News Hole

Last week in Washington, D.C., the Obama administration held its so-called “jobs summit.” One of the five mayors in attendance was Ashley Swearengin, executive of Fresno, CA. She called it “a terrific opportunity to raise the profile of Fresno.” At the same time, Fresno proudly announced the opening of an expansion to one of its highways. That announcement is why Fresno’s profile should be raised, as a model of madness.

Fresno, California, is the fifth-largest city in the nation’s most populous state, though there’s nothing else to distinguish it. Explosive growth has pushed the population from just over 350,000 when my family moved there 17 years ago to more than half a million today. Most all of these people have been accommodated through the construction of tract homes in the northwest and southeast sections of the city, where fig orchards and agricultural canals were once the only features on the otherwise flat horizon. To knit these new developments into the existing city, new roads have been built and once far-flung farm homes are now surrounded by strip malls and gas stations. There are predictable side effects to such sudden saturation of the landscape. Smog is thick, asthma rates are on the rise, and a three-bedroom home can be purchased for $48,000. The Daily Beast recently rated Fresno the least intelligent large city in the nation.

Unfortunately, Fresno is simply the example with which I’m most familiar from a broad sample of American cities that follow a similar template. When my roommate and I took a road trip in 2004, I lost count of the number of times that I said, “Look around. This is just like Fresno.” Houston and San Antonio; the eastern coast of Florida; Phoenix and Las Vegas glimmering in the desert night like the gaudiest bling in America.

If you looked at a cross-section of a human body, you would find it dense and multi-purpose. Bone supports the surrounding tissue, muscle allows for strength and flexibility, nerves report stimulus to the brain, which controls the movement of this intricate system. A body that is not dense, that has no central nervous system to process the effect of action, that has a single purpose is a mosquito. And it’s a lousy model for a city.

Yet the brainless, irritating mosquito is Fresno’s model. In 1992, Manchester Mall, at the intersection of Blackstone and Shields Avenues, was considered the dirt mall, while Fashion Fair, further north, was the tony center of consumption. By the time I left for New York in 2000, Manchester was all but dead, its central tenant a drug store, while Fashion Fair was struggling after the arrival of River Park, a collection of shops built on empty acreage farther north, anchored by a multiplex theatre that, on opening in the summer of 1998, showed Godzilla every 15 minutes. The most expensive homes are those that require a half-hour commute to downtown. And as long as there’s more cheap land, the cycle can pointlessly spin ad infinitum. The city isn’t expanding because it has run out of room to develop, which has fueled suburban growth since time immemorial – it’s expanding because it can, much as a mosquito gorges on blood even if it’s just fed. The suburb grows without the urb.

In addition to its gluttony, Fresno, shares brainlessness with the mosquito. Earlier this year, Ashley Swearengin, the mayor of Fresno, received a follow-up to a 2003 report, “Meeting the Challenge.” The new report found that on the eight key issues identified in the 2003 report, no progress had been made. City government allowed the mosquito to continue filling itself, and now, in 2009, the mosquito is about to burst. Unemployment, always a problem, is nearing 20%. What employment there is pays so little that the city’s per capita income is less than half that of San Jose. The gated communities built during the bubble are being auctioned off one tract home at a time at fresnoforeclosure.com.

Oops. There is, of course, no requirement that elected officials do anything about anything. Preserving the status quo has long proven an effective strategy for staying in office. It does seem odd, though, that the previous mayor of Fresno, Alan Autry (you may remember him from such second-banana law-enforcement roles as Bubba on the TV version of “In the Heat of the Night,” and the Klansman deputy from “A Time to Kill”), would bother to commission a report that would aid him in meeting the challenges that faced Fresno during a period of double-digit population growth and yet his successor finds, six years later, that all eight key findings were left unaddressed. Odder still, Swearengin’s politics and policies (generally Libertarian-style Republican, with the usual emphasis on law enforcement) force her to follow a similar path of inaction. The boldest action by Herroner has been the hiring of a police department auditor to address officers’ unfortunate habit of shooting the citizenry.

But then, given that the largest single contributor to Swearengin’s campaign was the California Real Estate PAC (care to bet what their position on building more strip malls is?), it makes sense that the city just blew $53.4 million on that freeway expansion. It likewise makes sense that there have been no announcements on how the mayor’s proposals to expand mass transit and rebuild downtown are proceeding.

Maybe there is a brain in Fresno; but the question it ponders is not, “how do I fix these problems,” but “how do I get re-elected.”

The answer? Keep taxes low. No matter the consequences.