Hayward's Place In The Megalopolis
St. Rose Hospital will get State money to build a new facility, A former CSUH Professor releases a book on the California Megalopolis, and the Fire Department gets a new toy.
Subacute Care and Jaws of Life
St. Rose Hospital Gets its Subacute Money
The City is accepting a $2,000,000 grant from the California Department of Health Care Services to finally build the subacute facility that St. Rose has been looking to build for several years. It’s good for the people who use St. Rose because, as the Staff report states, it’s used for “someone who does not require hospital acute care but has an acute illness, injury, or exacerbation of a disease process that requires more intensive care than is provided to patients in a general nursing facility.” This will free up intensive care rooms at St. Rose, where subacute patients now spend their time until their release.
Secondly, it’s good for the Community Services Commission. St. Rose has been putting in applications for the subacute facility for several years now. There have been some issues with their applications and spending out money on time—not to mention asking for more money than the CSC could possibly provide. Not having to write and read the applications and conduct an interview will save St. Rose and the City some resources.
It will also give the CSC some political breathing room. Many members of the City Council are on the St. Rose Foundation Board, and those who aren’t are still fairly cozy with the St. Rose administration. So having to deny St. Rose funding on multiple occasions has been a politically difficult issue for some of the Council-appointed Commissioners.
The Staff Report also points out the benefits of helping other local hospitals, freeing up intensive care units, lowering 911 use, and the jobs that will be added. It’s also one of the ways that St. Rose is planning on achieving financial sustainability—not to mention making the facility more attractive to anyone looking to partner with or take over the hospital.
New Jaws of Life for HFD
The Fire Department is looking to purchase a new set of Jaws of Life. Coming in at a little over $111,000 the Fire Department has decided to land on the Amkus brand, for those who are looking to buy one of their own. They’ve tried another brand, and settled on this one because it uses DeWalt batteries, much like the rest of the large powered tools that the Fire Department uses. So keep an eye out for that the next time there’s a big car accident.
A Life’s Work Culminates at Books on B
At a standing-room only event hosted at Books on B on February 11th, a local professor celebrated the culmination of decades of inquiry and research. Dr. Basil Sherlock, emeritus Professor of Sociology at CSU Hayward, sat in front of California atlases and travel guides to discuss his latest book From Missions to Megalopolis: El Camino Real, California’s Road to the 21st Century at Books on B. With the assistance of his wife, Ingrid Moller, the soft-spoken 90-year-old academic discussed his life, the current state of California’s Megalopolis, and what the future has in store for the region.
Far from having a background in geography or urban planning, Dr. Sherlock’s academic path began with chemistry and the study of doctor and nurse addictions—so-called “secret addictions”—in Kentucky. From there, his scholarship developed into biology, then psychology, before finally settling on Sociology. When he arrived at CSU Hayward in 1971, Dr. Sherlock was tasked with teaching a class on marriage and sex which became quite popular—some former students even attended the event.
What drew Dr. Sherlock’s interest to the subject of the Megalopolis was an interest in the region he lived in, the San Francisco Bay Area. After discussing the history of California development from Indigenous tribes to modern cities, the book separates California into 5 distinct regions: The El Camino Real, the Inland Empire, The Great Central Valley, The Gold Rush Counties, and the Redwood Empire. Each has its own defining characteristics, history, and population trajectory.
Dr. Sherlock then suggests an alternative definition of Megalopolis, instead of a single mega-city—like Tokyo, Delhi, or Shanghai—he defines it as a “system of cities” that form “building blocks for an urbanized region.” He offers five examples of megalopolises: The Tokaido in Japan, The Ruhrgebeit in Germany, the Randstad in the Netherlands, the Boston-to-Washington corridor on the US East Coast, and the El Camino Real in California. These regions have in common a major transit corridor that binds the regional cities together economically, if not politically.
After laying out the components that characterize a megalopolis region, Dr. Sherlock highlights that economic Booms make such regions possible. Using the El Camino Real as an example, he posits that the transit corridors allow the megalopolis regions to best use the Boom times to grow. The economic prosperity of events like the Gold Rush, the Post-War economy, or the .Com Bubble push a megalopolis into being, using a transit corridor to move capital throughout the region.
But the boom times that beget a megalopolis never last, “No longer involved in the joy and pain of galloping growth, a megalopolis may enter an era which could be named ‘Coalescence’—an integration of resources of the land and its inhabitants.” This coalescence can take two forms: a population stagnation and economic pivot like that experienced by the Ruhr region, or a dystopian hollowing-out like what occurred in the Rust Belt. Either option is a possibility, and it is up to the people and their governments to push the region in either direction.
If a positive pivot is made, the decreased population can materially benefit the residents who stay. “[T]he megalopolis ideally is more likely to employ its combined resources for the quality of life of the residents, offering better access to locations for science, medicine, education, libraries, and the arts.” This requires coordination between federated cities in a large region—something groups like the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) are working toward, though perhaps not quickly enough for everyone.
As always, we aren’t the first or only ones to have these problems. By taking a more global view, Dr. Sherlock encourages us to look to other megalopolis regions when developing policy so that we can make our own megalopolis more humane for the benefit its inhabitants. Sometimes, in order to succeed we need to be given a framework we can operate within, and Dr. Sherlock may have given us just that.
From Missions to Megalopolis: El Camino Real, California’s Road to the 21st Century by Dr. Basil Sherlock is available for purchase at Books on B in Downtown Hayward.