My first visit to California in the late 1980s was part of an ill-fated love connection. While I did find elements of “Endless Summer,” “California Girls”and “California Dreamin’”that I had come to expect from listening to theBeach Boysfor years, I found San Francisco to be cold (it wasfall), expensive and largely uninviting.
As San Fran was my mother’s favorite city, it would take several return tripsfor meto better appreciate it.But that same voyage and a prospective early return caused me to take a side tripto San Diego, which back then struck me as much closer to paradise.
The Gas LampDistrict of San Diego continues to offer entertainment and architectural choices aplenty, and I will return to the Moxy Hotel and the Gas LampFish House nearby. Meanwhile, San Diego’s local government leaders struggle with many of the same challenges facing the rest of the state, but they are doing a much better job with the litter, smells and crime that are at least in part associated with the swelling challenge of homelessness in the state. But in Los Angeles, it’s almost everywhere you see any government property: along the canals and rail lines, under almost every freeway overpass.And as California contains about 20 percent of our nation’s population, with its climate and a wealth of social service options available it’s easy to see how the Golden Bear State has become such a magnet for the unhoused. But pair that with some of the most expensive housing options in the nation and there is an apparent disconnect. Recreational and medicinal marijuana sales and consumption have long been legal there, but it remains not an inexpensive commodity.
Nevertheless, virtually every homeless encampment or cluster reeks of weed, sometimes over-powering even the smells of urine and worse...making clear at least one commodity remains a high priority, if not finding employment or housing.
And in typical California logic, while youcanrelieve yourself there on the sidewalks, and adjacent to most any private property...neither Horned Frogs nor Dawg fans were legally allowed to set up a tailgate tent or grill on gameday.
Thundershowers were in the forecast, so it defied explanation that those absorbing dozens of millions in tax dollars could toss up a tarp or any ramshackle structure, but those spending millions and lining tax coffers with their visits and purchases and sales and hotel/motel taxes should just all plan on entering SoFi stadium perhaps 60 minutes or more prior to game time.There simply aren’t enough cabs, Uber, Lyft, or even mass transit seats available to accommodate that transit plan.
The palm trees are still beautiful, though a bit weathered and withered by several years of drought.The massive canal system which crisscrosses the Los Angeles basin will carry billions of gallons of water during brief and occasional periods of heavy rainfall,yet most ALL of it will be directed into the Pacific, along with the runoff from many of those homeless encampments, instead of being captured, treated and re-distributed back into a very strained water system across southern California.
The state currently has a $66-billion budget surplus, thanks largely to the federal government’s Covid-19 Emergency Funding largess, but little of that is to be spent on new water reservoirs or a system to better channel those massive canal rain and runoff flows when they occur.
Yet in San Diego, since 2015 there has been a seawater desalination plant in the nearby community of Carlsbad, supplying roughly 10 percent of the region’s freshwater supply. In effect, it recycles at least some of that ocean water flowing down along the coast from L.A.
And the high prices you hear about in California are real and extreme. A daily newspaper, weekday edition, is $4, a dozen eggs, $7, and the price per gallon of gas is nearly treble back home in Georgia.Not surprisingly, mostof the Uber and Lyft drivers are in hybrid or electric vehicles.
I greatly wish my fellow Americans and Californians well, and perhaps they will let us leave a few lessons behind of hospitality and southern comfort of good sportsmanship for the fans who visit, enjoy, and perhaps even conquer a bit – without depositing a huge pile of trash.