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posted by martyb on Tuesday April 18 2017, @08:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the need-more-land-where-the-water-is dept.

California's Central Valley is best known for supplying nearly 25% of the country's food, including 40% of the fruit and nuts consumed each year. Yet today, backcountry places such as Patterson, population 22,000, are experiencing an increase in homelessness that can be traced, in part, to an unlikely sounding source: Silicon Valley.

The million-dollar home prices about 85 miles west, in San Francisco and San Jose, have pushed aspiring homeowners to look inland. Patterson's population has doubled since the 2000 census. Average monthly rents have climbed from about $900 in 2014 to nearly $1,600 in recent months, according to the apartment database Rent Jungle, compounding the hardships of the foreclosure crisis, the shuttering of several local agricultural businesses and surging substance abuse rates.

"The rents in Patterson are crazy," said Romelia Wiley, program manager of the local not-for-profit organization Community Housing & Shelter Services. "Why? I-5."

The freeway offers commuters access to high-paying job centers near the coast, and the number of people commuting to the Bay Area from the portion of the Central Valley that includes Patterson more than doubled between 1990 and 2013, to about 65,000 people, or at least 15% of the local workforce, according to an analysis by the University of the Pacific.

Why don't they build up instead of out?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @01:10PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @01:10PM (#495813)

    "California's Central Valley is best known for supplying nearly 25% of the country's food"? I find that difficult to believe considering the millions of acres of farmland in the non-arid/ non-mountainous regions in the rest of the country.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Kromagv0 on Tuesday April 18 2017, @01:29PM

    by Kromagv0 (1825) on Tuesday April 18 2017, @01:29PM (#495831) Homepage

    Well corn, wheat, soy beans, are exported in mass from this country so maybe that is how they get that number.

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    T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
  • (Score: 4, Informative) by butthurt on Tuesday April 18 2017, @01:34PM

    by butthurt (6141) on Tuesday April 18 2017, @01:34PM (#495836) Journal

    That may be measured by price rather than energy content. Fruits, nuts, vegetables and dairy products are produced there.

    Even so, it may be exaggerated. Circa 2007-2008, California "accounted for 17.6 percent of national receipts for crops" (page 1, numbered 17) and seven of the state's eight highest producing counties (the exception: Monterey County) were at least partly in the valley (page 13, numbered 29).

    source:
    https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/statistics/files/CDFA_Sec2.pdf [ca.gov]

  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday April 18 2017, @06:26PM (1 child)

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Tuesday April 18 2017, @06:26PM (#495948) Journal

    There are a lot of ways they could be arriving at that figure, but even if we're talking gross tonnage it's not outside the realm of possibility. California is an immense state. The Central Valley is a well-oiled machine of agro-business. Truck farms, orchards, animal husbandry. They have a long growing season, too. Compare that to, say, North Dakota, where they pretty much get wheat and hay that they have to grow with strip farming to let half the acreage lie fallow and recover from nutrient depletion, and where the growing season is short. Not all agricultural areas are equal.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @05:13AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @05:13AM (#496152)

      Way to prop up a straw man and knock it down. North Dakota is not the millions of acres of fertile farmland in that includes most of the state's to the east of the Mississippi and the states immediately west of the Mississippi and those adjacent states. Californians have an overly developed sense of importance when it comes to their state.