Rural Laws: October, 2002 - Number #1

The income-housing gap is widening in California, as housing prices climb faster than earnings. The National Low Income Housing Coalition released a study in September 2002 that concluded that U.S. workers must earn at least $14.66 an hour to pay 30 percent or less of their earnings to rent a standard two-bedroom apartment- rents in most California counties are $1,100 to $1,300 a month for two-bedroom apartments. A Mexican-born pastry chef profiled in the Los Angeles Times to illustrate the income-housing gap earned $9 an hour, or $1,440 a month, and paid $325 a month in rent. He also sent $575 a month to relatives in Mexico.

One of the major state-funded economic development efforts in the San Joaquin Valley is a new University of California campus planned for Merced, a city of 65,000. Construction on the planned 910-acre campus has been held up by suits over the fairy shrimp, which live in vernal pools - pockets of water that form atop impermeable rock after rain showers- and are protected under the Endangered Species Act. UC bought an adjacent 200-acre golf course, and plans to begin to build there, where vernal pools have already been filled in.

Santa Clarita in Los Angeles county and Bakersfield in Kern county are separated by 75 miles of the Tehachapi Mountains. Three Tejon ranch projects along I-5 may blur the gap between the Central Valley and Los Angeles, including the 23,000-home Centennial housing project, a golf course, luxury housing project, and a warehouse complex. The Tejon Ranch, a cattle-raising operation since 1843, has 270,000 acres, assembled from four old Spanish land grants, and is 40 miles from north to south and 21 miles across, or 425 square miles. Tejon was sold in 1912 to an investment group that included the owners of the Los Angeles Times. After 1996, Tejon got out of the cattle business and became a real estate developer.

An effort to require the sharing of sales taxes in the six-county Sacramento area to build more affordable housing, AB 680, failed in the Legislature in August 2002. The city and county of Sacramento supported AB 680, but most other local governments opposed it, suggesting that state legislation to require regional tax sharing would face an uphill battle. AB 680 was modified to require more affordable housing, which also prompted local government opposition.

The Davenport Institute for Public Policy at Pepperdine University released a study, "Rewarding Ambition: Latinos, Housing and the Future of California," that estimated that Latinos, who are 35 percent of California residents, buy 20 percent of California homes. About two-thirds of US-born Latinos are homeowners, compared to less than a third of Latino immigrants. (http://www.pepperdine.edu/PublicPolicy/institute/institute.htm)

Farm Worker Housing. Proposition 46 on the November 2002 ballot would provide $2.1 billion for affordable housing, including $200 million for farm-worker housing. The farm-worker housing funds would be allocated as follows: Farmworker Housing Grant Program, $155 million; Migratory Agricultural Workers, $25 million; and $20 million, housing developments with health services. If approved, the $200 million is expected to add 6,800 to 8,500 units for farm workers.

Napa employs a peak 6,000 farm workers in September and October, and many of the 2,000 to 2,500 harvest workers have a hard time finding temporary housing. The Napa Valley Housing Authority offers 174 beds in four camps managed by CHDC, and farmers and wineries offer an additional 85 beds in six to eight other camps. A new state law allows Napa grape growers to assess themselves to subsidize housing, and the assessment rate of $7.66 an acre for the first time in 2002 should generate about $300,000 to cover the expected deficit in the current four centers, which are owned by the NVHA, and operated by CHDC.

Grape growers who offer housing to farm workers may ask for an exemption from the assessment, and the Beringer Blass Wine Estates, which has about 2,200 acres of grapes, asked for an exemption because it owns the land for a 24-bed center in Carneros operated by the NVHA-CHDC. Beringer said it pays its workers an average $31,000 a year, so that they do not need subsidized housing (harvest workers brought to Beringer by custom harvesters who earn far less, often $8 to $10 an hour). Beringer then reversed its request for an exemption, and offered to pay the $16,000 assessment for its 2,100 acres, saying that it wanted to send the right signal to farm workers. Two other vineyards, Pope Valley's Eagle and Rose Vineyard and St. Helena's Frank Wood and Sons, received full or partial exemptions from the assessment. Eagle and Rose houses its 10 workers, and Frank Wood houses 15 of 25 workers.

In September-October 2002, many Napa Valley workers complained that there was too little work picking grapes; there were empty beds in the NVHA-CHDC centers. Some workers said they were getting fewer hours of work in 2002 than in 2001, and that, because of heavily thinned bunches, it is taking up to twice as long to pick a ton of grapes.

Budget. California got a $99 billion budget for 2002-03 very late--67 days into the new fiscal year. More deficits are promised in the years ahead. Tax revenues are down sharply- California collected $17 billion in capital gains taxes in 2000, but expects only $7 billion in 2002. The General Fund budget, which excludes federal payments, is $77 billion, and spends $31 billion or 40 percent on K-12 education, $22 billion for health and human services, $10 billion for higher education, and $5 billion for corrections/prisons.

California is a Democratic state, with Democrats holding the top elected positions and Democratic majorities in the Congressional delegation (31 to 21), the State Senate (26 to 14) and Assembly (50 to 30). Polls suggest widespread dissatisfaction with the major Republican and Democratic candidates for governor, and analysts said that controversial local issues, such as whether the San Fernando Valley should secede from Los Angeles, are more likely to draw voters to the polls than the governor's race.

The world's largest economies are the United States ($10.3 trillion), Japan, Germany and Britain. France and California each have GDPs of $1.3 trillion. California's GDP doubled since 1985, when it was $525 billion.

Education. The Public Policy Institute of California released a report on the 465,000 K-12 students in the southern San Joaquin Valley-- Fresno, Tulare, Madera, Kings and Kern counties. The share of children eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, an indicator of poverty, climbed from 47 percent in 1990 to 61 percent in 2000.

Some 27 percent of California adults had a BA or more, according to the 2000 Census. In the farm-worker city of Westley, 56 percent of adults had less than a ninth-grade education and none of the people who filled out census long forms had college degrees. More than half the adults in Grayson, French Camp, Keyes, Livingston, Westley and Winton did not complete high school. A third of the state's children enrolled in the Migrant Education Program are in the southern San Joaquin Valley.

The US Environmental Protection Agency announced in July 2002 that all sources emitting 25 tons of pollution annually must get a permit. California has exempted farms from air pollution rules since the mid-1970s; the EPA says that the exemption of farms from pollution regulations must end. Most farms would not be affected, but large farms with old diesel engines on water pumps may be affected.

Steinbeck/Black Okies. During the 1930s and 1940s, some 1.3 million small farmers, most from Arkansas and Oklahoma, migrated to California, and at least 10 percent became the farm workers portrayed by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. The book began as a series of newspaper articles for the San Francisco Daily News in 1936. Steinbeck visited the camps of farm workers in the Central Valley, and wrote of families who were once proud small farmers in the Midwest, and had been reduced "to a kind of subhumanity" by California's farm labor market.

Steinbeck wrote in the news articles that growers "have said in so many words that they require a peon class to succeed."

Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902 in Salinas, California, and there were many celebrations that included readings from the 1939 novel (www.steinbeck100.org). Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962 for his ability to portray "the gathered and the scattered."

There were also 30,000 and 40,000 Black Okies, most of whom arrived after World War II, and about 7,000 settled in the Tulare Lake Basin, and today the 1,500 survivors of this migration live in places such as Teviston, "a glorified squatters' village" on the outskirts of Pixley. In the late 1940s, Black sharecroppers could escape their debts in the Midwest by going to California to pick cotton for $2.50 for 100 pounds, and many made the 1,500-mile trip on Route 66.

Most Black Okies never became the small farmers they expected to become in California. Instead, many live broken families in Tulare county, a county in which a third of residents have incomes below the poverty line. About 70 percent of the Black children in the San Joaquin Valley are born out of wedlock, and 45 percent of the 6,000 Blacks in Tulare county receive welfare or food stamps.