Low-income homeowners at risk from development
I found the most amazing map in the County City Data Book at the Redbud Library. It shows the percentage of housing units that are owner occupied, broken down by county. I”m going to go out on a limb and assume that the bigger the percentage of people who own their own homes the better.
Most local boosters like to sing the praises of their little spot on earth as much as they can without looking ridiculous. In the case of Lake County that limit might be to say: “We are just as good as Napa, Sonoma, and the other four counties that caress our boundaries.”
I say hogwash. For this map, coded into four categories low to high, shows that poor little Lake County towers over our better heeled neighbors in something that made America the land of the free — home ownership. In fact, there is a whole category in between the six borderlands and us. Lake is second from the rarefied top strata.
So, how did our impoverished realm of minimum wage earners, retirees, disabled and substance abusers with their own parking places at AODS come to possess so much more of the American “right stuff” than snooty, sophisticated, and oh so trendy Napa County?
Well, the answer isn”t pretty, but the truth rarely is. Before government decided that they had all the answers, anyone could buy a badly subdivided lot and drop a residence on it. This included a lot of small “I”m-going-to-retire-up-here” homes but mostly the quaint but improvised products from dragging up an 8-foot wide trailer and grafting on an addition or two as funds allowed. Be it ever so humble, there is no place like home.
Now for the bad news. This map was based on data from the 2000 census. It seems that was the year the commuter fueled real estate boom hit Lake County. Maybe those Santa Rosa workers priced out of their market saw this map too. Land and house prices here shot up to what they could afford while the rest of Lake County remained a low wage backwater. “Spec” builders, openly contemptuous of locals, built the biggest cracker boxes that would fit on tiny, gouged out hillside lots for these new long distance lemmings.
Residents here 24/7 begin to be treated like second-class citizens, if not nuisances, by the deep pockets set. Their interests began to take a back seat to fawned-over real estate and development carpetbaggers.
All of those impromptu beachheads on the “American Dream” begin to be seen as an impediment to these new economic interests. The “Plan B” options spread across town were being flattened like pancakes. Their former occupants marched off to low-income apartments, constructed along thoroughfares well out of neighborhoods to minimize their effect on property values.
The poor were no longer to be owners in gentrified Lake County.
Dante DeAmicis
Clearlake
Hold liars accountable for crimes against humanity
Just before 6 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, I was viewing television in my home in Eureka. The CBS Morning Show from New York City broke in with live news coverage of the WTC”s North Tower on fire. A few minutes passed, then I watched in horror as the South Tower was impacted. Approximately one hour later, I saw the original footage of the damage to the Pentagon (which was never to be broadcast again on American network television) clearly displaying a circular hole in the Pentagon, far too small to accommodate American Airlines Flight 77.
In the intervening five years, forensic and eyewitness evidence (religiously ignored by the so-called “free” press) has proven that the damage to the Pentagon was caused by an American cruise missile from our own military”s inventory. The Bush regime”s traitorous psy-op on 9/11 has unraveled to the point where only those either in denial or isolation take the official government version of events seriously. It is time for the American people to discover the awful truth about 9/11. And it is time for the liars in the White House and Pentagon to be brought to justice for their crimes against humanity.
Jake Pickering
Eureka
