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<h1 class="post-title">Where No Google Buses Go</h1>
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<div id="attachment_655" style="width: 392px;"
class="wp-caption alignright"><a sl-processed="1"
href="http://darwinbondgraham.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/800px-richmond_chevron_refinery_fire_smoke_cloud_over_berkley_and_san_francisco-0441_04.jpg">Dec
21, 2013</a><br>
<b><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://darwinbondgraham.wordpress.com/2013/12/21/where-no-google-buses-go/">http://darwinbondgraham.wordpress.com/2013/12/21/where-no-google-buses-go/</a></small></small></small></b><br>
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<p>For every word written about the gentrification and displacement
that is tearing San Francisco apart, there should be ten words written
about the the poverty, environmental racism, and financial predation
battering the smaller industrial cities of Contra Costa and Alameda
counties. In suburban hinterlands north and east of Silicon Valley and
San Francisco are the bankrupted municipalities of the Sacramento Delta
and Carquinez Straight. We’re talking Stockton and Vallejo. Even closer
are other cities devastated by the economic crisis, places like San
Pablo, or Richmond from where you can see the rising skyline of San
Francisco across the Bay, growing with towers of luxury apartments as
it is.</p>
<p>Black and Latino residents have already been pushed to the fringes
of San Francisco, both geographically and in the employment ranks of
the new tech-centric economy. Fleets of Silicon Valley company buses
that clog San Francisco’s streets picking up and dropping off the
gentrifiers —mostly affluent white and Asian newcomers to the Bay Area—
give the ruthless socioeconomic order a sense of literal arrival each
morning and night.</p>
<p>It’s impossible to ignore, and the region’s media, fixated as they
have always been upon San Francisco’s wealth and velocity, give the
city’s problems frequent coverage. But San Francisco’s problems are
really just a small part of the region’s destruction and reconstruction
around new and even more severe class and race inequalities. In San
Francisco the have-it-alls are now as busy purging the middle class as
they are the remaining working class communities of color. Beyond San
Francisco, in its sunset shadow, are entire cities of the dispossessed,
largely forgotten in the boiling public debate around housing, jobs,
and community.</p>
<p>There is no Google bus that arrives in San Pablo, a small city
across the Bay from San Francisco that for decades has been known as
the Bay Area’s poorest municipality. What did arrive at least twice in
the last two years were orders for the San Pablo’s 30,000 residents to
shelter in place from toxic chemical clouds. San Pablo is less than two
miles downwind from Chevron’s giant Richmond oil refinery, and another
couple miles southwest of the ConocoPhillips refinery in Rodeo. If
Twitter and Salesforce and cleantech and biotech symbolize the “green”
and “postindustrial” corporate community of San Francisco today, it’s
noxious oil and chemical giants like Shell and Valero that dominate the
landscape of Contra Costa.</p>
<p>The landscape is relatively level where San Pablo’s 30,000 residents
are concentrated. Most of San Pablo’s homes, schools, and businesses
are built on the Bay’s flatlands bracketed between the Interstate-80
Highway to the east and the BNSF’s congested train tracks on the west
side. BNSF is the rail road of the world’s fourth wealthiest man,
Warren Buffet. Through San Pablo it pulls thousands and thousands of
tanker cars filled with hazardous crude petroleum and refined
petrochemical products. Warren’ Buffet’s net worth of $53.5 billion is
45 times greater than the total assessed value of all the land and
buildings in the city of San Pablo. In 2013 Warren Buffett’s wealth
grew by $37 million a day. In contrast, the average worker living in
San Pablo earned $106 a day.</p>
<p>Up against the BNSF railway tracks are neighborhoods comprised of
trailer parks and aging houses. The little wood-frame homes, many built
in the 1960s and 1970s, are inhabited mostly by Latino immigrants and
African Americans. San Pablo is 88 percent non-white. Children attend
an elementary school just 200 feet from where oil trains race by around
the clock.</p>
<p>Back in 2007, before the economic crash, the median household income
in San Pablo was $46,000. This was already a community enduring serious
poverty and higher than average rates of unemployment—6 percent even at
the height of the mid-2000s boom. Of course the Financial Crisis hit
San Pablo hard, and the Great Recession, which officially lasted from
December 2007 to June 2009 caused unemployment, poverty, and
foreclosures to spike in the community. Incomes dropped drastically.</p>
<p>With an unemployment rate now at 12 percent, double its pre-Great
Recession rate, and with median household incomes having actually
declined by $7,000, to $39,000 in 2012, San Pablo’s residents have only
fallen further behind in a region where there are corporations and
individuals worth billions.</p>
<p>There has been no recovery so to speak of. Far removed as it is from
the playground of San Francisco, and in the path of a polluting
industrial facility, waves of techies aren’t clamoring to move into San
Pablo, but the oil trains still stream through. For decades the
community has been afflicted by property crime and violence bred from
poverty and alienation. The city’s politicians now allocate 45 percent
of their total budget toward police repression. Ironically about 19
percent of San Pablo’s city revenue is now gotten from a casino that
was allowed to open in 2002—sin funds the city, even while it arguably
fuels social problems like gambling addictions, drunk driving, and
assault.</p>
<p>There are no tech buses to block in San Pablo. It and other cities
east of San Francisco have been left behind in the tech boom. The new
economy’s billion dollar corporations and thousands of startups are
concentrating themselves in downtown San Francisco all down the San
Mateo Peninsula into northwest San Jose. Places like Palo Alto and
Mountain View have become wealthier, whiter, and more connected to San
Francisco through public and private transportation infrastructure
investments, and through financial networks that link San Hill Road to
the Embarcadero.</p>
<p>Across the Bay in San Pablo and further east there are no new tech
campuses planned. Apple is building a multi-billion dollar campus in
Cupertino. (No one actually knows how much it will cost.) In Contra
Costa County the only multi-billion dollar investments planned are
PG&E gas-fired power plants like the one to be built in the distant
town of Oakley.</p>
<p>There are no techies pushing up rental prices in Contra Costa’s
working class cities. There is only the sinking feeling of further
declining real incomes, a generation of lost wealth, deepening racial
segregation, and cities that are tottering on weakened fiscal
foundations.</p>
<p>San Pablo’s neighborhoods were crushed by the foreclosure crisis.
When the crash came it took what wealth many had saved up; the median
home value in Contra Costa County dropped by 47 percent in 2008. It
dropped another 24 percent in 2009. Prices haven’t recovered in many
corners of the county since, especially those areas populated by
Latinos and Blacks. Over the past year there were 168 notices of
default issued on mortgages in San Pablo out of a total 4,030 loans —
four percent, according to Foreclosure Radar. HUD’s estimate of
foreclosures at the outset of the Great Recession, from 2007 through
the first half of 2008, showed that one in ten mortgages was foreclosed
in San Pablo. At the same time San Francisco’s rate of foreclosure was
a mere 2 percent.</p>
<p>Remarking on how much more devastated Contra Costa County cities
like San Pablo were by the Great Recession, Chris Schildt and Jake
Wegmann wrote in June 2012 that, <a sl-processed="1"
href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CCoQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.spur.org%2Fpublications%2Farticle%2F2012-06-03%2Fdiversity-didn-t-cause-foreclosure-crisis&ei=DhW1UtzwAc77oATW1IHwAQ&usg=AFQjCNEQjQCXzaE0XN7_HgTwnRq8lsDIHg&sig2=jpQb_njqlUA3YMy03-1kKw&bvm=bv.58187178,d.cGU">“we
now face a new map of regional inequality, one for which the entire
region bears some responsibility, not simply the residents and leaders
of southern Solano and eastern Contra Costa counties.”</a></p>
<p>How right that is. All the big banks that were responsible for the
subprime boom —and the frenzy of packaging these predatory loans into
complex derivative investment products that ultimately crashed the
economy— have offices in San Francisco. <a sl-processed="1"
href="http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2012/July/12-dag-869.html">Many of
the bank architects that targeted African Americans and Latinos with
subprime loans, financing their moves out of San Francisco and Oakland
into Contra Costa County, are in downtown San Francisco.</a> A few,
like banking giant Wells Fargo are headquartered there. Their
executives live in mansions in tony neighborhoods like Pacific Heights,
or down in San Mateo’s wealthy enclaves like Hillsborough and Atherton.
JP Morgan has a tower on Mission Street. Bank of America has a regional
office in San Francisco, as do US Bank, Citibank, HSBC, and others.
Tech, after all, isn’t San Francisco’s only industry. Finance is one of
San Francisco’s big employers and has been since the Gold Rush.</p>
<p>But the boom today really is in tech. There have been rumors lately
that Google is eying real estate in San Francisco for a second campus
there in addition to its Mountain View headquarters. Google more than
any other tech company has been obsessively reshaping the political
geography of the Bay Area. Its executives privatized part of San Jose’s
public airport. The company is building floating real estate in the Bay
as part of its planned conquest of retail. It’s buses are most
prolific, and most blamed for blocking streets in San Francisco, and
parts of Oakland, and of course each bus represents perhaps fifty
employees whose relatively flush incomes are putting unprecedented
pressures on rents in San Francisco, and also areas of Oakland like the
“Temescal.”</p>
<p>Google doesn’t send its buses into Richmond, and they probably never
will. Like San Pablo, but much larger, Richmond has become a refuge for
many of the displaced families forced to leave San Francisco and
downtown Oakland, but even so Richmond’s housing stock is characterized
by an unusually large number of empty and blighted homes, zombie houses
from foreclosure. Larry Page, a co-founder of Google, is wealthy enough
to buy up every parcel of land and every building in the entire city of
Richmond, and still have about $3 billion left over. Google’s other
founder, Sergey Brin, could do the same thing. To put the extreme
wealth of Silicon Valley’s elite in a similar perspective, consider
this: Richmond’s estimated 39,000 households earned a collective income
of about $2 billion last year. If the Google co-founders Brin and Page
wanted to, they could pay every household in the city twice their
existing income for a total of eleven years.</p>
<p>Perhaps here I should conclude by adding that <a sl-processed="1"
href="http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312513028362/d452134d10k.htm">Google
also claims a $130 million California research and development tax
credit</a> which will carry-forward indefinitely and allows the company
to whittle down the taxes it owes to Sacramento for many years to come.
Tax policies that favor the wealthy and large corporations, after all,
are part of the cause of growing inequality in America today.</p>
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