POOR Magazine has been focusing on Vallejo, CA, across San Francisco Bay from San Francisco. Vallejo benefitted, at first, from San Francisco's institutional, governmental incompetence and disinterest in honestly trying to keep its Black population from fleeing to friendlier places.
Many East Bay communities have grown as Black San Francisco has shrunk. The Bayview newspaper did a story on this sad detail, among many others we and they have pointed to, of the realities of life in San Francisco for poor people of any skin color.
the last two U.S. Census reports tell the tale, the Big Three People-of-Color populations (Asian, Black, Latin) outnumbers White Vallejo, with other brown-skinned people from the world Diaspora to Amerikkka making up the rest. Why is this important?
Until a few years ago, Vallejo was considered an up-and-coming place to live, a great place to be for non-white folks. Until recently, Vallejo was just like any other place in the Bay Area with more brown skin than white holding the place together--it was run by Whites.
The current Mayor is Black, but you couldn't tell by what has happened to the city and the way the power structure responded to challenges facing the body politic, primarily a seriously messed-up budget leading the city to file for bankruptcy. Vallejo has been trying to find new ways to make a buck, but they began with an attempt to destroy the Glen Cove/Sogorea TE Ohlone First Peoples' 4,500-years-old shellmound, to, as the song goes, "put in a parking lot".
Sound familiar (without the bankruptcy proceedings...so far...) to anyone paying attention to whazzup in San Francisco?
San Francisco's Po'Lice Department is infamous for getting overtime pay from the budget of the MUNI public transit system, which has been hurting in a variety of self and governmental-incompetence-and-indifference-inflicted ways for years. EIGHTY PERCENT of Vallejo's budget, we are told, has gone to pay for Fire-fighting and Po'Lice services.
That's an amazing...appalling percentage of a budget for a city of approximately 100,000! San Francisco has a mostly brown-skinned population, a Budget Brawl In City Hall that never ends (and the bruises are always found on brown skin).
When a baseball team doesn't try to stop one of another team's players from stealing a base it's called "Defensive Indifference". What is it called when the white power structure of a mostly brown town doesn't even notice their budget is more full of plot holes than a Hollywood blockbuster disaster movie (until all they seem able to do is wring their hands, cry wolf, and make the un-skin-privileged pay for their incomptence and/or indifference)?
Business as usual.
I can't cry over the Vallejo Po'Lice Department finding itself staring into the budget headlights, getting run over like everyone else. The San Francisco administrations of Gavin Newsom and the possibly interim Mayor Ed Lee (and others) want city workers to pay pay pay for the privilege of having been city workers for however many years or decades they worked.
Whatever happened to the I-Scratch-Your-Back-You-Scratch-Mine underpinnings of civilization (the reason we live in cities instead of being hunter-gatherer tribes wondering if somebody wants to count coup and steal our horses, or worse)? What has happened to the hard-fought-for and hard-won rights of union workers, among other things many, or at least some of us look forward to as old age and Eldership Happens and new generations take over the burdens we drop?
The mutual Bonobo-like "back-scratchin' " only seems to be for the people with connections and money now.
Vallejo's attempt to destroy the Ohlone shellmound has, for now, been defeated. They need to find better ways to make a buck. San Francisco does too. The current issue of the San Francisco Bay Guardian editorially celebrates a hard-won victory over the Indifferent Ones who so love to carve cash cows out of the city budget without ever trying to replace them.
Maybe Charlie Sheen can help us win some more battles. Or maybe not. We do need more wins, though. How many more San Francisco/Vallejo Budget Brawls In City Hall and China Syndrome-like Governmental Indifference budget-buster bombs are out there, waiting to go off?