My sense of smell didn’t come back fully after that and I have lawyers sending me postcards to try to cash in on that (no it was not COVID). We couldn’t go anywhere but sat in the house, still (literally) choking on smoke for a month. I spent the month of September 2020 running the air conditioner 24 hours/day (just to filter the air) and ran HEPA filters all day long indoors. This year’s fire season wasn’t bad but the last two years there were periods where the air quality was so bad everyone was instructed to stay indoors because it was literally off the charts. The smoke spreads down from the mountains and fills the Valley and doesn’t leave for weeks. In my neighborhood a guy recently started yelling through the open window of a neighbor’s house, asking for spare change.Īir quality has gotten worse - largely because the enormous wildfires have become an almost annual event. Coming out of work today and walking to my car, I was accosted by a guy and I’d stayed late, so no one else was around. We’re more likely compared to the 90s to be accosted by people asking for money in any given parking lot where we go to shop. My daughter sometimes had to step over a couple of homeless guys, sleeping in the doorway of her workplace this summer when she went to open up the building. “Everywhere” is not an exaggeration: the numbers of homeless people are astronomical. Now it’s everywhere including my middle class urban neighborhood. It used to be confined to certain locations downtown. Homelessness is worse and definitely more entrenched with people living openly in encampments. The corruption of local government, of developers, of scammers who made a pharmacy school and would-be DO school into a cash grab - corruption is bad here and judging by the recent series in the Fresno Bee has gotten worse. Now in still-healthy middle age, I realize I might need some competent doctors and a decent teaching hospital someday. Throughout my healthy young adulthood it was fine to live here and hope for the best. It’s fair to say that except for a VERY few great doctors who were born and raised here and stayed to serve the community, the doctors here are the absolute dregs, the bottom of their classes. Any doctor who cares about health or living in a nice place. The numbers of people who can work one or two jobs and afford to support a family are very small. The numbers of people / proportion of people needing food assistance is worse. not sure I’d send them to Fresno schools today.Įconomic security, food insecurity have gotten worse. Clovis schools were always more conservative and authoritarian so we preferred Fresno schools for our kids. Everyone who could afford a house elsewhere moved to “Clovis schools” (meaning Clovis and the aforementioned northern fringes of Fresno because they’re in “Clovis schools”). They were really pretty good when we moved here. The bulk of the city is crumbling and looking more like a developing country all the time.įresno schools have been abandoned by the middle class and have gotten worse. The neighborhoods in the city have all gotten worse except at the far north wealthy fringes and in its one suburb, Clovis. The population has increased without an increase in city amenities or services. They become close friends and they always leave the state. I’ve met a lot of nice people here over the years. Every interesting or smart critical thinker I’ve ever met here, everyone who gives even the slightest shit about museums and theatre and music and culture (with the exception of a few people who were born and raised here, so “it’s home”) has been desperate to leave. > “the problem is more that everyone in the Central Valley wants to leave.” Now the house prices in our neighborhood have doubled in the 4 years since we bought this home, and there’s no way we could now, if we moved here today, ever buy a home in this hellhole. (Long boring story about what went wrong.) The only things you could say for it back then were “Well, the produce is good” and “Houses are affordable, sort of.” We were going to stay two years tops and go back East. It’s been horrible since at least 1996 when I got trapped here by my spouse’s job. For example, 21st Century Salonniere (writes The 21st Century Salon ) writes: Original post: Why Is The Central Valley So Bad?ġ: Several Valley residents commented with their perspectives.
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