Cranks

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

If there’s one thing I like, it’s a panel. I do! (Also: sandwiches.) (Also too: Orange County Supervisor Chris Norby, who despite being a Republican officeholder in Orange County, says sensible things about our crawling out of caves millions of years ago—and not, say, 5,000—and once had something nice to say about labor. Once.) And so on a recent Saturday I flitted joyously—by 8:30 am—to the Anaheim Sheraton for the 12th annual Southern California Conference on Redevelopment Abuse, put on by Municipal Officials for Redevelopment Reform, to be held all day.

Ah, Saturday!

Now, I too am against eminent domain abuse, and so is everyone I know. Nor did I understand why my troglodytic OC blogosphere neighbors insisted upon calling Kelo—the Supreme Court decision that affirmed a municipality could take your shit to give to a shopping center—a liberal decision. Big government? Sure! But I’ve never heard anyone construe “liberal” as meaning “taking from small folk to give to private corporate interests.” Then I looked up Kelo on the Wik, and it turns out it was totally the four lib justices and the swing dude. My bad! Or rather, theirs.

Norby started the daylong program well, explicitly stating that public monies should be spent on public services and the public good rather than for corporate interests. This may not sound like much, but trust me; here in OC, any government service is suspect. The Orange County Register’s style sheet for decades mandated that public schools be referred to instead as “taxpayer-funded schools.” That Norby! Building bridges! Then he said profit should come from innovation, not political connections! Wow! I know, right? All while his cohorts the feds have privatized the profits and socialized the risks for their buddies Bear Stearns. That Norby is so sensible! I was primed to enjoy a day of cranks.

And cranks they were. Mostly, anti-tax cranks. Probably a few religious cranks. (Though Norby is a secularish Libertarian type, MORR’s longtime benefactor is Howard Ahmanson Jr., who is an awesome Dominionist who doesn’t think it’s “necessary” to stone sodomites, but wouldn’t find said stoning “inherently immoral” either.) And all, but all, of them were old and white and therefore crotchety, except for the two awesome Greens who make common cause with their oldnesses on the topics of gadflying and righteousness. It would be a day of love and healing, except for either of those two things.

Soon Anaheim Mayor Curt Pringle came up to talk about how awesome Anaheim is because it used market forces instead of eminent domain to plan its incredible Platinum Triangle. Through the magic of zoning, my city has revived, like, lots of stuff! Also, the already a-leetle-bit-impacted area between the 5 and the 57 (also, where Angel Stadium and the Pond are) is approved for 19 thousand new residences and 21 million square feet of commercial space! Pringle, consider yourself impeached.

Then people of every race (white) and age (old) came up to talk about eminent domain in their towns. One lady talked about property tax incrementalism. “The only thing that will probably help us,” she said, “will be the recession.” She backpedaled from there, probably realizing she sounded like an asshole, except that of course it’s the same thing I argue here week in and week out. A lady from a mythical land called Manteca addressed us to explain happily that in her mystery town, “The MUSD wants to borrow from the redevelopment agency to build schools, so we’re gearing up to fight that.” And then a youngish, slick-looking dude from the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association came up to talk about Props. 98 and 99, which in the wake of Kelo would bar governments from seizing your house to put up a Marie Callender’s. Prop. 98 is the one those assembled here support, while 99 is the Astroturf one designed to trick people into not passing 98. And as he talked and talked, I agreed with everything he said. That’s right, municipalities SHOULDN’T take private holdings for purely private enterprises like shopping centers. And 98 DOES of course allow eminent domain to be used for properly public purposes like roads, schools and parks. But it was the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association—the goodly folks who ruined our world-class schools by passing Prop. 13, and broke our counties in the process just as Grover Norquist has always dreamed. Surely there was something evil afoot? Whatever it was, I couldn’t find it. A short time later, it became apparent: “Rent control” is a “private taking” too.

Grover Nordquist

Ah. And that explains it.

I was actually having a fine old time, as I’m wont to do at these godforsaken things. I liked all the mean old white people real good!

Steven Greenhut, from the Register’s editorial board, came up to talk about Santa Ana’s Renaissance Plan, a masterwork of petty corruptions, calling it the “Remove the Poor Mexicans Plan So They Can Bring in Yuppies Who Go to Starbucks,” which even though it came from a Reg editor’s mouth is pretty much exactly right. (Santa Ana’s Fourth Street is probably the most bustling and economically vibrant in the city; for years, they’ve been trying to kick out the all the Sweatshops 2 You and Cinderella-style wedding dress stores to bring in yet more Gaps.)

The one Latina in attendance, a beautiful woman from Santa Cruz named Martha Montelongo, who’s been involved since the last time they didn’t manage to pass their eminent domain proposition, brought one of the Greens up to speak when the scheduled guys from LULAC didn’t show up. The Green was a Long Beach gadfly named Gabrielle Weeks, and she talked about the blocks and blocks of downtown Long Beach, now empty so as to “feed the gnashing teeth of commerce.” Yay, Greens! She also said young and becoming councilwoman Suja Lowenthal pretty much washes herself in a pile of developer bribes each morning before voting to call upper-middle-class homes “blight.” Suja, say hello to The Pike!

Weeks was a particular treat; she talked about how Long Beach has subsidized Wal-Mart twice, and how she organized different Long Beach communities in danger of losing their neighborhoods to eminent domain. Montelongo asked Weeks a question: “Was it scary?”

“Huh?” Weeks explained. “Um, no, they’re my neighbors.”

“See?” Montelongo seemed to say, and then she did say this. “Please don’t be afraid of the neighborhoods. They love their families and believe in God.”

And then one of the speakers asked how many in the audience were renters, and four of us—out of perhaps 75—raised our hands, and I started to get a wee little case of class resentment.

It’s just how I roll.

Naturally, I was still kind of snotty and sulky and angry at lunch, when a black professor of psychology from Columbia University addressed us about the losses of neighborhoods, and her research into what that loss means. It was a wonderful talk, all about how when she was growing up, in that tight-knit community, every grown-up was responsible for every child, because all of them knew you, and knew your granny. If you did something wrong, she said, you would be punished for it by every adult you came across, until you got home to your mother, who’d already heard about your transgression and would punish you again. The old people nodded, their hearts singing in agreement, until I wanted to shake them and yell, “Her entire speech is ‘It Takes a Village,’ and if you knew you were agreeing with the devilbitch Hillary, whose ‘It Takes a Village’ your kind so vehemently dismissed while you sneered, ‘No, it takes a family!’—I HEARD YOU!—you would pluck out your own eyes, like Oedipus!” But I didn’t. I did think it, though, totally.

Also they started to almost weep when an attorney in the crowd brought up research showing forced loss of a home cuts your lifespan from the stress of it all, and then I asked them if they had any tears left for renters when they’re kicked out of their houses by landlords who are only too happy to sell out to developers, or if their tears for the “stress of relocation” were trumped by property rights, because I do like to bring down a crowd, and, yeah, pretty much: no.

After that, and even though there was totally the entire afternoon session to go, I decided my work there was done, and that I could go home.

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