Tonight on State of the Bay, what is California doing to curb the mental health crisis facing young people? We’re two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, and mental health care professionals, educators, and politicians are drawing attention to the alarming increase in depression, anxiety, and suicide attempts among our youth. While the Newsom administration plans to spend $4.4 billion over the next five years to transform California’s youth behavioral health system, many child advocates believe we’re not moving fast enough.
Joining us to discuss will be Jocelyn Wiener, health and mental health reporter for CalMatters.
We’ll also hear from journalist and author Rachel Krantz, co-founding editor of Bustle, about her new book Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation, and Non-Monogamy.
Finally, we’ll learn about the Oakland Museum of California‘s new exhibit on the iconic Californian ceramicist, Edith Heath, with Drew Johnson, curator of photography and visual culture and co-curator of “Edith Heath: A Life in Clay.”
What would you like to ask our guests? Post a comment here, tweet us @StateofBay, send an email to stateofthebay@kalw.org or leave a voicemail at (415) 580-0718.
Tune in tonight at 6pm PT on KALW 91.7 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area or stream live. You can also call 866-798-TALK with questions during the show.
Feeling anxious about Election Day tomorrow? You’re not alone. According to the American Psychological Association, more than two-thirds of Americans say the 2020 presidential election is a significant source of stress in their lives. Tonight at 6pm on City Visions, we’ll discuss techniques for managing the emotional toll of this election and share some tips for how to cope with the potential days or weeks of uncertainty ahead.
Plus we’ll talk about San Francisco’s re-opening pause following an uptick in COVID cases last week, and we’ll hear our interview with Oakland-based singer and composer Bobi Céspedes, whose new album is “Mujer y Cantante.”
Joining me will be:
- Emily Anhalt, clinical psychologist & co-founder of Coa, the world’s first gym for mental health
- Emiliana Simon-Thomas, science director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley
- Bobi Céspedes, vocalist and composer in the Cuban son tradition
- Erin Allday, health reporter, San Francisco Chronicle
Call us during the show with your questions at 6pm PT at 866-798-TALK or send an email to cityvisions@kalw.org. We’re airing on 91.7 FM KALW in San Francisco and streaming live. Hope you can join us!
“Is it safe to take the bus?” That’s the question on people’s minds as we enter into the seventh month of the pandemic in the Bay Area. With ridership down, revenue across all Bay Area transit agencies has taken a huge hit that they may never recover from.
Join us on City Visions tonight at 6pm, as I host Jeffrey Tumlin, Director of the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency (MUNI/SFMTA), to find out how MUNI is coping with all of these changes and planning for the future.
We’ll also hear from Paula Farmer, book buyer at Book Passage in Corte Madera, with her recommendations for books on racial justice, and we’ll get a Covid update from our experts Erin Allday, health reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle and Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, infectious disease specialist at the UCSF School of Medicine.
Call us during the show at 6pm with your questions at 866-798-TALK or send an email to cityvisions@kalw.org. We’re airing on 91.7 FM KALW in San Francisco and streaming live. Hope you can join us!
Imagine: a severe pandemic races through the United States, hitting cities like New York hard. Public transit is partially blamed for the spread, given that transit works best by squeezing in a lot of people in tight places to move them efficiently.
What happens next, as the virus dissipates? After a few years dealing with panic and fear of being too close to others, how will urban residents react?
In response, residents could start to abandon cities and the public transit they depend on. Americans might choose to move out of high-cost, dense transit-dependent urban areas to emerging lower-cost, western cities, built around the automobile and single-family homes. They might abandon transit forever.
The result could be catastrophic, an environmental wasteland dominated by suburban sprawl, crushing traffic, and choking pollution, with little open space or agricultural land preserved. Those left behind in cities to ride transit will predominantly be lower-income individuals who can’t afford a car or single family home – too often people of color. This dynamic will only worsen racial disparities, and transit service, already underfunded, will worsen.
But this harsh reality is actually not the future — it’s what already happened in our past. Specifically, after the 1918-1920 Spanish Flu, urban residents abandoned American cities, particularly in the East Coast, lured to the cheap housing and car culture of places like Los Angeles. Developers sold the West Coast “car suburb” to newcomers as offering an escape from disease-ridden cities. The result was the environmental degradation and ongoing racial residential segregation we see today.
To be sure, since Spanish Flu times, trends on transit have reversed to some extent. Urban rail transit launched a comeback starting in the 1960s, and cities have since been revitalized with strong demand for housing. Voters have increasingly taxed themselves to build more and better transit, particularly with local sales tax measures.
And in the Spanish Flu era, the automobile was new and exciting, but the limits of the technology were not yet widely understood. Consumers only saw the upsides of driving, not the downsides of increased traffic, pollution, transportation costs, suburban isolation and lost open space. Since that time, we’ve learned many of those lessons and implemented new environmental policies to counteract the pollution and sprawl.
But public transit is indeed in serious danger. Fear is powerful, and those with means will choose to drive or work from home instead of taking on the risk of getting the virus from transit. Those with no other option, such as people with low-incomes, service jobs requiring in-person work, or disabilities, will have no other choice, exacerbating social inequities.
The result will be a downward spiral: as ridership plummets, budgets take a hit, transit service is cut back, and the systems overall can become unappealing to lure “choice” riders back who could otherwise drive.
This future in many ways is already here, in the initial months of COVID sheltering. As Janette Sadik-Khan and Seth Solomonow noted recently in The Atlantic, ridership on bus and rail systems has already dropped from pre-pandemic levels by:
- 74 percent in New York
- 79 percent in Washington, D.C.
- 83 percent in Boston
- 87 percent in the Bay Area
We all have a stake in making sure this outcome isn’t permanent. Transit is essential for cities, as our economic and cultural engines, to function well. We also need transit to reduce driving miles and pollution and reduce pressure to sprawl. And transit can address equity concerns, by providing mobility for those who can’t afford a vehicle.
So how do we save public transit post-Coronavirus and not repeat the mistakes of the past?
First, transit officials and advocates need to address the public’s fear. The evidence on viral spread via transit is mixed at best. On its face, we’ve seen outbreaks in places with heavy public transit use, like in New York City, so the public and some scientists have superficially connected transit ridership with disease spread.
But recent studies in Paris and Austria showed no spread from transit. And looking at the geography, it’s hard to see a connection between COVID and transit:
- Hong Kong with heavy transit use has recorded one-tenth the number of cases as Kansas
- In New York, car-heavy Staten Island has had higher infection rates than transit-dependent Manhattan
- Cities in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan have had little infection compared to suburban parts of the US or Italy, where outskirts of Milan were hit harder than the city itself
In general, spread seems to be more acute in places like nursing homes and prisons and among families living together, not via transit.
Second, transit officials should point to and replicate success stories. Taipei in Taiwan provides perhaps the gold standard. Taiwan officials require mandatory mask wearing on trasit. They use noninvasive handheld or infrared thermometers to screen all riders. They test, trace and quarantine, and they clean the systems well. Transit officials also adjust service to limit crowding. All of these steps require resources in times of budget crunches, so we’ll need financial support for transit, for both environmental and equity reasons.
Third, officials can highlight the miserable alternative to supporting transit. Without transit, we would see significantly more traffic congestion, including traffic deaths (averaging about 37,000 in the US per year). We’d also see more pollution, imperiling our air quality, public health, equity, and climate goals.
Fourth, we need to boost non-automobile alternatives to transit. These options include “active” transportation, timely with e-bike sales skyrocketing and the proliferation of e-scooters. Cities can also explore employing more shuttles and vans instead of mass transit. And they can set aside street infrastructure for all of these uses, as well as offering rebates and other incentives to encourage e-bike and e-scooter purchases, to replicate success we’ve seen with zero-emission passenger vehicles.
And there looms one major, yet controversial idea to consider for the long term: replacing all rail transit with far-cheaper and more efficient automated, electric bus-rapid transit lines (ART) on the dedicated lanes of former rail tracks. This transition would harness new technology in self-driving software and improvements in batteries to save transit agencies orders of magnitude in costs for operations and maintenance compared to rail. And with rows of connected buses, ART can replicate the capacity and electric propulsion of rail at a fraction of the time to build and money to operate — timely for squeezed transit agency budgets. Now might be the time for transit agencies to study these conversions.
In the future, public transit post-COVID doesn’t necessarily have to replicate the past. But unless we act now to bolster public transit and its sustainable alternatives, we may indeed find ourselves moving backwards, in more ways than one.
What can be done to keep COVID-19 out of California’s prisons? On tonight’s City Visions on KALW 91.7 FM San Francisco, we look at these high-risk environments, where social distancing is virtually impossible. We’ll hear from doctors on the front lines of this effort.
At the top of the hour, we’ll have a coronavirus update from health and medical experts, and we’ll also hear about how one local theater company, ACT, is handling what it’s calling this “long intermission.”
Our guests include:
- San Francisco Chronicle reporter Erin Allday and USCF’s Dr. Peter Chin-Hong.
- COVID-19 and prisons expert Dr. Alison Pachynksi, Head of Internal Medicine at San Quentin Prison; Adnan Khan, Executive Director of Re:Store Justice; and Dr. Brie Williams, Founder of AMEND at UCSF.
- American Conservatory Theater performance of Rocky Horror Picture Show (prerecorded) and conversation with Pam Mackinnon, Artistic Director of ACT (donate here to support Theatre Bay Area).
Call us during the show with your questions at 866-798-TALK or send an email to cityvisions@kalw.org. We’re airing on 91.7 FM KALW in San Francisco and streaming live.
The COVID-19 virus and global response has sparked massive changes in our economy and every day lives. There is a lot conjecture about how this experience may shape long-term responses to climate change, from a crashing oil and gas market to the potential for the public taking scientific projections of calamity more seriously.
I’m mostly pessimistic about how the virus and our response to it will shape long-term climate change efforts. My guess is that life will mostly return to our normal fossil fuel-burning ways once the pandemic eases. And in the short term, the economic recession will undermine clean tech investment, while virus panic will hurt transit ridership and possibly undercut support for urban living.
But there’s one potential bright spot for the climate that may outlive this current era: working from home. Prior to the pandemic, only 4% of U.S. employees worked from home, according to Global Workplace Analytics. But now more than half of the 135-million people in the U.S. workforce is setting up in a home office.
The firm estimates that at this rate, by the end of next year 25% to 30% of the total U.S. workforce will be telecommuting, the carbon equivalent of “taking all of New York’s workforce permanently off the road,” per Kate Lister, president of the firm.
From a greenhouse gas perspective, it means many fewer driving miles from commuting. Otherwise, approximately 86% of Americans drive to work, according the National Household Travel Survey. If just 25% of Americans began teleworking even one day per week after the pandemic, total vehicle miles traveled would fall by 1%, which is actually a significant amount of the more than 3.2 trillion miles driven in the U.S. in 2018. The numbers could go much higher if telecommuting were multiple days per week for more people.
And why might these work from home habits stick, as opposed to other environmental friendly measures taken during the pandemic? Simple: working from home is more convenient and productive for most people. But prior to the pandemic, many managers weren’t comfortable allowing the practice, believing (falsely) that it would hurt bottom lines.
But now that everyone who can work from home is forced into this arrangement without calamity, my guess is that this manager resistance will fade. And any employees who might have guessed they wouldn’t enjoy working from home may also be finding that there are significant upsides, which would lead them to agitate for supervisor permission to continue the practice.
Telecommuting by itself won’t solve transportation emissions, but it could set the stage for further reforms, such as dedicating more public spaces like streets for pedestrians and bicyclists, as European cities are now contemplating. After all, people working at home will want to take walks and get out for exercise, and in cities that means streets will need to be converted.
In addition, telecommuting may solidify the current practice of transitioning work travel and conferences to on-line events and meetings. If people are already comfortable working at home, they may be more likely to continue participating in panels and meetings remotely, too, which will reduce car and plane flights.
Perhaps there will be other long-term climate benefits from COVID-19. But to my mind, working from home seems like the most obvious candidate for a pandemic culture-changer that reduces emissions.
Schools are closed, and Zoom is the new classroom for thousands of Bay Area students. Tonight on City Visions (new time from 9-10pm) on KALW local public radio we’ll discuss how local school districts are handling distance learning, get tips from teachers and hear about what we can do to create equitable learning experiences for all.
We’ll also get an update on the latest local pandemic developments and hear a specially composed reflection on life in the COVID-19 era by Bay Area novelist Vanessa Hua.
Guests will include:
- Erin Allday, health reporter, San Francisco Chronicle
- Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, professor of medicine and infectious diseases specialist, UCSF
- JC Farr, principal, Tamalpais High School in Marin County
- Lisa Kelly, 6th grade English teacher at the Life Academy in Oakland
- Jill Tucker, K-12 education reporter, San Francisco Chronicle
- Vanessa Hua, novelist whose books include “Deceipt and Other Possibilities” and “A River of Stars”
Call us during the show with your questions and experiences at 866-798-TALK or send an email to cityvisions@kalw.org. We’re airing on 91.7 FM KALW in San Francisco and streaming live.
The parallels between the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change are striking. Both events featured stark warnings from scientists about impending disaster. Both required early, short-term mobilization that would head off severe longer-term pain. And both were routinely ignored and laughed at by right-wing denialists, with prominent Fox News pundits and Donald Trump (among others) labeling them both “hoaxes.”
So why do people cling to incorrect beliefs? UC Berkeley recently featured an interview on this question with Celeste Kidd, a computational cognitive scientist at the university who studies false beliefs, curiosity and learning. First, Ms. Kidd described the problem:
All of us stick to beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence. All of us have beliefs that do not match reality. It is unavoidable. But it’s possible that some people are better or worse than others at keeping an open mind. Our previous research suggests that uncertainty makes people more willing to change their mind. The downside of that is that constant uncertainty can make us less willing to make decisions and act, which would make it hard to navigate life.
So can people learn to improve their ability to reconsider beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence? While her research does not yet indicate that training could be effective for intransigent thinkers, she does offer this optimistic note:
But I see hope in the fact that people are fundamentally social and that they seek to engage with one another. People are sensitive to the beliefs of those around them. When those beliefs change, people may reconsider their positions. That’s why talking about what is happening is important, and informed people who know the most should be talking the loudest.
Of course, when everyone thinks they’re informed on a subject, then you end up with a lot of noise. But when the results of certain beliefs lead to undeniable disaster, whether it’s a global pandemic or worsening climate impacts, closed minds do start to change — just hopefully not too late to avert catastrophe.
With the COVID-19 virus shutting down cities and countries all over the world, anti-urban advocates are seizing the moment to argue that pandemics prove density is bad. For example, longtime sprawl booster Joel Kotkin argues that shelter-in-place orders and fear of contagion will push people to demand more lower-density homes, far from crowded and ailing cities.
These advocates have some support from scientists. Some public health experts point to density as a factor in spreading the disease, as the New York Times recently reported:
“Density is really an enemy in a situation like this,” said Dr. Steven Goodman, an epidemiologist at Stanford University. “With large population centers, where people are interacting with more people all the time, that’s where it’s going to spread the fastest.”
But at the same time, some of the densest nations around the world have had the most success fighting the spread of the virus, such as Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Singapore. In particular, Taipei and Saigon city leaders (among others) have been extremely effective in controlling the contagion.
By contrast, low-density suburbs have been among the first sites where the virus took hold in the U.S., such as in Kirkland, Washington, and New Rochelle, New York. Similarly, the outbreak in Italy began in small towns outside of Milan.
Given this evidence to date, governance appears to be far more important a factor than density in limiting the spread of the virus. Furthermore, density could actually be more helpful in controlling the spread, as governments can more easily enforce sheltering in place in smaller zones, while emergency response times and trips to the hospitals are typically faster than in far-flung rural areas (which also suffer a dearth of available medical facilities, as my colleague Dan Farber pointed out).
But the question remains: could the pandemic dampen demand for housing in dense urban environments, regardless of the science? People may still (perhaps irrationally) fear a dense environment as a disease-spreader. Or they may emerge scarred from this era of “sheltering in place” and prefer larger homes with outdoor space, just in case another pandemic requires a new round of society-wide house arrest.
History may provide some guide in answering this question, as low-density homes in the 1920s were certainly sold to the public as antidotes to disease-ridden, crowded cities. As Emily Badger noted in the New York Times, “[r]espiratory diseases in the early 20th century encouraged city dwellers to prize light and air, and something that looked more like country living.”
But as policy makers weigh options to boost density, they should keep in mind the myriad public health benefits that density can provide. It can foster more physical fitness from increased walking and biking instead of sedentary, automobile-based sprawl; mental health benefits from strong and frequent community interactions; and stronger health care from pooling resources for big public hospitals.
Furthermore, in an era of climate change, living in more compact environments can guard against extreme weather events. In California, for example, urban neighborhoods are among the most fire-safe during destructive and worsening wildfires, while also largely avoiding the electricity shut-offs needed to avoid igniting fires in high-fire sprawl zones. From a public safety perspective, density can now save lives during wildfires.
And sheltering in place in a more compact environment can bring elements of joy and community during a time that can otherwise feature crushing physical and emotional isolation. Witness scenes of a balcony opera performance in Florence to help neighbors cope with the lockdown or police in Mallorca, Spain singing songs for neighbors while enforcing the quarantine.
The human connection found in dense neighborhoods can not only help us get through this particular challenging time in human history, it can build the foundations for a healthier, more sustainable future. The current pandemic won’t change that reality.
