I love college towns. There’s always a positive vibe there, one that you feel just walking through town or on campus, that is inclusive and flowing with experimentation and innovation, an atmosphere where the passion of learning from great teachers surrounds you, where enthusiasm is welcomed–not suppressed.

In Irvine, you have the legacies of Gregory Benford (Professor Emeritus, Physics and Astronomy) and Stanley van den Noort (Dean of Medicine).

In Fullerton, you can find the apartment where Philip K. Dick and his wife Tessa lived while he was writing VALIS and A Scanner Darkly, within walking distance from the California State University-Fullerton campus. His papers are also available to view in the CSUF Library’s University Archives.

It’s not surprising, then, to learn that California is ranked sixth in the United States for quality of higher education. With this caliber of teaching talent on tap at UCI, CSUF, USC, UCLA, Pomona College, UC Berkeley, San Francisco State and Stanford, we have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to collegiate opportunities.

All the more disappointing, then, when the city councils and other ruling bodies of such cities resort to conventional thinking and action. Last month, Fullerton cancelled its experiment in city planning–the Walk on Wilshire or WoW–and announced plans, like every city in California, to remove the homeless from residents’s sight, without any improvements in temporary or long-term shelter–as laid out in the Housing First initiative passed by the California Senate in 2016. In a time where experimentation and innovation is most needed, the Fullerton City Council is going with “same old, same old.”

At the last hearing regarding WoW, over two thousand citizens stated their support for it, as well as sixty seven businesses. What did the opposition have? A handful of detractors, and one business–the 888 Cigar Lounge and Mercantile. All the same, Mayor Fred Jung and council member Jamie Valencia voted against WoW, effectively killing it. (Mayor Pro Tem Shana Charles and council member Ahmad Zahra–Zooming in from the UK–voted in favor. Nicholas Dunlap recused himself due to conflict of interest; his father owns a building on Wilshire Ave.).

It is a matter of record that Tony Bushala, the impetus behind the anti-WoW campaign, contributed thousands of dollars to Jung’s and Valencia’s campaign–in spite of the latter’s unbelievably clumsy attempt to return said donation, which was announced the night of the WoW vote, taking it neatly out of the realm of coincidence. (Hopefully, Valencia has learned how to better handle such obvious conflicts of interest).

Another megabucks guy–currently on the world’s center stage, and relishing every iota of attention he’s garnering–is Elon Musk, a classic authoritarian, anti-government, pro-big business mogul who is taking an axe to the federal budget, whereas a scalpel would be more appropriate.

Even more egregious is his harvesting of American citizens’ personal data–for he only knows what nefarious purposes. The only thing standing in his way at the moment is the judiciary, who apparently didn’t get the memo from Trump’s White House that their presence as a check and balance on the executive would no longer be required. (As my brother David once observed, guys like Musk want all the power, all the money and all the women–and they want it now).

The main problem that big money guys like Bushula and Elon Musk have with democracy is what they regard with contempt as wasteful, annoying things–judges who block their attempts to run roughshod over federal agencies, or annoying liberals and their suggestions about regulating traffic flow in city centers in order to balance the needs of businesses, consumers and pedestrians.
From their libertarian perspective, they declare that the commonwealth should just get out of their way and let capitalism solve everything. To that estimable demand, I would pose the same question Dr. Phil asks:

“How’s that working for you?” Clearly it’s working just peachy-keen for the Gilded Class, via tax cuts and virtually unlimited access to power, while the rest of us are praying to keep our jobs and homes while desperately trying to figure out how to save our safety nets.
Who amongst us is more vulnerable, in more need of a durable safety net, than the homeless? And who would benefit more from actual housing, instead of sleeping rough or being shuttled from shelter to shelter, constantly avoiding fights, and simply trying to get a good night’s sleep–something average folks take for granted? (though with Trump in office, that’s no longer a given). MAGA is aiming its sights at Housing First, claiming it costs more than shelters and incarceration (it doesn’t), that it creates more problems for law enforcement (it doesn’t, shouldn’t and needn’t) and encourages addiction by not requiring sobriety as a condition of housing (again, wrong).

Dammit, I’m out of space to yet again explain how Housing First works, so I’ll refer you to these documents. Further, deponent sayeth not.
• https://endhomelessness.org/blog/housing-first-is-a-matter-of-health/,
• https://www.hcd.ca.gov/grants-funding/active-funding/docs/housing-first-fact-sheet.pdf,
• https://files.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/Housing-First-Permanent-Supportive-Housing-Brief.pdf.

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