bako”?

I find myself in one such situation on a recent trip home at an annual dinner for several families at a local Basque hangout. It is a dinner I’ve spent nights dreaming of in D.C.: cold iceberg salad dressed in olive oil and vinegar, vegetable soup topped with pinto beans and homemade salsa, hard jack cheese sliced thinly, crispy, twisted French fries, and fried chicken doused heavily in minced garlic. The parents still sit at one end of the long table and their 40-30-20-something children on the “kids” end, though the unmarked bottles of red table wine flow freely between both.

This dinner is actually larger than my family’s Thanksgiving and more predictable as well. There will be plenty of ribbing of significant others who are not from Bakersfield, and a fair amount of dirt will be dug up from the past. Babies and new handbags will be admiringly passed around among the women. Diners will change seats throughout dinner to relay gossip from three seats down. The waitresses call you “hon.” By the time the second helping of pickled cow tongue has been passed around, talk has turned to my career and future plans.

“When are you moving back to California?” I get asked several times. The not-so-veiled opinions of Barack Obama start to emerge, too, as though I am his personal ambassador from Washington, D.C. The question of what exactly I’m doing “over there” gets me thinking as well.

Someone once told me, “The more words it takes to describe what your career is, the further you are away from actually doing something.” My friends in Bakersfield are teachers, lawyers, small business owners, and, mostly, farmers. Most inhabit a world of one-word job titles like cards from the “LIFE” board game. And when Bakersfieldians talk about what they do, it often revolves around something they’ve produced from the earth: oranges, almonds, carrots, milk, cotton. When I talk about what I do in D.C., I talk about the ideas and concepts I try to capture in my writing. I struggle to define how I’m contributing to society, because I come from a world where people put their hands in the dirt. In Washington, D.C., we argue over what laws may or may not be passed or how much money should be extracted and spent; meanwhile, the sons and daughters of Thomas Jefferson’s ideals are out there toiling for our dinner.

The truth is I often dread going home to try and answer questions from the friendly neighbor walking her dog or the high school friend at the next table in the restaurant. I suppose I dread it because I don’t have it all figured out in Bakersfield terms. What feels like a perfectly acceptable paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle of a journalist in D.C. does not feel so glamorous in my hometown. I dread the measurements of Bakersfield being applied to my life in Washington. They don’t apply, of course–the cities are vastly different–but they still gnaw at me. After I’ve been home for about 72 hours the dread quietly leaves my body, and I start appreciating how much my family takes care of me and how much my friends seem to take an interest in what I’m doing. (Especially when I say I’m writing a piece about Bakersfield. Everyone, it seems, wants to make sure that it’s something that reflects well on our beloved home.)

It is colder in D.C. and not everyone is friendly, but those are easy trials to overcome when you feel you have a whole town behind you, rooting for you to succeed. I suppose it would be better for my writing career if I despised my hometown, if I were scarred by my God-fearing, Republican upbringing. But the older I get the more I realize what an idyllic childhood I had. Shooting BB guns for target practice in the front yard, singing Christmas carols on mule wagons, riding bikes to school with the neighborhood kids, and listening to my parents and guests from neighboring homes sitting around an outdoor fireplace laughing late into the night over some glasses of locally vinted wine. Bakersfield helped me define as an adult what a community ought to feel like: warm, supportive, close-knit.

My east-bound airplane shrugs off the fog as it climbs the sky. The morning sun is making outlines over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, though the light can’t yet reach the patchwork of farmland below that defines the boundaries of my hometown. I had dreaded going home, yes, but I’d also forgotten how much I loved being home. You’ll be back for Christmas, I tell myself.

Paige L. Hill is a writer living in Washington, D.C. writing for a variety of publications on architecture, energy, green building, and, occasionally, personal history.

*Photos courtesy of Paige L. Hill.

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