How much for a ticket to ride the high-speed gravy train?

Feat. Jorge Luna Monterrey of Valley Voices!

As a friend recently put it—kindly, I’m sure—this is the only newsletter that will keep you updated on whether it’s still hot in Fresno. And I’m proud of that, but it’s so much more. Today, a departure from our usual track to check in on the Right’s favorite boondoggle to bash and the Left’s preferred public project to pine for: California high-speed rail. In the works since, *checks notes*, the first Obama administration, high-speed rail has been on my mind thanks to the folks at Fresnoland, an indispensable Central Valley newsroom.

[A brief aside: I don’t think I truly understood how vital local journalism is until I moved to a city of over half a million people with a small cohort of journalists punching well above their weight in keeping City Hall accountable, prosecutors and police on their toes, and beloved cryptids in the spotlight.]

At a recent Fresnoland event, three men who, to my eye, visibly disliked one another—Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer, California Assemblymember Joaquin Arambula, and California High-Speed Rail Authority CEO Ian Choudri—came together to espouse the importance of finishing North America’s first high-speed rail line, which will connect Merced to Bakersfield via Fresno and a few other stops. To learn about the major questions surrounding the project,¹ I recommend reporting from CalMatters, Fresnoland, and the Fresno Bee. Here, my goal is to connect several themes from the Fresnoland event with those from a conversation I had recently with a talented data analyst, labor advocate, and community organizer, Jorge Luna Monterrey.² Jorge works for Valley Voices, a Hanford-based civic engagement organization founded by Ruth López in 2019 to serve the people of Kings, Tulare, and Fresno counties.

Late last year, Valley Voices surveyed some 400+ Kings and Hanford county residents about what they would like to see developed around the high-speed rail station set to be constructed in a stretch of empty land between the cities of Hanford and Visalia (both charming places but not exactly hubs for major public investments). Although the survey results are preliminary, the act of gathering such feedback—and the fact that it took a non-profit to do so—raises interesting questions about who stands to benefit most from a project that has united local leaders across the political spectrum in support of its completion, at seemingly any cost. Let’s get this train of thought rolling.

It’s not important here, but the Frensoland panel took place at Fresno City College, California’s oldest community college and surely its most beautiful, too. Okay, enough praising local institutions for one post.

Labor

There are a lot of empty buildings in downtown Fresno. Once the center of commercial activity, the businesses of Fulton Street fled north, chasing the ag-lined pockets of the Central Valley’s wealthier—and whiter—denizens. The city is now working to incentivize “market rate” housing development and disincentivize vacant property ownership, but things aren’t likely to change substantially until high-speed rail comes to town. To Jerry Dyer (“Mayor Jer” to his friends and family, I must assume), the medium-term pain of shut off utilities and torn up roads—of which there are many, especially around Chinatown—will all be worth it, as people will someday be “in awe when they come to Fresno”; never let it be said that MJ is not, at least, a true politician.

Yes, high-speed rail will undoubtedly have long-lasting impacts on the local economy. On that, a pro-business mayor and union leaders alike can agree. As Dillon Savory—the executive director of the Central Labor Council, often spotted sporting a fedora—was quoted by Julianna Morano in Fresnoland:

High-speed rail can be a full career for some people. If it completely went away, there would be thousands of people that … thought that they had 30 years’ worth of work that potentially would suddenly be unemployed.

The question becomes, then, towards what ends such labor will be put, and which residents will be served by a slate of new businesses. According to Jorge with Valley Voices, we should be planning for broader community benefits along with the development of rail stations and their environs:

Beyond the actual terminal, people want to know: What’s going to be constructed there? A lot of people said, “Hey, we want a job center or a training center, so that we can bring workers here, or a community center so we can have events and community forums.” People want long-term, good paying jobs. That’s how they’ll see a benefit, right? With high-speed rail, they want to know if it will create long-term, good paying jobs, not just on the construction, but with what gets constructed around it.

I hope this more positive vision of community-centered economic development comes to pass. But there are reasons to be skeptical, not least of all because the aim of many of high-speed rail’s biggest proponents is to cater to as-of-yet nonexistent Central Valley —> Bay Area tech commuters.³

Migration

Ian Choudri promises that the journey from Fresno to San Jose will take less than an hour. Joaquin Arambula believes Fresno could be the Frankfurt of California: a fifth-largest city, transit hub, and center for research. These visions must bring a tear to the cold, dead eye of Leland Stanford, a key figure in the creation of both Fresno—as part of his rail empire—and Silicon Valley.

In CalMatters, Yousef Baig—also on stage at the Frensoland event—reminds us how the ugly legacy of Fresno’s founding still stains its urban geography:

The city’s first settlers—many of them Chinese—were forcefully relocated here in the late 1800s. They built the multicultural community brick by brick, and much of the mason work is still intact. But urban renewal in the 1960s devastated the neighborhood, UC Berkeley scholars noted in a case study last year. Businesses and residents were displaced by freeway construction, sowing a deep distrust of government among those who stayed. As white flight to outlying communities stretched the city’s boundaries, southwest Fresno stagnated, enduring decades of hardship and neglect.

Could investment from high-speed rail help right some of these iniquities? In theory, long-overlooked Valley communities along the 99 could access jobs, services, and educational opportunities that currently require long, costly commutes. Then again, there is the concern, voiced here by Jorge, that the post-COVID wave of gentrification throughout the west coast is set to crest:

Another major concern is if this is going to raise the price of homes, if it will make it more expensive to live here. People have these concerns because folks are going to be able to travel in from Silicon Valley, purchase homes, and push people out. I don’t think [the Hanford or Fresno City Council members] are too concerned with this. There’s a lot of interest in bringing in tourists, but how is that going to help our community here? How is that not going to displace people who are renting?

I tend to be pro-mobility, both across and within borders, so I think, on balance, it is a good thing that communities largely shut out of the world’s fourth-largest economy will be the first to benefit from high-speed rail. Yet there will surely be costs, so I also agree that Valley municipalities should seriously consider rent control and other tenant protections that are anathema in a region that has long been beholden to developers’ interests, at the expense of investment in the things that make life worth living, like parks.

Environment

Finally, I can’t get out of this without mentioning the book that launched 1,000 podcast episodes, Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. California high-speed rail is used as an avatar in that book for everything that has gone wrong with liberal governance in the 21st century. On Klein’s telling, what started out as an ambitious, pro-climate project—backed by a Democratic administration and a blue state—was mired in process, process, process: Environmental reviews. Associated lawsuits under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Lengthy right-of-way acquisitions. Finding contractors to fit very specific, often admirable, criteria. Etcetera.

Governor Newsom seems to agree that CEQA review should have been modified or suspended for high-speed rail. But Joaquin Arambula and other politicos project confidence that, having gotten through all those years of paperwork, the future is bright for high-speed rail, at least in the Central Valley. It’s interesting to consider the counterfactual in which high-speed rail could was pushed through with less small-d democratic input. On the one hand, not every interest group fighting the project is so sympathetic, like the big farmers who are mad about their plots of land getting sliced up. Then again, Jorge makes a good point that helping a project like this reach its full carbon-cutting potential depends to some degree on tools like CEQA:

Our goal is to create some pressure for the High Speed Rail Authority, to make sure that they're aware of what our community wants to be developed, right? We want to see more infrastructure that's resilient. … [But] a lot of community benefit agreements happen when they’re going through CEQA, right? So, part of it is, when all those suits are done, and they’re halfway through development, where is our leverage now?

As many readers of Abundance have noted, it’s odd, even depressing, to consider questions like this in an era of fast-encroaching fascism. Shouldn’t all of our attention be focused on keeping things from getting even worse? We can worry about trains, planes, and permitting reforms in the next administration, should we be so lucky. The natural rejoinder is that these projects are linked. Not that finishing some rail lines will stop people being disappeared, but it wouldn’t hurt to show that, yes, better things are possible.

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Thank you for reading, happy springtime, and let me know where I went off the rails here. I’ll be taking a 4+ hour Amtrak ride to Oakland this evening. Maybe it could be faster, but I’m looking forward to the journey all the same.

1. E.g., Why is it taking so long to build? Why didn’t we start on the coast? What will happen if federal funding falls through, with state funding already looking shaky?

2. Pay no mind if these themes happen to coincide with my career interests.

3. I am all too aware that as a former tech bro who moved to Fresno for work, I should be careful in casting stones. All I can say is I feel less like a gentrifier here than when I moved to Oakland straight out of college…which isn’t saying much.