One would hope that a city run by real estate interests would have a good understanding of the pitfalls of their own industry and would even take action to protect their own citizenry against those pitfalls. Unfortunately, we live in a City run by real estate vultures who profit from a rickety international machine designed and built to encourage boom-and-bust cycles and take advantage of new homeowners in the Valley, who also tend to be working-class people of color.
If you took seriously real estate broker and City Planning Commissioner Carole McCoy’s paeans to the industry, it would be difficult to discover precisely who is responsible for Merced’s state of affairs. According to McCoy, realtors are like medical professionals:
We work with so many people from so many walks of life. The service we provide is a real personal one-on-one service with clients. Doctors work closely with people on health matters and we work with people on their family lifestyle. What better people can you have to serve?
Carole McCoy is a like a doctor…except her industry is at the epicenter of a crisis that makes people sad and destroys their lives, and doctors make us healthy and perform miracles. It’s like the difference between a crippling, contagious plague and unicorns.
Taking ocean cruises is apparently Carole McCoy’s primary hobby. She has taken 27 cruises, nearly one for every year she’s lived in Merced. All this despite working in a profession where, in her own words,
We have no retirement benefits, health care, paid vacations or sick leave and we work for a promise.
Let’s be real here — these cruises may not be paid vacations, but they are accumulated capital from the commissions of hundreds of flipped homes in a county where one in 68 homes sits in foreclosure and 9.3% of us are officially unemployed. Nice work if you can get it!
When making decisions, Merced’s political class has three positions:
1.) Powerlessness and victimization. As elected (and appointed — I’m looking in your direction, Carl!) representatives, the City Council and Planning Commission often understand that terrible things have happen to their constituents, but act lost and helpless when asked to create positive solutions for Merced’s crises. They understand their role to be middlemen between Developers and Residents. Developers often make mistakes, such as creating incompatible land uses and building crappy homes. Our supine reps watch at a distance, and intervene as pressure valves in times of inconvenience, like when the lawns of foreclosed homes become “eyesores.”
2.) Crumbs from the table. Let’s take another look at Carole McCoy’s recent letter to the editor. McCoy cites her realtors’ association’s “endless” charitable activity, such as the Christmas Can Tree and raising cash for the Salvation Army, and concludes by daring the hapless, lazy reader to volunteer as much as she does. When not looking for work, cooking up some rice and potatoes, or squatting in foreclosed homes, Mercedians have demonstrated an impressive ability to stick together and survive in creative ways. Whether it’s calling a new sidewalk “growth paying for itself” or slapping some mashed potatoes on the stytrofoam plate of a homeless person around the holidays, the current band-aid approaches are clearly inadequate for the problems confronting our community.
3.) Faith in technology and ‘cutting edge’ planning initiatives. When all else fails, our reps are happy to foist our problems onto future generations through a myriad of overlapping regional planning initiatives and a blind faith that market forces will eventually develop solutions to today’s crises. The real lessons of the market are all around us — in the families working in the fields threatened by deportation to the empty homes next door and a small class of elites blind to the destruction they’ve caused.
