It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to determine the point at which smallish, people-friendly towns evolve into big anonymous cities that grow to the point they become unlivable.
I knew a guy who talked about the wonderful boyhood he’d had growing up in San Jose among the orchards and neighborhoods. By the 1990s he couldn’t stand even to visit San Jose with its congestion, concrete and confusion.
When, and why, did Santa Rosa grow from a city with nice, semi-elegant downtown hotels and a railroad depot a few blocks west with trains coming and going, pretty neighborhoods, beautiful high school and college campuses, into just another collection of big blank buildings and vast acres of suburban housing? Was Coddingtown the first domino?
Or was abandoning the lovely old downtown courthouse and moving into a government-style complex indistinguishable from insurance buildings the first step to ruination?
Today, right now, we watch our smallish, friendly-ish funky old Ukiah being transformed from what it has been into something worse. The new courthouse looks like a monster rising up on Perkins Street, designed to throw dark shadows across downtown.
Do you know anyone in favor of this blindingly ugly building that will soon become the biggest in all of Mendocino County? Why didn’t we get to vote?
On the southeast side of town the massive economic drain that for 25 years has been growing around Fort Walmart has had drastic impacts on all of downtown, all of retail in spite of the so-called “Shop Local!” sloganeering preached, but not practiced, by Ukiah’s city administrators.
Around Ukiah there are huge new apartment complexes being built. They are everywhere all over the city, and if they aren’t they soon will be. This is a significant departure from the kinds of homes in which we have lived and the neighborhoods that have grown in the past 100-plus years.
Do we think young families today yearn to live in two bedroom apartments on the third floor of a cheap building in close proximity with neighbors they will never know? The apartment buildings erected around town back in the 1930s and 1950s were mostly small, pretty units of a dozen units or less, nestled into neighborhoods alongside modest single family homes with yards, gardens, garages and sometimes swimming pools. Who decided to impose expensive, complicated building permits and requirements for basic three bedroom, two bath houses to the point of making such projects impossible, while massive “affordable” housing all get the automatic go-ahead?
Why, your elected leaders, that’s who. California’s and Ukiah’s housing shortages are the product of political decisions; today’s “solutions” come from the same sources.
Did you grow up/arrive in Ukiah wishing it was more like Rohnert Park? Do you yearn to see the population increase by, let’s just say, 10 percent or so? Or maybe 50 percent is more like it. How about a 100 percent population increase?
Why not? Doubling the number of Ukiahans would have lots of benefits that you and I may never consider but that city administrators spend a lot of time dreaming about.
Twice as many citizens would produce twice as much traffic and twice as many stoplights. Think of all the city streets made twice as wide and city officials having twice as much money to play with and grow, with the goal of doubling the size of Ukiah again by 2035. More land! More taxes!
More offices! More programs! More employees! Twice as many employees doing twice as much mischief on twice as much land adds up to a future no ambitious politician could resist.
Twice the salaries! Half the work, meaning plenty of time to go interview for hotshot administrative positions in fancy places like Fresno and Bakersfield.
We don’t know, or at least can’t explain, how this merry-go-wrong got started, so it’s difficult to come up with a strategy to slow it back down. Expect nothing from city council, and that’s exactly what you’ll get.
(Tom Hine writes these weekly columns but is able to avoid taking blame because many years ago he cleverly invented his invisible writing partner, TWK. Please send thoughts, comments and snide remarks to Mr. Kramer and let us sleeping dogs lie.)
I cry for all of California, indeed all of America.
A direct line can be drawn between the decision taken by the Reagan administration to halt enforcement of the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936, and the demise of small retail businesses. Robinson-Patman prohibits discriminatory wholesale pricing of the kind commonly practiced today by wholesale suppliers to big box stores like Walmart and Costco. Without Robinson-Patman, small retail businesses of the kind that used to fill the downtown streets of Ukiah have been forced out of business due to their inability to compete with the big box retailers.
I’ve been told by small business owners that the retail prices charged by Costco are now less than those offered by their wholesalers for the same goods.
Robinson-Patman remains on the books. Without FTC enforcement it is meaningless.