North Coast Journal October 18, 2007 : IN THE NEWS : SHORT STORIES

October 18, 2007

The Wordy City | Grab Your Pitchfork

A view down Fortuna’s Main Street. Journal file photo.

The Wordy City

The New York Times’ wordsmith William Safire would have a field day if he visited Fortuna now. That’s because the City Council there is pulling out its hair over how future generations might define the phrase “preserving small-town qualities,” as contained in the city’s General Plan Update (GPU). At its Oct. 2 meeting, the Fortuna City Council considered eliminating the phrase from the GPU entirely, as it might someday squelch development.

Some, like City Councilmember Mel Berti feel that those four words will hold back development. “The people of Fortuna need shopping,” he said imperatively when reached by phone at Hoby’s Market in Scotia on Tuesday. But that’s not all they need, he said — they need jobs as well. “A city thrives on businesses,” he explained. By deleting those four pernicious words from the GPU, it’s like laying out a welcome mat for big box retail, and big boxes mean jobs, he said. Even the $8-dollar-an-hour kind, according to him, are better than nothing.

Berti claims the Council’s move to redact the GPU represents the desire of most Fortunans. “The Council represents the majority of the people,” he said. But Fortuna businessman Clif Clendenen, who recently announced his candidacy for the Second District Supervisor seat, doesn’t think so. He said he’s heard “resoundingly” from the community that Fortuna’s small-town qualities are what people like best about the place. Reached by phone on Tuesday, he said that keeping the phrase in the GPU “would set a tone to encourage development in a good way.”

City Councilmember Doug Strehl also doesn’t necessarily think the phrase needs to be thrown out. “As far as the wording, I had no trouble leaving ‘small-town atmosphere’ in,” he explained over the phone from his shoe store in Fortuna on Tuesday. “But my perception of a small-town atmosphere is something the people carry with them. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with the size of the city.”

Still, Strehl understands where the Council is coming from. At issue is future interpretation. “We’re trying to make it clear enough 20 years from now what we meant,” he said. “There was a concern on the Council that if we wrote ‘small-town atmosphere,’ 20 years from now that could mean ‘no growth.’”

But Strehl isn’t worried that nixing Fortuna’s small-town qualities in words will change the city in deeds. “I would still love it to be the Friendly City,” he said.

There’s no question about that, according to Berti. “Fortuna will always be the friendliest people,” he said. “We go out of our way to make sure contractors can do things legally. After it’s all through, everybody’s happy.”

But nothing, as of yet, is written in stone. Fortuna City Planner Stephen Avis said Tuesday that no changes to the GPU have yet been made. Proposed changes will be decided on at the end of the month. Avis will recommend keeping the phrase, but defining it clearly. “We want the document to be as complete as possible, to be an accurate reflection of the community and as useful a tool [as possible] for guiding future development,” he said.

You might be wondering right about now: How exactly will small-town qualities be defined? Therein lies the rub. “It’s like that famous line from the Supreme Court,” Clendenen explained. “It’s hard to define it, but you know it when you see it.”

— Japhet Weeks

Grab Your Pitchfork

Boy, that was a burly editorial in last Wednesday’s Eureka Reporter. Headlined “Professor’s depreciation theory not supported by North Coast history,” the editorial excoriated HSU Economics Professor Erick Eschker for daring to suggest that Humboldt County home prices may fall in the coming years.

Earlier in the week, the Reporter had published a story about one of Eschker’s recent publications, “It’s a National Housing Market.” In his paper, was published on the Internet as a supplement to his monthly Humboldt Economic Index, Eschker compares local housing rents to home prices, and suggests that the two were driven far out of balance during the recent housing boom. To Eschker, this suggests that there exists a bubble in the housing market, and that home prices might have to fall by up to 40 percent (in inflation-adjusted dollars) to bring them back into line with rental prices

Mention of falling home prices apparently sent a shock through the Humboldt County real estate world. On Wednesday, Larry O. Doss, president of the Humboldt Association of Realtors, took out full-page ads in both the Reporter and the Times-Standard arguing that such a precipitous drop in home value would be all but impossible; that Humboldt County real estate is as good an investment as it ever was.

And it was apparently those ads, or some other pressure from the real estate world, that stirred the Reporter editorial board to write up its own renunciation of the Eschker report. In it the Reporter denounced the professor’s work as “ridiculous,” “totally fictitious,” “full of hot water” [sic] and — most damning of all — “just a theory.”

“While we do not have any economic expertise as Eschker claims he has as the HSU Economics Department’s chairperson, we do not believe there will be an unprecedented drop in North Coast real estate values,” the Reporter wrote. The syntax was awkward, but the message was clear.

Reached at his office Tuesday, Eschker was fairly nonplussed at the stir his work had caused. He said that the rent-to-home price metric he employed to forecast a drop in prices was widely accepted throughout the field, and had been referenced by a San Francisco Federal Reserve banker earlier this week.

“This reaction is really a local version of what’s been playing out in big cities, or nationally, recently,” he said. “I suspect what’s happening is that people don’t like to hear the news about where things might be going. For me, I’m about looking at where we’ve been and making an educated guess about where things might be going. I’m not a salesperson.”

Eschker said that only one real estate professional had contacted him personally since the whole brouhaha erupted, and that professional was very supportive of his work. He said that there was no bad blood between himself and the Humboldt Association of Realtors, whose data he partly relies upon in formulating the Humboldt Economic Index. He had just received new HAR data earlier this week, he said — and it showed that after being adjusted for seasonal activity, last month was the worst month for Humboldt County home sales since 1997.

Is his work “just a theory”? Will home prices fall by exactly 40 percent? “I’ll tell you right now — I’m sure I’ll be wrong, and I’m sure no one else will get it precisely right either,” Eschker said Tuesday. But anyone who doubts his powers of prognostication might want to look in the Journal archives — Oct. 13, 2005, to be precise — for a story titled “The end of the boom?” In it, Eschker predicted that the then-hot Humboldt housing market was just about to peak. And peak it did.

— Hank Sims

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