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