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Salinas. The Wall Street Journal on August 26, 2006 reported on housing issues in Monterey County, emphasizing the clash between environmentalists who want to preserve open space and developers who point to overcrowded housing in Salinas and call for more. Salinas has become the least-affordable place in the US to live, based on the percentage of median income required to make the mortgage on a median-priced house.

The median resale price of a single-family home in Salinas was $620,000 in June 2006, up from $175,750 in June 1996. As a result, farm workers tend to double- and triple-up, leading to crowded housing, gangs and poor schooling outcomes.

Would building more housing reduce overcrowding for low-income farm workers? Advocates of more housing say yes, emphasizing that developers are required to set aside a portion of new housing for low-income residents. Those opposed to additional housing say that most new homes built in the area sell for more than $500,000, and even homes set aside for low-income residents cost more than $200,000, which puts them out of the reach of seasonal farm workers.

As the county develops a new 20-year growth plan, slow-growth advocate LandWatch wants to restrict development to the five already urbanized areas and have voters decide on major new projects. Its initiative is tied up in federal court, with Hispanic activists saying it violated the Voting Rights Act because it was circulated only in English. Most slow-growth advocates live in Monterey and along the coast, separated from the 155,000 resident city of Salinas by the so-called "lettuce curtain" of vegetables.

Santa Maria and Santa Barbara each have about 90,000 residents, but Santa Maria (75 miles north) is growing much faster, in part because its housing costs are less than half the average $1 million in Santa Barbara.

California had 6.3 million K-12 students in 2005-06, a drop of 10,000 from the year before and the first drop in a quarter century. Santa Barbara has seen an especially sharp drop in enrollment. With median home prices topping $1 million, residents tend to be older and childless or involve several younger families sharing a house. About 70 percent of elementary school students are Hispanic, even though the city is 35 percent Hispanic.

San Diego is one of the largest farming counties in California, as measured by farm sales, and some farm workers live in canyons near million-dollar homes. Many tomato farmers lease land, and do not provide housing for their workers, prompting workers in high-housing cost areas to build informal housing in canyons that are not suitable for development.

Periodically, complaints from neighbors and concerns about health and disease lead to "clearing the canyon" operations and calls for "decent" farm worker housing. Northern San Diego county received a pledge of $3 million to build a 60-bed dormitory, but could not find sufficient land for what would have been $5 a day housing for workers. Tomato farmer Leslie Farms says that it does not know where its workers live, but local police say that up to half of the workers in McGonigle Canyon work for Leslie.

San Joaquin Valley. The city of Fresno has the country's highest rate of concentrated poverty: 44 percent of the city's poor live in neighborhoods in which more than 40 percent of the residents live below the poverty threshold. New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was second, with a 38 percent rate of concentrated poverty.

Mendota, a farm worker city in western Fresno county, hoped that new prisons would provide economic salvation. However, the Corrections Corporation of America did not finish a private prison it began to build in 1999, and the federal government stopped construction after spending $90 million on a new prison.

Orange Cove's long-time mayor, Victor Lopez, is credited with winning $63 million in grants from 2001 to 2005 for one of the poorest cities in California. The Fresno Bee on June 27, 2006 reported that Lopez had received $174,000 for travel expenses during this period.

Stockton, a city of 279,000, has California's highest crime rate. Crime is dropping as the city aggressively applies the broken window's theory: clean up the minor blight and more serious crime will drop. The city first tackled graffiti, then decided that it must abandon the common idea in farming towns that government should be small. Bonds were approved to build more schools, but the share of residents with college degrees is still less than half the state average.

Kern county voters in June 2006 voted to stop allowing Los Angeles county to dump treated waste on a 4,700-acre farm, bought for $10 million in 2000 and named Green Acres; the farm produces corn, wheat and alfalfa. About half the nation's human waste is applied to land, according to EPA. Los Angeles county sued Kern county in federal court for blocking its sewage.

California. The share of California workers in unions fell from 25 to 20 percent between 1989 and 2005; union workers earn an average 30 percent more than non-union workers in the state. Labor productivity has been rising, but not real wages for workers at the bottom of the wage scale, which some attribute to the fact that firms such as Wal-Mart and Manpower are generating many of the new jobs. Corporate profits, on the other hand, are rising, so that the wage share of GDP is the smallest since 1947, when recordkeeping began.

Greater Los Angeles is the most economically segregated US region, with two-thirds of residents living in neighborhoods that are rich or poor, according to 2000 Census data. Middle-class jobs and residents are disappearing in cities, leaving the rich and the poor [Middle-class incomes are defined as between 80 and 120 percent of the metro median]. About five percent of Los Angeles county residents had incomes of $45,000 to $50,000 a year in 2004, the median for the county.

The Los Angeles-area has concentrations of working poor immigrants and more billionaires than anywhere else in the US. Middle-class jobs and residents disappeared when the aerospace industry collapsed in the early 1990s, and as a result different businesses have evolved to serve remaining residents, such as upscale supermarkets for the rich and minimarkets for the poor. Without middle-class jobs, the poor must often leave the Los Angeles area to achieve economic mobility. New York, Houston and Dallas have similar concentrations of rich and poor, while Boston and Detroit have far larger middle classes.

Many of California's Latinos are in the Los Angeles area, where the Latino health paradox puzzles researchers- why are poor Latinos in better health than poor Blacks? Most researchers believe that diet, lifestyle choices and strong social support networks are key to Latinos' better-than-expected health. Newly arrived Latinos appear to drink less alcohol and smoke less, which may explain why their health appears to "worsen" with time in the US.

Costa Mesa is a city in southern California with a city council committed to reduce illegal migration by using local police to enforce some immigration laws and closing a job center that helped day laborers to get jobs. A Return to Reason campaign that includes most former mayors aims to unseat the anti-migrant council members in November 2006 elections.

SB 1765, approved by the California Legislature in 2006 but vetoed by the Governor, would have extended the statute of limitations to 2016 for Mexicans deported from the US between 1929 and 1933 and seeking redress. An estimated 5,000 Mexicans who were repatriated live in California, and they as well as US relatives of those deported would have been able to sue for damages if the bill had become law.

AB 32 became law in Fall 2006. AB 32 requires California's Air Resources Board to develop a program to reduce the state's greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide and methane to 1990 levels by 2020, a cut of about 25 percent from today's levels. About two-thirds of these emissions are from power plants and office buildings.

The Tule Lake Segregation Center near the Oregon border was the largest of the ten Japanese American internment camps operated between 1942 and 1946. Two other internment camps have been turned into US memorials, but many Tule Lake residents oppose more federal government land ownership in the area, a reaction in part to reduced federal water deliveries from the Klamath river during the 2001 drought.

Schrag. Peter Schrag's five-chapter book, "California: America's High-Stakes Experiment," depicts California as a model and anti-model for the US. During the 1960s, California was recognized as a leader in education and infrastructure; during the 1990s, it was recognized for its efforts to bar immigrants, structural budget deficits and disputes over how to integrate newcomers.

Steve Chawkins, "A Bumper Crop of Bad News for Salinas," Los Angeles Times, October 12, 2006. Miriam Jordan, "Slums and a Land War," Wall Street Journal, August 26, 2006. Nancy Cleeland, "Rich, Poor Live Poles Apart in L.A. as Middle Class Keeps Shrinking," Los Angeles Times, July 23, 2006. Schrag, Peter. 2006. California: America's High-Stakes Experiment. Berkeley. UC Press. http://www.ucpress.edu/