IS THE “CENTRAL VALLEY” THE NEXT FOCUS FOR GROWTH IN CALIFORNIA?

…The Padre Hotel, once shuttered for years, is the latest sign of Bakersfield’s rediscovery.

Bakersfield is the 2^nd fastest growing city in California!

Many visiting tourists and vacationing Californian’s often dismiss inland California cities such as Bakersfield, Fresno, Merced and Modesto, and other Highway 99 drive-through towns that seldom made the state’s tourism maps.  For decades these towns have been languishing behind the allure of the California coast. But there’s a transformation happening in California’s Central Valley. These second-tier cities, once known primarily as the core of the nation’s agricultural engine, are now drawing new businesses and young people away from cosmopolitan enclaves, where the high cost of living has priced them out.

There’s a relatively new side-of-the-highway sign that now notifies drivers that maybe, just maybe, there is something more here than a gas station and a drive-thru Jack in the Box for a burger and fries.  This freeway sign reads, “Bakersfield — Next 13 Exits”.  It’s become a kind of invitation to a large and growing city once known as a place to avoid.

“It tells people we’re not just a place to stop for food or gas” said David Lyman, a gray-bearded PhD who runs the city’s tourism bureau. “The challenge has never been to get people to come. It’s been to get people to stay.”

And stay, they are.

The dynamic underscores a priority of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s relatively new administration.  In recent years, California’s traditional north-south rivalry has given way to an east-west divide over government policy and resources.  Newsom, a Bay Area liberal, pledged during last year’s campaign to make closing that gap a priority and he’s showing he meant it.

“We can’t have two California’s,” said Lenny Mendonca, Newsom’s chief economic and business adviser, who was raised in Turlock, just a ways up Highway 99 from Bakersfield. “We have to have more housing development on the coast where the jobs are arriving, and we need more job production in parts of the state where the population is growing. And that is in the diverse, interesting eastern part of the state that people usually fly over.”

California’s population grew 0.47 percent last year, the lowest rate in the state’s history.  But here in Bakersfield, the growth rate was more than double that, making the city of nearly 400,000 the second-fastest-growing of the state’s large metro areas.  Sacramento, also far from the coast, was first in growth and it is also considered in the Central Valley.

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Many of those arriving, and staying, are young people. The median age of Bakersfield residents is just over 30 years old.  The youth migration is infusing this traditionally conservative area with a new ethic.  It’s part cowboy, part craft beer & cocktails, and it is propelling a revival of downtown districts.

Three hotels are being built across the city and three more are in the planning stage. The surge has made Bakersfield the hottest hotel construction market in California.

San Diego, along with the Los Angeles and San Francisco metro areas, posted the highest inflation rates of any cities in the country over the past year. Housing prices, in particular, are driving the increases. The median home price in Bakersfield is $237,000; in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, it’s $1.2 million.  Recently, there was an offering of a bunk in a bunk bed in San Francisco for $1,200 a month.  It's gotten ridiculous.

But yes, there are some serious challenges to Bakersfield’s new appeal.

Let’s face it, the weather is wood-oven hot in the summer, and the air quality is often poor with oil-field pollution caught between the Sierra and coastal ranges.  The place gets shaken, as it was twice recently by earthquakes, which knocked out power in the more remote parts of the area.

As with the rest of America, there is a drug problem and a homicide and homeless problem.  This last year prompted the usually conservative voters to approve a sales-tax increase to address these issues.  It was also revealed this month that more than 13,000 barrels of oil were spilled since May from a Chevron-run field outside Bakersfield.

The many changes are apparent, too.  Bakersfield’s emerging frontier hipness can be seen in the Padre Hotel, a historic landmark with a red-neon sign that is the primary feature of the evening skyline in a city that has always grown out, never up.

The hotel opened in 1928.  Then it was a luxury spot for the Bakersfield oilmen, and has since followed the city’s uneven growth.  It was shuttered for years, then the Padre reopened in 2010 as a boutique attraction after a renovation supported in part by government-backed loans.  The new-Western vibe has become something of a model for the city’s rediscovery.

A pop-art design of a cowgirl looking over her shoulder, the slogan “That Dog’ll Hunt” as caption, covers the wall behind the registration desk.  At happy hour, the Brimstone Lobby Bar is packed, the red-felt billiards table occupied for hours.

The question Rachel Parlier heard many times during her senior year at San Diego State University, where she majored in marketing, was: “Why do you want to go back to Bakersfield?”

After graduating from Ridgeview High School here, Parlier headed for the Pacific coast, and usually that’s a one-way trip for the city’s teenagers.

But she returned, to Bakersfield, what locals call Bak-O, astonishing her college friends.  She is now the digital media marketing manager for the Bakersfield Condors, a popular minor-league ice hockey affiliate of the Edmonton Oilers.  “If you’d have asked me that question my freshman year, I’m not sure how I would have answered,” Parlier said.

Parlier missed home and the best chicken-fried-steak and her family.  What she calls the “big city, country feeling” that is Bakersfield’s signature.  “We’re growing so fast now I don’t know if we’ll keep that country feeling,” she said. 

“We’ve always been extremely defensive when people say negative things about our community,” said Nicholas Ortiz, president of the Bakersfield Chamber of Commerce. “Traditionally, inland California has been a part of California, but also apart from California’s coast.”

Ortiz, 37, was born and raised in Bakersfield, then headed, without a thought of returning, to school at the University of California at Santa Cruz.  He met his future wife there, also a Bakersfield native, and the two began careers in the tech mecca of San Jose.

At the time, a little more than a decade ago, the couple was paying $1,100 a month for a 900-square-foot apartment in San Jose. Ortiz said that was a stretch for their then income.

Ortiz visited San Jose recently. The same apartment unit is renting for three times that amount, while he and his wife are paying much less for a 2,700-square-foot home with a pool in Bakersfield.  Ortiz and his wife have two children, now 6 and 7 years old.  Ortiz said that if they had remained in Silicon Valley, they probably would only now be considering starting a family.

Among other projects, Ortiz has been working with city officials on a new Bakersfield branding campaign. It will be a way to sell the city to those who still think of it still as the butt of a joke.

This this city that, for decades, Johnny Carson ridiculed on “The Tonight Show” as the definition of provincial dullness.  Carson did admit that he had bombed in a Bakersfield nightclub and he never entirely forgave the city.

Irma Olquin, was born in a small town outside Fresno, north of Bakersfield.  She co-founded the software company, Bitwise in 2013, and it has since trained 4,000 students in computer coding.  It also brought 1,000 high tech jobs to Fresno. The company announced this month that it had secured $27 million in new investment, which will finance its expansion to Bakersfield.

“The story of Bakersfield and the problems it has faced are so similar to the ones Fresno and other Central California cities face,” Olguin said, adding that the “grittiness and scrappiness of the people resonates.”

“For too long, young people in the Central Valley left to pursue their careers,” she said. “We want to make sure they don’t have to do that anymore.”

All young people like fun, but it was never something Bakersfield offered. 

But, if the micro-brew concept is any measure, the city is evolving quickly along with its population.

Temblor Brewing Co. occupies a large warehouse-style space along Buck Owens Boulevard, where the late country star’s Crystal Palace remains the city’s top tourist attraction.

Temblor is more San Francisco than Central Valley, with its stainless-steel tanks and leather couches.  It now hosts the Bakersfield Jazz Workshop on every Tuesday night.

“The more young people that move in, the more demand there is for better restaurants and beer and other things that bigger cities have,” said Francesca Colombo, Temblor’s 31-year-old operations manager, who moved back to Bakersfield from San Francisco.

Since Temblor opened four years ago, three other local breweries have started up across the city. Colombo doesn’t mind the competition because of what it says about Bakersfield and where it is heading.  “It’s just not as boring here as it used to be,” Colombo said.

Bakersfield has only one direction for the future, and that direction appears to be up!

Copyright G. Ater 2019