Name That Street

As if navigating around Hooterville wasn't difficult enough, what with it's rat's maze city planning and labyrinth-like neighborhoods, the city has yet another trick up it's sleeve - street names change arbitrarily mid-block.

Why? Who knows. Maybe they looked at the city and realized how boring it was and decided this might spice things up.

They were wrong.

I came across this (see above) yesterday when I was walking the dogs on a new route.

The house on the left is #2601. The house on the right it is #6808.

"How can that be?" you may ask. "They're sitting side by side. That can't be right..."

Au contrair, mon ami. This is Bako.

Yes, they are sitting side by side, but they are on different streets!

The house on the left is 2601 Toxic Drive*. The house on the right is #6808 Landfill Lane*. And never the two shall meet, except at the hedge in the middle of the photo.

This happens everywhere here. What would look like a relatively normal street to you and I, albeit with some twists and turns, maybe some slight zigs and zags, is, to the city of Bakersfield, five different streets. Every time a street zigs, the name zags. And because that must not be confusing enough, each one has a completely different numbering scheme.

It's the stupidest thing I've ever seen, and living here, that's saying something.

No wonder so many people seem like they're trapped here. They probably are.

*Street names changed to protect the innocent.

Avenida Blanca de Basura

I haven't written more about our housing situation, or as I like to call it "The Greater Bako Foreclosure Scavenger Hunt", in deference to the boyfriend's wishes. He doesn't read this blog, but he'd "heard" from "friends" (you know who you are) that I had mentioned something about it and he wasn't too thrilled. So out of love and respect, I'll say no more.

Except this.

Who the hell picks the names for the streets of Bakersfield? Obviously it's someone with an axe to grind against the city, or someone with nothing but contempt for the people who live here. Someone from Fresno.

How else to explain streets like "Volcano" and "Fjord"? Because everyone knows Bakersfield is known the world over for it's scenic volcanoes and fjords.

How about "Candy Lane" and "Twinkle Drive"? No wonder the people here seem so angry.

"Merlot Cellars Drive"... why, that has to be a nice area, right?

We looked at a house on "Snowflake". "Snowflake"? In Bako? It was 106 that day.

Several of the developers have chosen to name the streets after their kids (I'm assuming):

"Kathy Suzanne"
"Tori Lorene"
"Kimmie Rachelle"

Proving they have no more talent naming their kids than they do the streets.

"I live on Kimmie Rachelle Drive..."

Never gonna happen.

Or how about a theme! Everyone loves a theme. There's the "Spice Tract", which is really the "Spice Rack".

"My house? Just make a left on Sage, a left on Rosemary and the a right on Thyme..."

You can really do that here!

Or get your flag on in the neighborhood of "Liberty" where you can actually live on the corner of "Declaration" and "Independence".

The old downtown is laid out with numbered streets running east and west, and lettered streets running north and south. Either the original city fathers were a no-nosense, pragmatic sort, or they knew even then that the locals couldn't be trusted naming the streets.

The Road To Recovery

The main road near our house didn't appear to be in bad shape, so I was surprised when a sign popped up a couple of months ago announcing that a major "road improvement" was set to begin May 3.

Expect delays, it warned.

Even worse, the project was being paid for by the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act", otherwise known around these parts as the "Socialist Stimulus Package".

The same Stimulus money the Teabaggers protest when they rally downtown at the Liberty Bell.

Yes, there's a Liberty Bell.

A small one.

A really small one.

Like you find in the gift shop at Knott's Berry Farm, which is where it probably came from.

At any rate, the work started on May 3rd as advertised and I have to admit it's been a model of efficiency. It's been a minor inconvenience, but I've been impressed with how quickly they're getting it done. Score one for Bako.

Or so I thought.

This morning as I was leaving the house I noticed a familiar insignia on the safety vest of one of the workmen.

"City of Los Angeles Department of Transportation".

I first thought it must be a memento from a previous job, but then I noticed others wearing them. And a lot of the work trucks had "818" numbers on the license frames... the San Fernando Valley.

You've got to be kidding me... they're outsourcing public works? To other cities?

So that's the key to smaller local government? Pawning the work off on the neighbors?

Or maybe the powers that be just realized if you want something done right, you can't rely on the local talent.

I know I wouldn't.

UPDATE: Gotta love small town living. What would appear to me to simply be a lane closure on a surface street has now officially been christened a "TRAFFIC NIGHTMARE" by the local news. We have "full team coverage"!

They warn it may add "up to 5 minutes" to your commute".

They've clearly never been on the 405.

Best Laid Plans

I have a new found respect and admiration for whoever runs the planning department for the City of Bakersfield. It wasn't always so. I once believed only a knuckle dragging moron could design such a byzantine, convoluted layout for a city.

But I've since done a 180.

Why the change of heart?

Well, over the weekend I took my own little Magical Mystery Tour of the city, and in my travels I came upon this...


The "Arc de Bako".

Grand, no?

A monumental arch, spanning a wide, tree-lined boulevard, welcoming one and all to Bakersfield.

It all looks rather newish and evidently replicates an arch that once stood downtown. But here it was, a little out of the way I thought, a gateway to someplace special.

But where could it possibly lead? Was there someplace new and spectacular I hadn't heard of?

A civic plaza, perhaps?

A performing arts complex of some kind?

A Great Park?

Sports complex?

Convention center?

Well... not quite.

It leads here...


And you have to pass the jail to get here.

It was then that I realized this isn't the work of rank stupidity. It couldn't be. No one could possibly in a million years believe this was a good idea. Which means only one thing...

It's the work of some evil genius. Like a Bond villain. A double agent. Someone with an ax to grind against the city who is covertly working to undermine it and make it a laughingstock. Or more of a laughingstock than it already is. Someone with the charm and persuasive powers to get who knows how many city departments to sign off on an idea that is clearly an embarrassment.

It's brilliant.

Sir, or Madam, whoever you are, my hat is off to you.

So SO

"She thinks she's better than everyone else just because she lives in Esso..."

Esso? There's some place called Esso? I know this is oil country, but that seems a bit much.

I was outside one of my local clients having a smoke, eavesdropping on a gaggle of "Real Housewives of Bakersfield". The woman speaking was late 30's and appeared to be a frequent flier with many of the local plastic surgeons. She was wearing skin tight white jeans and a bolero jacket that was no match for her enormously enhanced chest. Her face was pulled taut and she looked like she was in a wind tunnel.

It quickly dawned on me that she wasn't saying "Esso", she was saying "S.O."... as in "Seven Oaks". Seven Oaks is Bako's manufactured, master planned answer to Beverly Hills. It looks like any of the other recent housing developments, with the same Caliterranean McMansion architechture, except the houses are bigger and undoubtably have more "upgrades". The houses go for around $500K, which wouldn't even get you a condo in the real Beverly Hills. It's considered to be in the "good" part of town, not far from abandoned power plants and oil refineries. That's Bako for you.

Really, people - this whole acronym thing has to stop. I blame it all on that idiotic TV show of years past, "The O.C.". As someone who grew up in Orange County I can assure you that no one ever referred to it as "The O.C.". If someone were to ask you where you were from, you politely changed the topic. It was the decent thing to do. Of course this was long before the area got it's nouveau riche makeover.

Soon the LA broadcasters were referring to it as "The O.C.", and the trend started to spread like a virus. Next up was the low rent areas east of LA in San Bernardino and Riverside counties, which for some unknown reason had long been referred to as "The Inland Empire". Not anymore.... now it's "The I.E."

Oy vay.

And now it's infected Bako. "S.O." isn't the only offender. There are several others. The most egregious is "N.O.R.", which stands for "North of the River". Since the "river" is nothing but a trash filled dry gulch, you'd be hard pressed to know when you ever traveled north of it.

Unfortunately, it appears to be a trend that that shows no signs of abating - I've recently seen "Bakersfield" abbreviated as "B.K." I always thought that was shorthand for "bankrupt".

If the shoe fits...

The New Math

And now a tale of multiplication and subdivisions.
If you want to see a snap shot of the Great Recession, how it all started, and why it probably isn't ending any time soon, all you need to do is take a quick spin around the endless suburbs of Bakersfield.

I had a few minutes to kill yesterday, so I did a 2 mile loop near our neighborhood.

Let's take a little tour, shall we?


A long time ago, in a housing market far, far away, the subdivisions of Bako marched relentlessly into the farmland, spreading like a virus.

Who was going to live in these houses? Who cares! Trade up!


So many "neighborhoods" to choose from, and more arriving every day!


Bella Terra, Terra Vista, Vista Terrabella, take your pick! Would you prefer an Estate, or perhaps a Villa? There's plenty to go around!


But it didn't last.


Now they're all sitting unsold, slowly rotting in the dust that blows in from the adjacent fields. Prices slashed. For the poor souls who bought, they might as well be called "The Villas at Altlantis" because they're going to be underwater for a very long time.

What do you do when the identical home next door sells for half what you paid?

You walk away. And they are.



And since they can't sell the homes they've already built, they've pulled the plug on "Phase Two".

And "Phase Three".

And "Four".

Imagine the folks who bought homes out here thinking they might actually, have, you know, "neighbors".


At least there's plenty of room for the kids to play. In the landfill next door.


Those schools and shopping we promised to build out here in the middle of nowhere? Maybe someday. In the future. When we all have flying cars.


So one thing seems crystal clear... it's going to be a long, hard road out of all this.

And I have a sneaking suspicion that road doesn't run through Vista Bella Terra.

When It Rains...

We've been hit with wave after wave of storms for the past two days. And by "wave", I'm talking a quarter to a half of an inch of rain at a time. Here, that's ark-building weather.

The rain has, however, exposed a somewhat fundamental fly in the ointment. It would appear the morons in the Hooterville planning department blew their entire budget on their too-clever-by-half, eternally exasperating rat's maze master plan. And so there was no money left for... storm drains.

A quarter inch of rain turns the entire town into the Everglades. I happened to be out driving during the last wave of rain and absolutely everything was flooded after 20 minutes. I thought maybe a drain was blocked, so I was checking the curb as I drove and I'd gone over a mile before I saw one. Turns out the nearest one to our house is four blocks away.

I'm sure it will all eventually drain before the mosquitos start breeding.

On a lighter note, after four waves of rainstorms, there was a brief break in the weather and I walked out front to see to see my crazy neighbor Mary doing what Bakopudlians do best...

Watering her lawn.

An Open Letter to the Bakersfield Planning Department

Dear Fucktards,

I realize your city is boring beyond belief, but that's no excuse to turn every public space into a laboratory rat maze.

It doesn't make it "interesting".

Best Regards,

Eric In Bako

It isn't just the Byzantine housing developments. It's everything - parking lots, shopping centers, everything. In Bako, the shortest distance between point "A' and point "B" involves looping around to "G", doubling back to "C" and "D" and finally deadending at "F". A simple trip to the market is a ride on a Moebius strip.

After swearing off the Mall of the Dead, I found myself having to go after all for a last minute gift. It was such a complete nightmare I finally gave up. Not by choice. I battled gridlock to the entrance of the parking lot, and after crawling along for 30 minutes, merging, converging and doubling back through pedestrian crossings, one of the helpful parking attendants directed me to... the exit. Suddenly I was back out on the street.

Fuck it. I'm giving gift cards.

And God help you if you need to turn left. Evidently this place is so rightwing they've banned left turns. Every street has a huge concrete median, with few, if any, opportunities to make a left. So you drive down the street, staring longingly at your destination on the left, knowing you have to drive a mile or two down the road in order to double back. If you even can. They don't do U-turns here either, so you usually have to turn into one of the Habitrail neighborhoods and hope you can find a way to turn around and backtrack.

And it's apparently all by design.

Maybe the Planning Department is staffed with people with Tourettes.

Or maybe they know that if they make it easy to find a way out, everyone would.

And leave for good.

Medieval Times

Bakersfield isn't so much a city as it is a crazy patchwork quilt of subdivisions and "master planned" communities. Starting in the 60's they started leapfrogging west and north, spreading like fungus. Designed as self contained little instant villages with absolutely no relationship to the neighboring tracts. Each one is surrounded by a high block wall with only a handful of access points, like a medieval fortress. Adding to the feudal feeling is the fact that quite a few back up onto irrigation ditches, so they even come eqipped with their own moats. The only thing missing are some turrets and a line of archers ready to do battle with the neighboring fiefdom. Maybe a few catapults hidden back among the trampolines and pool slides, weighted down with old cement yard decorations, ready to lob at the slightest provocation.

The walls also have the unfortunate side effect of turning almost every major street into a canyon-like no man's land. High walls on the left, high walls on the right, it's like driving through the DMZ.

What the fuck is up with the walls? Do these people not like each other? Are they afraid of each other?

You can see the progression of time in the architecture of the various subdivisions. The 60's and 70's yielded some fairly cool modernist ranch style homes. We live in one, and I love it. I'd actually consider buying it. If it wasn't in Bakersfield. My only complaint is that, like the street layout of our neighborhood, the house zigs and zags. So while we have a fair number of windows, they all look out onto... the house. I can look from one bedroom into the other. The net effect is we get almost no sunlight and the house is dark and Dick Cheney bunkerish.

Sometime in the 80's the tide turned against the modernist look and took a turn towards the architectural dark side - the dreaded "Cali-terranean" look. Part hacienda, part Tuscan villa, it's essentially a stucco box with corbels and columns and crown moldings tacked on. It proved to be an enormous hit, not just here, but seemingly everywhere, and the style is unfortunately here to stay.

And then there are the names. Oy vay, the names. Each subdivision has been christened with a name to evoke the lifestyle you'll live behind its block walls. The early ones are innocuous, pleasant sounding words mixed and matched like Garanimals - "Sagepointe". "Laurelglen. "Stonepine". No harm, no foul.

But as the architecture got grand, so did the names. Everything became an "estate". "Brimhall Estates". "Redwood Estates". "Shiloh Estates". Or vaguely Italian - "Belle Terra"/"Terra Bella".

Sometime in the 90's "at" was introduced. Maybe it was just the influence of the internet, or more likely elitist one-upmanship, but you now had "Seven Oaks at Grand Island" and "The Estates at Windemere". Right before the housing bubble burst the trend seemed to be headed towards the metaphysical with "The Springs" and "Artisan".

But that's all gone now. When it burst, it burst bad. Subdivisions sit abandoned or half finished, eroding away in the dust storms on the edge of town. Instant ghost towns.

Such a sad estate of affairs.

Go West

"Oh you don't want to live there - that's a bad part of town." We were in a property management office looking at rental listings and a map of Bako. And the woman behind the counter was vaguely pointing to the east side of town. Listen honey, you're going to have to be a bit more specific, because we aren't from here and it all looks bad to me. But it ends up she was being specific. Bakersfield is almost perfectly bisected by Highway 99, and everything east of it was considered East Bakersfield.

East Bakersfield is bad.

Now every town and city has areas that are considered "bad", little pockets of mayhem that you can usually avoid. But not here. They've written off half the entire city.

With that new information, we cast our gaze west and soon found three listings that we thought would make a good start. Rents are so cheap here that we thought we might splurge and rent a house with a pool. It was mid-August and 106 and the heat may have clouded our judgement.

They're very trusting here, a luxury I guess you can afford when everyone is armed. You check out the keys to the various listings and have a couple of hours in which to return them. If they tried that in LA, every rental home would be stripped of it's fixtures and copper wire in a matter of days. So armed with three sets of keys, we headed out.

Contestant Number 1 was a smallish house, but it had a beautiful backyard and pool. When we showed up we were surprised to find the homeowner inside waiting for a handyman to replace the shattered window from the previous night's break-in. Hmmmm. Clearly we were still too far east. Check please!

Contestant Number 2 was a real contender. It was a duplex, not a house. And it had no pool and a smallish backyard. But it was HUGE. Two thousand square feet of the best 1978 had to offer. Dark wood, cottage cheese ceilings, tile counters and a wet bar. A wet bar! Screw the pool. To survive Bako I think the bar would prove to be a bigger asset. It was so "Mad Men". If "Mad Men" took place in Bakersfield. In the 70's. All the appliances were "vintage", meaning the microwave probably leaked more radiation than Chernobyl. But we loved it. We're a little strange that way.

Contestant Number 3 was in the middle of nowhere. And that's saying something here. We drove west until the housing developments gave way to abandoned oil fields and weed patches. And kept driving. Finally after several miles it appeared on the horizon like a mirage... Bella Terra. Or was it Terra Bella? Bella Vista? Vista Terra? Who the fuck knows. Anyhow, there it was. Fate had not been kind to little Vista Whatever. The recession had caught it mid-development and many of the lots were vacant. Of the houses that had been built, half looked like they were in foreclosure. There was no landscaping to speak of, except for the occasional tumbleweed. On the sales brochures, that's probably listed as "drought tolerant landscaping". The house we looked at was even bigger than the last, but with the oddest of layouts. All kinds of strange nooks and alcoves. In the model homes, these were probably filled with stylish writing tables and fainting couches. In reality, they were more likely stacked high with boxes from the Home Shopping Network. It did have a pool, surrounded by a security fence. That looked relaxing. Floating on a raft in a minimum security prison. No trees or greenery of any kind, just the pool, the fence and concrete. The whole thing creeped us out and we quickly left.

We decided to cut our losses. We chose Curtain Number 2.