The Northern California Nightmare Of Politicians Owned
By Google's Covert Stock Market Bribes
USA Today's Erica Hellerstein reports on the nightmare of socialist hell
that northern California has turned into under the Democrat leadership:
"...The first thing locals mention are the homeless who line the
streets of densely populated city blocks. They sleep restlessly in
RVs; in vast encampments under the freeway; in tents in front of artisan
coffee shops; on scraps of cardboard and discarded mattresses; on subway
car seats that lurch from one end of town to another.
This is the Bay Area in 2020, infamous for its homelessness crisis and rising
inequality, where the gulf between the rich and the poor can be seen every
day on the street. Tents are propped up in front of swanky
restaurants and boutique gyms; the impoverished pick through techies’ trash; misery
laps up against luxury, all while the elements rage — fires, earthquakes,
drought.
I finally returned to this place, where I was born and bred, as a
journalist last June, after spending years away reporting in North
Carolina, Washington, D.C., Honduras, Mexico, Colombia and Argentina.
Yet my homecoming was fraught. Just a few months before I moved back, I
lost my best friend to a traumatic and unexpected death. When I got there,
I was overwhelmed by my grief and terrified of what I would find in a
place built on 28 years of our shared history, from our local Thai haunts
to Berkeley’s Tilden Park and the campgrounds of Big Sur.
Imposing geography, crushing poverty
But quickly the Bay Area itself demanded my attention. Spread across nine
Pacific coast counties, it commands an immense physical space and,
as home to Silicon Valley, it has a particular weight in the popular
imagination.
It still looked the same to me as when I left in 2006, with its glorious
ocean vistas, winding hills and abundant gardens, but it was profoundly
different. Skyrocketing rents,
homelessness,
rising inequality,
a migrating creative
class — these are the concerns foremost on many local minds.
Local and national news outlets debate whether San
Francisco could be fixed at all — or claimed the city was
irrevocably broken.
My job brings me into close contact with all of these problems,
reacquainting me with my hometown through the occasional fog of
grief. As I
reported in my early months on the beat, the gap between the haves
and have-nots in California is growing ever larger, with the top
5% of households in places like San Francisco County earning an
average of $808,105 a year, compared with $16,184 for the lowest 20%.
More than half of Latinos, who
make up nearly
40% of the state population, struggle to make ends meet at
all.
Meanwhile, homelessness is on the rise. From 2017 to 2019, it increased by 47% in
Oakland; in Sunnyvale, it surged
by 147% over the same time period. The housing crisis is creating a
new breed of supercommuters, who spend hours navigating the region’s maze
of highways each day.
In Santa Cruz County, I spoke to Ernestina Solorio, a single mother
struggling to make ends meet on her farmworker salary. She stopped by an underground food bank for farm workers
living in poverty who were too scared to go to public food banks for
fear of immigration raids. I met her in an alleyway and spent the day
talking to farmworkers who couldn’t afford to eat the food they harvest. One
farmworker who volunteers with the food bank told me she has
trouble surviving on her salary, stretching her paychecks between rent, her
children, food and her mother back in Mexico. She knows what it’s like
to earn so little, so she helps others.
Farther down the coast, in Half Moon Bay, I covered the city as it rallied behind nearly 200 farmworkers
who were losing their jobs at a beloved Japanese American flower company
in the face of an increasingly global, competitive flower market and
changing regional economy. People who had been at the company for decades
were helping their colleagues find hope and new jobs. They have to
move forward, one worker told me."
San Francisco is a tough place live for a lot of reasons.
Sky-high housing prices can make it nearly impossible to find a place. In
February, a 1,000-square-foot
home with no working plumbing and a pile of rotting mattresses
stacked in the kitchen sold for more than $520,000.
Even tech
moguls and startup
founders are having trouble finding homes in an area where nearly
every spare piece of real estate is gobbled up by the highest bidder. One
firm estimated that a home buyer needs to make about $300,000
a year just to afford a median-priced abode.
But San Francisco isn't just perilously overpriced: It's also perpetually
teetering on the edge of disaster. On October 18, the city of San
Francisco participated in an annual earthquake drill called the Great
California Shakeout, a dry run where more
than 10 million people across the state practiced a "drop,
cover, and hold on" earthquake survival protocol.
None of those people are quite old enough to remember this, but on April
18, 1906, a violent ~7.7-7.9
magnitude earthquake leveled the city into ruins. The minute-long
quake ruptured 296
miles of California coastline, sparked three days of fires, and
killed 3,000 people, leaving the bulk of the city homeless.
That was just 112 years ago — the geologic equivalent of the blink
of an eye.
If earthquakes don't shake you, consider that the city is literally
sinking into mud — and into trash in certain places.
Real-estate woes aside, here are the ways that scientists know living in
the Bay Area is not for the faint of heart:
The Bay Area is a veritable
smorgasbord of complex fault lines. No less than seven
different faults converge here.
The well-known San Andreas Fault is just one of the seven
"significant fault zones" the US
Geological Survey (USGS) cites in the Bay Area. The
others are the Calaveras, Concord-Green Valley, Greenville,
Hayward, Rodgers Creek, and San Gregorio Faults.
People who live in the area experience
small earthquakes and shakes all the time. But those
aren't the rumbles that scare seismologists.
It's the bigger, disastrous
quakes scientists are really worried about. And they say San
Francisco is due for another soon.
In 2007, the USGS
determined that there was about a "63% probability of a
magnitude 6.7 or greater earthquake in the Bay Area" by 2037.
Estimates have only gotten worse since then. One recent
report suggested that there is a 76% chance the Bay
Area will experience a magnitude 7.0 earthquake within the
next three decades.
Seismologists are most concerned
about two fault lines in particular: the San Andreas and the
Hayward.
Anything higher than a 7.9 on the San Andreas Fault line,
which runs from Mendocino to Mexico, would put "approximately
100%" of the population of San Francisco at risk, while a 6.9
quake from the Hayward Fault could spell trouble for nearly
everyone who lives and works there, according
to the city.
At least 300 buildings sit
directly on top of the Hayward Fault, and another two
million in the San Francisco Bay area would also be under
threat if a big quake hit the region.
Scientists warn that more
than 22,000 people might need to be rescued from stalled
elevators, while another 411,000 people could become homeless.
The USGS predicts that at least
800 people would be killed and 18,000 more injured, if a
hypothetical 7.0 hit nearby Oakland, California.
The
scientists warn the threat of a future earthquake like
that "is real and could happen at any time."
Some geologists are already
predicting that the period from 2018 to 2021 will be an
especially rocky one.
The Earth is turning
a little slower than usual right now, which puts extra
squeeze on tectonic plates and may mean more high-magnitude
shakes are on the way.
Certain neighborhoods in the city
are built on less-than-rock-solid heaps of trash.
Old 19th-century
trash that was dumped out to widen the city could
quickly level the bottoms of many homes during a big quake. It
already did once in 1989.
Experts estimate that places like the Marina neighborhood,
pictured above, would today be 50% destroyed by anything
higher than a 7.0 magnitude earthquake on the San Andreas
Fault.
And many of the cities tallest
downtown buildings are sitting on ground that could easily
liquify during a big earthquake.
The
New York Times recently estimated that more than 100 of
the city's tallest buildings (higher than 22 stories) have
been built in areas with a "very high" chance of liquefaction
in an earthquake.
But San Francisco's quake threat
doesn't stop at the shore. Tremors could hit the city from
the sea, if powerful tsunamis rush in from places across the
water like Russia, Alaska, or Japan.
That's less likely than a Californian earthquake, because
typically, tsunami waves aren't super serious once they reach
San Francisco's shores. According
to the city, most of the tsunamis that hit the Bay Area
from Alaskan earthquakes are less than 1 foot high by the time
they make landfall.
But there's still a chance that a tsunami moving in from the
Cascadia subduction zone (which stretches from Canada's
Vancouver Island into Northern California) could come into the
Bay Area at more than 16 feet high, UC Santa Cruz earth
sciences professor Steven Ward told
KQED.
In October 2017, more than 3,500
homes, buildings, and other structures in the Napa Valley
were reduced to ash. At least 31 people were killed.
Many people in San Francisco took to wearing
masks so they wouldn't have to breathe the smoky fumes
wafting in.
In November of this year,
wildfire smoke that drifted into the city from the nearby
Camp Fire made it so tough to breathe that officials
canceled school, and museums offered free admission to keep
people out of the smoke.
Soot and chemicals released from the flames
of the Camp Fire traveled more than 170 miles to San
Francisco.
In the days after the devastatingly deadly fire
broke out in the Sierra Nevada foothills, the Environmental Protection
Agency described the air quality throughout much
of the Bay Area as "unhealthy" or "very unhealthy." It
stayed that way for nearly two weeks.
California is currently suffering through its longest drought to
date, and experts believe wildfires in the state will only
become stronger and more common as the planet heats up
further.
In the nearby East Bay, a 1991
"firestorm" triggered by a grass fire killed 25 people.
East Bay resident Will Wright, who had a near-death
experience when his home burned to the ground, was inspired by
the tragedy to create the wildly popular game "The Sims,"
according to local news site Berkeleyside.
In 2016, the city of San
Francisco estimated sea levels there would rise 66 inches by
2100. That's 5 1/2 feet.
Today, with the accelerating pace of polar ice melt, the
state says the 2100 water
level could be much higher, increasing by more
than 9 feet as Antarctic ice sheets quickly thaw.
The sea change won't come cheap.
At least $62 billion in property and infrastructure is at
risk.
That's the
calculation with just a modest 4 feet of sea level rise.
But the flooding problems don't
end with seawater. San Francisco is also sinking into the
ground at a rate of about 10 millimeters a year.
The natural caving-in
process at work is called "subsidence," and it's
happening because the city is built on heaps of trash and
Holocene-era mud that's slipping away.
And more more frequent storms
could make landslides and flooding more common.
"Severe storms can cause landslides, coastal flooding, and
stormwater ponding," the
city warns. Scientists predict
we'll see many more of those kinds of events in the
coming years, as more "surprise" and potentially irreversible
climate events crop up around the globe.
California's seemingly
never-ending series of droughts is also a concern for San
Francisco Bay Area residents.
Supplying Californians with enough water is increasingly
becoming an expensive problem. The Pacific
Institute estimates that municipal water costs in
California metro areas rose at two to three times the rate of
inflation between 2000 and 2010.
California is currently suffering through its longest drought to date,
which started in 2011.
With more extreme climate shifts
and heat waves on the way, San Francisco will have an
unusual problem on its hands: a lack of air-conditioners.
With extreme
weather events and heat waves on the rise around the
world, people in San Francisco may have a tougher time than
other Americans finding relief from scorching temperatures at
home, at least in the near future.
According to the 2011 housing survey of the US Census, "the
Bay Area had the lowest percentage of housing units with
central air-conditioning (10%) of any region in the country,"
the San
Francisco Business Times reports. That compares with 66%
of people nationwide who said they have central air at home.
If you decide to stick around the
Bay Area, it's probably time to make sure you're prepared
for all these various disasters with a well-stocked
emergency kit.
The San Francisco
Department of Emergency Management suggests having
enough water, nonperishable food, and flashlight batteries on
hand to last about three days. Because in San Francisco, you
just never know.