Inequality in the San Joaquin Valley
By 
This is a few weeks old now, but I remembered it and am glad to share a bit of it. The San Joaquin Valley has long defined California inequality, with wealthy farmers and impoverished workers fighting for basic rights. This is the home of the Wheatland Riot, The Grapes of Wrath, the United Farm Workers. But despite all these brave struggles, inequality between the largely white elites and largely Mexican poor remains intense and not getting any better. The Times Magazine had a good long story about it.
The crew of organizers they mentored — mostly young, female, college-educated, Spanish-speaking — did not tire. Together, by means of community protest and legal challenge and local ballot measures that they conceived and helped pass, they were bringing change to the most hidebound of places. A shift in power and public spending was occurring not only in Fresno but also in small towns and rural settlements throughout the valley.
It was one kind of challenge to the status quo when they advocated for state legislation that forced the citrus town Exeter to extend its water to the sticks of Tooleville. Or when they helped secure an $8 million grant to build a multifamily apartment complex in the farmworker town Lamont. But now Garibay and Seaton were teaming up with Celedon to kill an initiative called Measure C, a $7 billion sales tax to fund highways and roads across Fresno County for the next 30 years. This was civic heresy.
The two previous Measure C’s built the roads and highways that fueled four decades of sprawl in Fresno and adjacent Clovis, luring waves of upper- and middle-class families to suburbia’s frontier. Sprawl, at least the way it was done here, made inequality a defining feature of place. Few developers chose to revitalize the crumbling neighborhoods in Fresno’s heart when acres of open farmland beckoned in every direction. Perversely, poverty turned land speculation into a bonanza. Putting more miles between Southside decay and the new subdivisions filled with three-bedroom, two-bathroom dreams became the easiest sales job ever.
Like a giant Ponzi scheme, each new growth area gave an initial boost to the economy but over the long haul didn’t generate enough revenue to pay for its own streets, sewers, police and fire services. Fresno was stuck in the perpetual state of having to add new subdivisions and retail centers to pay for the losses of the previous ones.
The public hearing to unveil the latest version of Measure C was held last July in a small meeting room atop a vacant downtown casino. Sixteen leaders from Fresno County, mayors of big cities and small towns and a county supervisor, sat on the regional Council of Governments that oversaw the measure. They were prepared to show the pie charts of funding, hear a grumble or two from the Southside and vote to send the measure to ballot, where voters countywide would pass it as they had before.