WG: Poverty in California

this is quite interesting. mark krikorian sent me this from his center of
migration studies in NY

greetings

arno tausch


>    http://www.sacbee.com/news/projects/leftbehind/dayone_main.html
> 
> 
> Central Valley mired in grinding poverty
> By Dale Kasler 
> Sacramento Bee, January 24, 2000
> 
> Second of three parts
> 
> PARLIER, Fresno County -- It's a typically depressing fall afternoon here
> in "the other California." A face peers out from an unliveable back-alley
> shack. The downtown shops go begging for customers while four men hold
> court at a nearby park, hopelessly unemployed. Farmworkers line up at a
> local church, which doubles as a Salvation Army center, for their monthly
> food hand-out.
> 
> In Parlier -- 98 percent Latino, steeped in poverty and saddled with 29
> percent unemployment -- recovery is just a rumor. "There's no such thing
> as
> good times," said Juan Salazar, a farmworker and father-to-be who earned
> $5,600 this year picking grapes.
> 
> A similar story is told, in varying degrees, all over the Central Valley,
> a
> placed dubbed "the other California" by Fresno economist Joseph Penbera.
> The world outside may be enjoying the healthiest economy in 30 years, but
> in the Valley it's business as usual. Unemployment is still high, and so
> are poverty and welfare dependence. Personal income is lower than the rest
> of California.
> 
> If it were a state -- and with 3 million residents, its population rivals
> Oregon's -- the Valley would have the nation's sorriest economy.
> Unemployment averaged 12.4 percent last year, nearly twice as high as West
> Virginia's. As for poverty, only West Virginia, New Mexico and Washington,
> D.C., have higher rates.
> 
> Moreover, the economic distance between the Valley and the rest of
> California is widening. Thirty years ago the average Bakersfield resident
> earned only 25 percent less than the average San Franciscan. Now the
> difference is nearly 50 percent.
> 
> "We're within a 50-mile commute of all this prosperity," said David
> Shirah,
> head of the chamber of commerce that serves hardscrabble Yuba and Sutter
> counties just north of Sacramento. "Considering how close we are to all
> those jobs, all this prosperity it makes you wonder. It defies logic."
> 
> The No. 1 culprit, of course, is the Valley's longstanding dependence on
> farming. During harvest season, roughly 25 percent of the work force in
> most Valley counties is employed in agriculture, a business that pays most
> workers meager wages for seasonal employment.
> 
> "We have the breadbasket of the world, but the pickers can't even buy a
> complete meal," said David Rosales, a Parlier pastor and Salvation Army
> leader.
> 
> The problems go beyond the low wages paid to farmworkers. As Valley towns
> try recruiting non-farm industries -- telemarketing, some of the high-tech
> assembly work spilling out of Silicon Valley -- they've encountered major
> roadblocks:
> 
> A comparatively uneducated labor pool. "If you're looking for a skilled
> work force, we don't answer the bell," said Tony Roberts, who runs the
> welfare-to-work program in Yuba County. That many of the Valley's
> residents
> speak only Spanish, particularly in the San Joaquin Valley, makes things
> even tougher.
> 
> Inadequate infrastructure. Highway 99, the Valley's main artery, is
> overburdened, while the region's airports provide spotty service. Valley
> cities often can't compete in the modern world; Shirah said Yuba and
> Sutter
> counties have lost out on some telemarketing prospects because the
> counties
> lack up-to-date telecommunications networks.
> 
> Poor location. The Valley is too far removed from coastal California to
> show up on many companies' radar screens. Yet because it's in California
> --
> known for its high costs and sometimes unfriendly business climate -- the
> Valley often loses out on opportunities. For example, Shasta County lost a
> hot manufacturing prospect a few years ago because the parent company, fed
> up with high workers' compensation claims at a Southern California plant,
> vowed never to do business in California again.
> 
> Resistance from agriculture. Several development experts said farmers,
> wary
> of surrendering land, water and labor, often use their political clout to
> fight efforts to attract non-agricultural industries to the Valley.
> Farmers
> say they welcome new industry, as long as it doesn't come at the expense
> of
> agriculture.
> 
> The Valley also suffers from a sense that nothing ever changes. "It's
> almost like inertia; it's always been that way," said David Bryant, an
> executive with a citrus box manufacturer in Parlier. "If you're a person
> with an idea, with some money, where are you going to go? Are you going to
> go to the middle of nowhere? They can go to the Bay Area, they can go to
> L.A."
> 
> This inertia sometimes breeds complacency. While Gov. Gray Davis convened
> an economic summit in Fresno in November on the Valley's problems, a
> recent
> poll by the Public Policy Institute of California revealed that 55 percent
> of Valley residents believe the region's economy is good or excellent.
> 
> Only now are many Valley communities getting serious about building a
> non-farm private sector. "We should be reaping the benefits today from
> activity done four or five years ago that had not been done," said Richard
> Machado, who heads Fresno County's Economic Development Corp.
> 
> Poignant symbols of the Valley's failures abound. When a shopping mall on
> the outskirts of Marysville got wiped out by the 1986 flood, the site was
> rebuilt as the Yuba County welfare office. The agency probably does a
> better business: More than 14 percent of Yuba's population was eligible
> for
> welfare last year, the highest in the state.
> 
> Often it seems the Valley can't buy a break. Shasta County lost of good
> blue-collar jobs in the timber industry because of logging restrictions.
> Kern County lost good blue-collar jobs in the oil industry because of
> declining crude prices. El Niņo cut into farmworkers' hours in many parts
> of the Valley in 1998; a brutal freeze cut into farmworkers' hours this
> year in the citrus belt around Fresno and Tulare counties.
> 
> Marlia Ochoa, 45, usually earns $5,000 a year at a citrus packinghouse in
> Reedley, Fresno County. The freeze lopped $1,000 off her income this year,
> forcing her and her fruit picker husband to resort to free food at the
> Parlier Salvation Army. They make only partial payments on their monthly
> bills.
> 
> "It's very hard to survive," she said.
> 
> A "now or never" sense of desperation is beginning to emerge among some of
> the region's leaders, who believe that when the California economy cools
> off, as it surely will, a window of opportunity will close on the Valley.
> 
> For example, Parlier is one of many Valley towns have watched with envy as
> manufacturing jobs come spilling out of overbuilt Silicon Valley -- and
> migrate to places like Phoenix and Las Vegas. At some point, when the
> economy softens, those jobs will stop spilling out of the Silicon Valley,
> said Michael Swigart, Parlier's city manager.
> 
> Granted, there are signs of recovery and optimism in the Valley.
> Marysville
> and its neighbor Yuba City expect significant economic dividends from a
> motor speedway and outdoor concert venue planned for the region. The new
> University of California campus at Merced is expected to galvanize the
> regional economy.
> 
> Woodland has become a warehouse and distribution center. Shasta County has
> created more than 500 new manufacturing and service jobs as part of a
> five-year plan. Lindsay, a small town in Tulare County's citrus belt, has
> created nearly 1,500 new jobs this decade in fields such as food
> processing
> and plastics manufacturing.
> 
> But even as the Valley's unemployment rates approach respectable levels --
> as low as 9.2 percent in Fresno and 6.3 percent in Stockton during peak
> harvest season last September -- experts say genuine prosperity is still
> too slow in coming. Much of the job gains have been in low-wage, part-time
> work, much of it in retailing.
> 
> "We still have a lot of people in jobs at relatively low wages," said Don
> Peery of the Private Industry Council in Shasta County, where unemployment
> fell to 5 percent at one point last fall.
> 
> In August, for example, the In 'n Out hamburger chain opened a new
> restaurant in Redding offering $7.25 an hour for 25 hours work per week.
> Some 900 applicants showed up for 40 openings. A month later a
> tele-marketing firm opened a 300-employee call center paying $7 to $9 an
> hour. The company, ACI Telecentrics, was overwhelmed by the response.
> 
> "Every retail job in the world is in that town paying minimum wage or
> marginally better," said Dana Olson, chief operating officer of ACI. "It's
> not necessarily a positive statement about the community, but it's worked
> out well for us."
> 
> Meanwhile, it's unclear what will happen to the job market in the Valley's
> newest boom towns -- the communities in San Joaquin and Stanislaus
> counties
> that are receiving enormous population spillover from the Bay Area and
> Silicon Valley.
> 
> The cities have lured a limited amount of high-tech manufacturing: circuit
> boards in Stockton, chips and integrated circuits in Manteca, a total of
> several hundred jobs. But so far the population boom has mostly meant a
> slew of low-paying retail jobs.
> 
> "We get all of the problems with the traffic, but none of the benefit,"
> said Chris Reardon, a board member of the Stanislaus County Economic
> Development Corp. These jobs "don't generate a lot of what I would
> characterize as wealth in the community."
> 
> Some, like Mike Locke of the San Joaquin Partnership, believe more
> high-tech jobs will follow the population. But others are doubtful, saying
> most of the newcomers are relatively unskilled workers who've moved
> because
> they couldn't afford housing in Silicon Valley, said Ken Entin, head of
> the
> Public Policy Center at California State University, Stanislaus.
> 
> "These are the firemen, policemen who could not live in the areas where
> they were working," Entin said. "These are not the people who would
> motivate an employer in the Bay Area to relocate."
> 
> Oddly enough, the whole Valley is growing, not just the section adjacent
> to
> the Bay Area, despite the chronic shortage of jobs. The San Joaquin Valley
> in particular is expected to be California's fastest-growing region, in
> percentage terms, over the next decade, according to the Center for
> Continuing Study of the California Economy.
> 
> The reason is that stricter border policies have altered patterns of
> farmworker migration. Because "it's harder to get back in once you go
> home," migrant workers generally no longer return home to their families
> in
> Mexico when harvest ends, said J. Edward Taylor, an expert on rural
> poverty
> at the University of California, Davis. Now they bring their families to
> California to live year round, he said.
> 
> Add to that the high birth rates among immigrant families, and the result
> is a bunch of towns adding population but not nearly enough jobs, Taylor
> said. "That's created a whole new burden on these communities in the San
> Joaquin Valley," he said. "They have to deal with whole families in
> poverty
> instead of sojourners."
> 
> In Parlier, the population has grown from 2,900 to an estimated 11,000 in
> 20 years. It's one of the poorest cities in California. Unemployment
> usually hovers between 25 and 30 percent.
> 
> "It's a very sweet little town in a lot of ways, but our citizens don't
> have a lot of money," said City Manager Swigart.
> 
> There are some new homes here, on the outskirts of town, but the $80,000
> price tags are out of reach for the farmworkers who make up the bulk of
> the
> population. The homes belong to commuters who work in relatively
> prosperous
> communities like Reedley and Dinuba.
> 
> The farmworkers -- some migrant, some permanent -- live in trailers and
> shacks. Often they're tucked in a back alley, in a house that looks out on
> a junkyard. Sometimes three or four families will share a small house,
> "like little subdivisions," said the local pastor Rosales, who adds that
> he's stunned at the extent of the community's poverty: "A lot of times we
> can't even comprehend how they make it. These families have learned how to
> survive on very, very little."
> 
> Juan Salazar, 25, and his wife Ofelia, 44, earned a combined $8,000 this
> year picking grapes. They pay $200 a month to rent a shack behind
> someone's
> house. There's no hot water heater; they heat water on the stove in order
> to bathe and cook.
> 
> "We're always behind on our bills," said Ofelia, who's expecting a baby
> next March. "We eat poorly."
> 
> A better job is out of the question, she said. "We don't have the
> education
> to get a better career or lifestyle. This is the only thing we qualify
> for."
> 
> Indeed, the Valley's largely unskilled, under-educated labor force is a
> handicap. So is the language barrier, especially in the San Joaquin
> Valley.
> Most Parlier residents, for instance, don't speak English.
> 
> The result is an inability to attract anything but the most menial jobs,
> in
> spite of a large labor force willing to work cheaply. Places like Parlier
> have tried to attract high-tech manufacturing, the work that generally
> requires semi-skilled labor. "These people can certainly run electric
> screwdrivers and rivet guns," said Swigart, the city manager.
> 
> But the high-tech companies don't think so.
> 
> "There's a question mark about the (Valley's) labor force. That's a
> negative," said Steve Wahlstrom, a Berkeley consultant who advises
> high-tech companies on factory locations.
> 
> Study after study shows lower educational attainment in the Valley than in
> coastal California. A report by the Modesto-based Great Valley Center
> showed that Valley high school students are less apt to take
> college-entrance exams and less likely to attend UC than Californians at
> large. True, the new UC campus at Merced is likely to become an
> intellectual engine that will galvanize the region's economy. But the
> campus doesn't open until 2005 and the economic impact will be many years
> away, said Robert Smiley, dean of the Graduate School of Management at UC
> Davis.
> 
> In the meantime, the Valley will continue to experience a brain drain; the
> best and the brightest students generally leave and don't come back. "We'd
> like them to remain in the area, to be role models," said Jean Angier,
> principal of Parlier High School. "But we also wish them well."
> 
> Many Valley towns lack the bare essentials of infrastructure to attract
> business. "Never mind the fiber optics. In the Valley, we're still trying
> to put in basic streets and sewer and water," said Parlier Mayor Luis
> Patlan.
> 
> Penbera, the Fresno economist, said the inadequacy of Highway 99 is a
> major
> impediment to Valley prosperity. So, too, are the airports. He said the
> Valley doesn't get its share of infrastructure dollars from state
> government.
> 
> "This "other California' has been completely neglected by urban centers,
> who have legislators who are more powerful and have larger voting blocs as
> far as what their needs are for infrastructure," Penbera said.
> 
> The Valley also suffers from a "middle of nowhere" problem; business
> executives across the country have barely heard of it.
> 
> "If you say "Fresno,' there's no knowledge," Machado said. "It's an
> unknown
> this whole inland part of California."
> 
> Ironically, though, the Valley also is burdened by the very fact that it's
> in California. An out-of-state company figures the costs are too high, the
> regulations too burdensome, and won't give the Valley a second glance.
> 
> "They look clear beyond us because they think we're like San Jose,"
> Swigart
> said.
> 
> Some Valley leaders say they're also held back by agricultural interests
> that are less interested in a strong economy than in keeping a tight grip
> on the Valley's labor force.
> 
> Patlan, the Parlier mayor, said an ag lobbyist told him point-blank last
> year that the industry fears a drain on its labor.
> 
> "He told me, "If you're going to bring in industry that's going to compete
> for my labor, I'm going to oppose you,'" said Patlan, the son of
> farmworkers. "Agriculture is the power base in the Valley, we can't escape
> that reality."
> 
> The power manifests itself in county government, which has consistently
> turned back Parlier's requests to expand the city limits in order to
> recruit industry, he said.
> 
> Jeff Tweedie, a county official who oversees those requests, said his
> agency "must address the loss of prime farmland." But the real culprit is
> that Parlier doesn't have any development projects in hand that would
> justify such an expansion, he said.
> 
> In any event, farm groups say they don't oppose competition for their
> labor; it's the loss of land and water that worries them. They say they
> support new industry for the Valley -- as long as farming doesn't suffer.
> 
> "I'm not saying we don't diversify the economy," said Rick Milton,
> president of the Fresno County Farm Bureau. "But we're supposed to convert
> the Valley from the richest agricultural region in the world to something
> else? Ag is supposed to just back off and give way to what the urban
> population wants?
> 
> "Everybody in the San Joaquin Valley is an aggie at heart, whether they
> want to be or not."
> 
>