I See by the Papers...

"The past is never dead. It’s not even past" is a flippant line tossed off in a novel by William Faulkner (don't bother reading it; I did one college summer, when I thought Faulkner novels were something I just had to learn to appreciate, more the fool I) and that quote reflects the theme of the book, which is about the terrible prices we often pay for long-ago mistakes. In recent years it's been misappropriated to mean history in general, particularly as an upbeat catchphrase for historic places. That meaning fits the town of Sonoma, with its adobes haunted by Vallejo's ghosts, or Petaluma, with much of its downtown undisturbed since Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn. But Santa Rosa - not so much. Here the phrase has to be used in its original intent, to express the unhappy ways we are dogged by our past.

 This is the 700th article to appear in this journal, which now clocks in at over 1.5 million words (I have statistically typed the letter "e" about 190,530 times but the letter "z" merely 1,110). Normally such a milestone is an occasion for a "best of" recap but I did that not so long ago back at #650 with "650 KISSES DEEP," so instead I'd like to step back and reflect on some of the reasons Santa Rosa came to be the way it is today.

 This is also timely because right now (summer 2019) the city is working on the Downtown Station Area Specific Plan which "seeks to guide new development with a view to creating a vibrant urban center with a distinct identity and character." The plan calls for wedging up to 7,000 more housing units into the downtown area, which will be quite a trick.

 There are limits to what developers can build, in part because this is a high-risk earthquake zone (a 1 in 3 chance we will have a catastrophe within the next 26 years), but a greater obstacle is that Santa Rosa is uniquely burdened by layers of bad decisions made over several decades.


 The rest of this article can be read at the SantaRosaHistory.com website. Because of recurring problems with the Blogger platform, I am no longer wasting my time formatting and posting complete articles here. I will continue to create stubs for the sake of continuity, but will be publishing full articles only at SantaRosaHistory.com. - Jeff Elliott