Big Sur Highway

One of the most beautiful in the world but its troubles accumulate, as reported in this story from the Washington Pot.

An excerpt.

“BIG SUR, Calif. — Workers dangle from a crane, drilling into the vertical face of rock that holds up one of the most famous and picturesque stretches of road in the world. They’re performing a delicate surgery on fragile geology in hopes that a single lane of traffic can safely flow to Big Sur before summer arrives.

“On this day, it had been nearly a month since a rockslide severed Highway 1, California’s beloved road-trip destination.

“Across this stretch of the Central Coast, landslides have repeatedly buried the highway’s undulating curves or sent pavement tumbling into the Pacific Ocean. They bring a steady drumbeat of road blockages, tourism disruptions and stranded communities. Now, some fear the landslides are getting worse, due to climate change and engineering missteps throughout the roadway’s 86-year life span.

“It was always a risky proposition to maintain a highway at the very edge of a continent. But now Big Sur is facing wetter storms that infiltrate and weaken cracked and porous rock. Wildfires leave behind extra debris for those floodwaters to carry downhill. Pounding waves from stronger storms and rising seas eat away at cliffs from beneath.

“Everything is working against Highway 1,” said Gary Griggs, an oceanography professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

“The latest slip-out, known as the Rocky Creek slide, exemplifies the complexity of the problem. It stranded 1,500 people at the end of March as workers were making slow progress addressing three other slides. California’s transportation agency — known asCalTrans — estimates it will take more than $100 million to fix them all — if new slides don’t come first.

“California is a national leader in confronting climate change, but making Highway 1 sustainable may be a challenge it cannot surmount. Despite spending a billion dollars a year to fix damage that climate-related stressors inflict on its roadways — plus $100 million in projects to make infrastructure more resilient to climate change — the state is struggling to fortify one of its most prized landmarks.

“A series of Highway 1 landslides

“In recent years, crumbling earth has closed sections up and down a 100-mile stretch of California’s Highway 1 around Big Sur.

“Some have suggested rerouting Highway 1 inland, but they don’t understand its terrain, or its identity, said state Sen. John Laird (D), a former California natural resources secretary who represents part of the Central Coast in the state legislature. Barriers and boulders armor sections of the road and the cliffs against erosion, but extending those interventions along some 100 miles of highway isn’t feasible, others say.

“That leaves few options: Get better at predicting and fixing the landslides, and preventing them when possible. Or else imagine the unthinkable: Giving up on maintaining a continuous 656-mile stretch of blacktop from Orange County to Mendocino County, and letting parts of Highway 1 become dead ends.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/05/07/california-highway1-climate-change-landslide/

Portland’s Homelessness

It’s really bad, as this story from the Daily Mail reports, and be sure to check the graphic on the location of homeless encampments after the jump, chilling.

An excerpt.

“Americans from liberal west coast states are fleeing in greater numbers to a neighboring red state to escape political riots, homelessness and crime. 

“Idaho appears to be where disaffected residents of California, Oregon and Washington are now flocking to, with the state’s population surging by 12 per cent in just five years.  

“Husband and wife Nick Kostenborder and Ashley Manning are among those who brought their then-9-month-old son to Sandpoint to escape Portland. 

“The couple’s baby, who they named Taylor, was on the way in summer 2020, right when the Portland riots following George Floyd’s death were in full swing.

“Kostenborder pointed to the homeless problem in his old city as something that swayed his decision to up and leave.

‘You’re worried about someone else besides yourself. So you start to notice threats more. Like, it’s no longer charming to have the homeless guy asleep in front of the grocery store. Now it’s like, all right, this actually might be dangerous,’ Kostenborder said.

“In fact, the homeless problem has gotten so out of hand in Portland, that its own city government has a tracking portal detailing the number of encampments in the city. 

‘Currently there are hundreds of unsanctioned camps spread out across virtually every neighborhood of our city, over a massive 146 square mile area,’ according to the Portland city government.

“West coast problems could be part of the reason Idaho’s population soared more than 12 percent from 2018 to 2023.

“Manning, the mother of now three-year-old Taylor, said their little cul-de-sac is much safer than their old neighborhood in Portland, adding that she couldn’t imagine her son playing outside there like he does in Idaho.

‘He just can take off on his bike and it’s so safe,’ she said. ‘Everybody just watches out for him.’

“Kostenborder said the same year his family moved to Sandpoint, families from Seattle and San Diego moved next door.

‘It’s this kind of weird little expat group that we all found ourselves here,’ Kostenborder said. 

“For Bryan Zielinski and his wife, who moved to Idaho from the Seattle area, it was a combination of things that got them to flee.

“Zielinski was the general manager at one of the largest gun shops in Washington, and as a conservative who has an affinity for firearms, the state’s growing hostility to his values concerned him greatly. 

‘Everything is political,’ Zielinski said. ‘Whether it’s the car you drive, where you work. You’re wearing a mask, you’re not wearing a mask.

Idaho is the new ‘red state’ haven where residents of some of America’s most Liberal cities are now fleeing to escape crime and chaos | Daily Mail Online

Sky Watch

Lot going on up there as this story from the Washington Post reports.

An excerpt.

“May is the perfect month to celebrate astronomy. The nights are mild, the springtime constellations are at their best, and a meteor shower greets early risers.

“As the month opens, Earth encounters bits of cosmic fluff left in the wake of the famous Halley’s comet, the source of the Eta Aquariids meteor shower. The shower’s May 5 peak is a broad one — and extends a week before and after.

“The Eta Aquariids are one of the year’s most consistent showers, and an observer at a dark sky site can expect to see up to 30 meteors per hour before morning twilight begins. The waning crescent moon should have little effect on visibility; just find a dark site with a good view to the east.

“The radiant — where the shower appears to originate — is near the faint star Eta Aquarii, which rises at around 3 a.m. in the eastern sky. This year, Saturn is nearby, so look for the bright planet to get the best of the display.

“Spring constellations in full bloom

“This is the month when we bid farewell to the last of winter’s constellations, which now set during evening twilight. Early risers can get a preview of summer’s bright stars in the hours before sunrise. In between, we have fewer bright stars, but we are greeted by some familiar patterns.

“Look to the north after evening twilight ends for the seven stars that make up one of the most familiar group of stars to Northern Hemisphere residents. Popularly known as the Big Dipper, it is also known as the Plough in Great Britain and Charles’ Wain in some parts of continental Europe. It serves as a great “signpost” to help you locate other springtime sights.

“Trace an imaginary line northward from the two stars at the end of the Dipper’s “bowl”; this will lead you to Polaris, the North Star, which, for the moment, marks the north celestial pole. In the Northern Hemisphere, this star never appears to move from night to night, and you can get a pretty good reading of your latitude by measuring the angle between Polaris and the horizon.

“Use the “pointer” stars in the Dipper to follow an imaginary line to the south that will lead you to the star Regulus, which is thebrightest star in the constellation Leo, the Lion. Just above Regulus is a semicircle of stars that outline the Lion’s mane. Point a telescope at the brightest star in this circle and you will be rewarded with a view of a classic double star. Algieba is a close pair of yellow-tinted stars whose colors are quite striking.

“Returning to the Dipper again, we can trace an arc from the “handle” to find the brightest star in the northern sky, Arcturus. Shining with a cheery rose hue, Arcturus is the closest red giant star to the solar system, some 37 light-years away. Continue following the arc and you will see Spica, the blue-white star that anchors the sprawling constellation Virgo.

“The area of the sky between Regulus, Arcturus and Spica seems relatively devoid of stars because we are looking toward the pole of the Milky Way galaxy. There are simply fewer stars to see when gazing in this direction.

“However, this gives us a relatively unobstructed view over vast stretches of intergalactic space, and if you point a telescope randomly toward this seeming void, the odds are quite high that you will stumble on a fuzzy blob of light. In fact, this is the location of the Coma-Virgo galaxy cluster, and several hundred galaxies can be seen from a dark sky. While they may appear as mere smudges of faint light, most of these galaxies are located around 50 million light-years away.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/05/01/eta-aquariid-meteor-shower-may-sky

The California Grizzly

Another look from the Washington Post.

An excerpt.

“In April 1924, a road crew was working in Sequoia National Park, near the spectacular granite dome of Moro Rock, when a large shape emerged from the woods. These workers had previously been stationed with the Park Service at Yellowstone, and they were familiar with the animal that walked by their camp. In their report, they noted its cinnamon-colored fur and the prominent hump on its back, both telltale signs of a grizzly bear.

“A century later, that report remains, in most experts’ eyes, the last credible sighting of a grizzly in California. An animal that had once numbered as many as 10,000 in the state, living in almost all its varied ecosystems and gracing its state flag, had been hunted to local extinction.

“The grizzly, a subspecies of brown bear, has long held a place in mainstream American myth as a dangerous, even bloodthirsty creature. Its scientific name, Ursus arctos horribilis, means “the horrible bear.” But that image is being challenged by a new set of studies that combine modern biochemical analysis, historical research and Indigenous knowledge to bring the story of the California grizzly from fiction to fact.

“In January, a team of experts led by Middlebury College paleontologist Alexis Mychajliw published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B about the diet of the California grizzly bear and how that influenced its extinction. The results challenge virtually every aspect of the bear’s established story.

“Pretty much everything that I thought I knew about these animals turned out to be wrong,” said Peter Alagona, an ecologist and historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara and co-author of the study.

“The myth of ‘the horrible bear’

“Much of the grizzly bear’s long-standing narrative comes from stories, artwork and early photographs depicting California grizzlies as huge in size and aggressive in nature. Many of these reports, which found wide readership in newspapers elsewhere in the West and in the cities back East, were written by what Alagona calls the Californian influencers of their time.

“They were trying to get rich and famous by marketing themselves as these icons of the fading frontier,” Alagona said. “A lot of the historical sources that we have about grizzlies are actually not about grizzlies. They’re about this weird Victorian 19th-century celebrity culture.”

“The team of ecologists, historians and archivists compared the image of California grizzlies from these frontier reports to harder data in the form of bear bones from museum collections all over the state.

“The frontier myth had painted the California bears as larger than grizzlies elsewhere in the country, but the bone analysis revealed that they were the same size and weight, about 6 feet long and 440 pounds for the average adult.

“In an even larger blow to the popular story of the vicious grizzly, the bones showed that before 1542, when the first Europeans arrived, the bears were only getting about 10 percent of their diet from preying on land animals. They were primarily herbivores, surviving on a varied diet of acorns, roots, berries, fish and occasionally larger prey such as deer.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/04/25/california-grizzly-bear-extinct-reintroduce

Troubled Transit

Story from New Geography.

An excerpt.

“Over the six decades that transit subsidies have been virtually universal, governments and media have urged people to give up driving and switch to transit. Yet transit’s share of total urban travel was near modern lows just before the pandemic. It is recovering more slowly than other modes of travel, as transit analyst Randal O’Toole has shown in New Geography.

“Indeed, city officials often portray transit as a readily available alternative to the car. But transit can quickly access only a small fraction of destinations compared to cars for most people. This article provides data for the largest metropolitan areas in the 13 Western states.

“This is not an argument for cars, but simply a recognition that cars better serve what many (including this author) consider to be the ultimate domestic public policy objectives – improving affluence and reducing poverty (see: Toward More Prosperous Cities).

“Improving Affluence

“Economists such as Remy Prud’homme and Chang-Won Lee at the University of Paris, as well as David Hartgen and Gregory Fields at the University of North Carolina – Charlotte, have shown a strong association between better economic performance in metropolitan areas where more jobs can be reached in a specified time (such as 30 minutes) by the average resident.

“Former senior advisor to the U.S. Department of Transportation Steven Polzin noted the relationship between economic progress and faster travel times in the United States and the economic losses from spending more time than necessary commuting.

“An average 30-minute travel time, also called the “Marchetti Constant,” has endured through history. In the United States, about 60 percent of workers commuted less than 30 minutes (excluding those working at home), according to the American Community Survey, 2019.

“Reducing Poverty

“Moreover, because cars make so many more jobs accessible, they improve household income prospects. David King and associates at Arizona State University have found that households without cars are 70-percent more likely to be in poverty. Margy Waller of the Progressive Policy Institute found that, “In most cases, the shortest distance between a poor person and a job is along a line driven in a car.” One can only wonder how much unemployment would be reduced if auto-competitive mobility were available to all residents.”

Planners Push Transit, But It’s a Hard Sell in Western Cities | Newgeography.com

Lived Experience

Relevant article from Aeon for today’s identity struggles.

An excerpt.

“Everywhere you turn, there is talk of lived experience. But there is little consensus about what the phrase ‘lived experience’ means, where it came from, and whether it has any value. Although long used by academics, it has become ubiquitous, leaping out of the ivory tower and showing up in activism, government, consulting, as well as popular culture. The Lived Experience Leaders Movement explains that those who have lived experiences have ‘[d]irect, first-hand experience, past or present, of a social issue(s) and/or injustice(s)’. A recent brief from the US Department of Health and Human Services suggests that those who have lived experience have ‘valuable and unique expertise’ that should be consulted in policy work, since engaging those with ‘knowledge based on [their] perspective, personal identities, and history’ can ‘help break down power dynamics’ and advance equity. A search of Twitter reveals a constant stream of use, from assertions like ‘Your research doesn’t override my lived experience,’ to ‘I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to question someone’s lived experience.’

“A recurring theme is a connection between lived experience and identity. A recent nominee for the US Secretary of Labor, Julie Su, is lauded as someone who will ‘bring her lived experience as a daughter of immigrants, a woman of color, and an Asian American to the role’. The Human Rights Campaign asserts that ‘[l]aws and legislation must reflect the lived experiences of LGBTQ people’. An editorial in Nature Mental Health notes that incorporation of ‘people with lived experience’ has ‘taken on the status of a movement’ in the field.

“Carried a step further, the notion of lived experience is bound up with what is often called identity politics, as when one claims to be speaking from the standpoint of an identity group – ‘in my lived experience as a…’ or, simply, ‘speaking as a…’ Here, lived experience is often invoked to establish authority and prompt deference from others since, purportedly, only members of a shared identity know what it’s like to have certain kinds of experience or to be a member of that group. Outsiders sense that they shouldn’t criticise what is said because, grounded in lived experience, ‘people’s spoken truths are, in and of themselves, truths.’ Criticism of lived experience might be taken to invalidate or dehumanise others or make them feel unsafe.

“So, what is lived experience? Where did it come from? And what does it have to do with identity politics?

“Lived experience’ is a translation of one of the two German words for experience: Erlebnis. The other German word for experience, Erfahrung, is the older of the two. It has as its root fahren, ‘to journey’. When one calls someone ‘experienced’, it is this kind of experience that is being appealed to. Erfahrung is experience that is cumulative – as one who has long journeyed a path knows the road – and is associated with practice, skill and know-how. Erfahrung can sometimes be translated as ‘learning’, and suggests experience that might be gathered in the form of practical wisdom and passed on as tradition.

“Erlebnis, by contrast, has Leben or ‘life’ as its root. Rather than experience that accumulates over time or is held in the form of tradition, Erlebnis connotes experience that is living and immediate. It is the province of the pre-reflective and innocent, as opposed to the refined and distilled. Erlebnis implies experience that is new, fresh and sometimes disruptive – what doesn’t easily fit into the public, cultural patterns associated with Erfahrung.

“In the late 19th and early 20thcenturies, German philosophers developed and exploited the contrast between these two kinds of experience. This led philosophers and translators in other languages – most notably, for our purposes, English and French – to add the qualifiers ‘lived’ or ‘vécue’ to signify when they were invoking Erlebnis as opposed to Erfahrung. So, while the multifaceted English word ‘experience’ can be used to translate both Erlebnis and Erfahrung, when someone wants to refer to the distinctive form of experience picked out by Erlebnis, they often use ‘lived experience’ to do so.

“According to Richard E Palmer in his book Hermeneutics (1969), Erlebnis first appeared in the plural form Erlebnisse in the work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, while Hans-Georg Gadamer suggests in Truth and Method (1960) that the first singular use can be found in one of G W F Hegel’s letters. But the word really didn’t come into common usage until the 1870s. It was then that the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey brought Erlebnis into the mainstream, when he used it in his 1870 biography of Friedrich Schleiermacher and in an 1877 essay on Goethe, a version of which was later included in his highly regarded work Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (‘Poetry and Lived Experience’; 1906).

“While himself a staunch empiricist, Dilthey was part of a Romantic movement reacting to earlier empiricists, positivists and Kantians, whom he believed relied on an unduly narrow conception of experience. Since these philosophers were primarily concerned to provide an epistemological foundation for the budding natural sciences, they focused on the cognitive aspects of experience – that is, how experience can be used as the basis for scientific knowledge of the kind produced by natural philosophers such as Isaac Newton.

“At the risk of oversimplification, these thinkers focused primarily on sensation – the ‘objective’ world encountered by the senses and, in particular, those aspects of sensory experience that could, through abstraction, be quantified, measured and shared. Other features of experience, such as meaning, significance, value, purpose, feeling and the like, were ignored and relegated to the ‘subjective’ realm of ‘inner experience’. This epistemology created a split between subject and object, mind and world, fact and value. The external or objective world became the realm of ‘facts’, while meaning, significance, value, purpose and feeling were increasingly thought of as subjective.

“While a Romantic, Dilthey was also insistent upon being more empirical than earlier empiricists. He saw his task as getting back behind the subject/object, mind/world, fact/value split to embodied, full-blooded, living experience. In a line from his work Introduction to the Human Sciences (1883), Dilthey writes: ‘No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought.’ Dilthey believed we have to return to conscious lived experience, not because the content of lived experience is indubitable but because we have no alternative. The only way we can know anything is through conscious experience.

“Dilthey maintained that the subject/object split led us to the false belief that the world of the natural sciences was the true or fundamental reality. By contrast, Dilthey argued, since our original access to the world is through conscious experience, so-called objective reality is only the husk that remains by exsanguinating lived experience. This means that the world of the natural sciences is not fundamental, but necessarily derivative. Dilthey designed the concept of Erlebnis (lived experience) to reflect the fact that, in our original experience, we know the world as a meaningful, coherent whole – a composite of inner and outer, subjective and objective, facts and values. One can analyse the original whole of lived experience into subjective and objective elements, but this analysis is only possible because subject and object are originally bound up together in the fundamental reality of lived experience.

“Contemporary usage of lived experience still bears the mark of Dilthey’s original formulations (a point I’ve developed in more detail in other writings). For Dilthey, lived experience should first be taken to signify the view from the inside, the ‘what it’s like’ to be a human being. There is a stark difference between learning about the physics of colour and being awestruck by the prismatic beauty of a sunset; one thing to know about the biochemistry involved in love and another to experience the extraordinary, ineffable thrill of actually falling in love.”

On lived experience, from the Romantics to identity politics | Aeon Essays

Homeless & Trains

Can’t make this stuff up, story from the Sacramento Bee.

An excerpt.

“Some Sacramento residents are concerned about a homeless encampment that is dangerously close to railroad tracks. The safety hazard has forced Union Pacific freight trains to come to a complete stop when traveling through the area near W and 20^th streets.

“We’ve never had the trains been so impacted by encampments,” said Stephanie Duncan, who lives nearby in Land Park.

“And that happens every [freight] train that passes by every day, multiple times a day. It’s ridiculous,” Duncan said.

“About a block away, Leslie Bosserman is the site supervisor and preschool director at The Makers Place.

“Between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., we always have someone napping on site,” she said.

“However, her biggest worry is not about the noise.

“The thing that I’m more concerned about with this specific social issue is making sure people are safe and making sure team members can get to work on time,” Bosserman said.

“The city of Sacramento told KCRA 3 that it has received 15 reports to 311 so far this month regarding the encampments in the area. However, the city said that the camping is occurring on land owned by Union Pacific and the Sacramento Regional Transit District.

“The City is working with both UP and SacRT to dispatch the appropriate personnel to ensure safety and resolve the issue,” a spokesperson wrote in a statement to KCRA on Friday.

“Union Pacific would not do an interview about the topic and did not answer KCRA’s repeated questions about whether it planned to address concerns over the encampment.

“In a statement, a spokesperson said, “Homelessness is a challenging issue and a growing social problem that state and local governments across the U.S. are struggling to get their arms around. Despite efforts to keep our tracks clear and safe, illegal dumping and camping is happening on Union Pacific property, creating public safety risks.”

Homeless encampments halt trains in Sacramento (kcra.com)

Safety on Transit

Rare, as this article from the Anti-Planner reports.

An excerpt.

“Less than half of New York City residents feel safe riding the subway today, down from 82 percent before the pandemic. Subway crime is so bad that New York’s governor called out the national guard to patrol subway stations. Crime is up on San Francisco BART trains despite the agency putting more police on trains. A few days ago, a mentally ill person stabbed someone to death on a Portland light-rail train.

“Will putting more police in subway stations solve the crime problem? Probably not if BART’s experience is any guide.

“Some people say transit crime is dropping so it’s safe to ride transit. Others say it is getting worse. Who’s right? We can get some answers from the Federal Transit Administration’s Major Safety Events Database, which was recently updated with data through the end of 2023.

“The database lists more than 88,000 safety and security events since 2014. Safety events include things like collisions between transit vehicles and other vehicles. Security events include assaults and murders. The database counts suicides as security events, but I think they reflect safety problems and have adjusted the data to account for this. Suicides appear to be way down since the pandemic, possibly because transit agencies have stopped blaming accidental fatalities on suicides.

“The database does not include commuter rail as apparently that mode is monitored by the Federal Railroad Administration. Crime rates on commuter buses are much lower than other buses and it is likely that crime rates on commuter rail are similarly low.

“Some other security events are also not crimes. If someone accidentally leaves a backpack on bus or train, transit police may decide to evacuate the vehicle in case the backpack contains a bomb. The event gets written up even if the backpack turns out to be innocent. Rather than go through all 88,646 events recorded in the database, I’m going to assume that such innocent events are distributed equally among all agencies and modes. If true, then the crime rates reported below will be a little higher than the truth, but the relative rates between cities and mode will be about the same.

“In recent years, heavy rail has seen far more security problems than any other mode of transit. But heavy rail also carries far more riders than any other mode except conventional buses. To assess the risk people take when riding various transit systems, I’ve calculated the number of safety or security events per billion passenger-miles. Passenger-miles from 2014 through 2022 are in the National Transit Database historic time series, table TS2.1. For 2023, I estimated passenger-miles by multiplying the average trip length in 2022 (passenger-miles divided by trips) by the number of trips in 2023.

“I last reviewed transit security in 2022 using data through 2021. The most recent data show that transit crimes, per billion passenger-miles, have slightly dropped from 2021, but are still worse than from before the pandemic. However, crime rates were already growing before the pandemic began, meaning that crime rates today are much worse than in 2014.

“Not counting suicides, bus and rail riders suffered an average of 274 crimes and 0.3 murders per billion passenger-miles in 2014. This rose to 431 crimes and 1.6 murders per billion in 2019, then leapt to 1,046 crimes and 4.9 murders in 2021, declining to 781 crimes and 2.9 murders in 2023. The 2023 numbers make transit look safe compared with 2021, but transit riders were still almost three times more likely to be crime victims and ten times more likely to be killed in 2023 than in 2014.

“The highest crime rates are on light rail, streetcars, and trolley buses. Light rail and streetcars both collect fares using the honor system, and the broken windows hypothesis suggests that making it easy to evade fares invites more crime. Trolley buses are only found in a few cities and crime rates on this mode are skewed by high rates in San Francisco, which also collects fares using the honor system on its trolley buses. It is worth noting that many cities are addressing transit crime on heavy rail by installing better fare gates and St. Louis is planning to install such gates for its light-rail system”

Is It Safe to Ride Transit? – The Antiplanner

Money, Money, Money

Definitely not well spent on the homeless in California

Story from MSN.

An excerpt..

“SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California spent $24 billion to tackle homelessness over the past five years but didn’t consistently track whether the huge outlay of public money actually improved the situation, according to state audit released Tuesday.

“With makeshift tents lining the streets and disrupting businesses in cities and towns throughout California, homelessness has become one of the most frustrating and seemingly intractable issues in the country’s most populous state.

“An estimated 171,000 people are homeless in California, which amounts to roughly 30% of all of the homeless people in the U.S.

“Despite the roughly $24 billion spent on homeless and housing programs during the 2018-2023 fiscal years, the problem didn’t improve in many cities, according to state auditor’s report.

“Among other things, the report found that the California Interagency Council on Homelessness, which is responsible for coordinating agencies and allocating resources for homelessness programs, stopped tracking spending on programs and whether programs were working in 2021. It also failed to collect and evaluate outcome data for these programs due to the lack of a consistent method, the audit found.

“Some data regarding the number of program participants and bed inventory in the state system might not be accurate or reliable, the audit found.

“The council, which lawmakers created in 2017 to help deal with the state’s homelessness problem, has only reported on homelessness spending once, according to the audit. Without reliable and recent data on its spending, “the state will continue to lack complete and timely information about the ongoing costs and associated outcomes of its homelessness programs,” the report says.

“Democratic state Sen. Dave Cortese, who requested the audit last year after touring a large homeless encampment in San Jose, said the audit depicts “a data desert” when it comes to homelessness. The biggest issue is the lack of transparency at every level, he said.

“Despite (the auditor office’s) professionalism and best efforts, they are at this time unable to … draw conclusions about things like whether or not overhead is appropriate or too high,” Cortese said, though he stopped short of calling for a halt to future spending on the homelessness issue.

“Republican state Sen. Roger Niello said the lack of accountability is troubling.

“California is facing a concerning paradox: despite an exorbitant amount of dollars spent, the state’s homeless population is not slowing down,” Niello said in a statement. “These audit results are a wake-up call for a shift toward solutions that prioritize self-sufficiency and cost effectiveness.”

“California funds more than 30 programs to tackle homelessness. The audit assessed five initiatives and found that only two of them — one that converts hotel and motel rooms into housing and one that provides housing-related support — are “likely cost-effective.”

How effective are California’s homelessness programs? Audit finds state hasn’t kept track well (msn.com)

Sacramento, Rated Highly

Story, which our family certainly agrees with, from Sacramento Bee.

An excerpt.

“Sacramento is one of the 50 best spots to live in the United States, according to Money.com

“The personal finance website featured two California cities on its 2024 Best Places to Live list, including the capital city.

“This year’s Best Places to Live list celebrates cities and towns where a thriving economy meets affordability, diversity and an exceptional quality of life,” Money said. “Backed by rigorous research and data-driven analysis, these 50 places are the blueprint for the future.”

“The site highlighted a variety of communities including Eugene, Oregon; Bisbee, Arizona, and Camas in Washington states.

“Here’s how Sacramento stacked up.

“WHY IS SACRAMENTO ONE OF MONEY’S TOP PLACES TO LIVE?

“Sacramento landed on Money’s list thanks to its “vibrant cultural scene,” Money said, namechecking local attractions such as the Crocker Art Museum, B Street Theatre and the Farm-to-Fork Festival.

“The capital city has a population of 528,001 residents, the website said.

“Unemployment in Sacramento is at 4.70%, Money said, and the median price for a house stands at $465,000.

“What really distinguishes Sacramento from its coastal brethren, though, is its unwavering commitment to the people who call the city home,” the site said, citing efforts to build more affordable housing. “As Sac’s popularity (and population) has grown, locals have fought relentlessly to prevent displacement.”

Read more at: https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article287483930.html#storylink=cpy