Broke Town USA

Vallejo is bar none the dodgiest town I have ever been to. And I used to live in Ballymun.

I was there for 15 minutes waiting for a bus and weird stuff happened:

- A perpetually sweating man with enormous glasses told me about how he watched porn for free in his buddies adult shop and that we should get a drink sometime.
- An effeminate man got called a (three letter word, synonym for gay) by a passing old man, the gay guy promptly started beating him over the head.
- An old black woman with a zimmer frame started directing her entourage to break up the fight telling them to "respect yo eldas".

I was also amused to find out that this is where the Zodiac Killer did his best work. A delightful place altogether.
When was this?



Mass Transit doesn't have that kind of creepy stuff anymore. OTOH Vallejo now has a thriving homosexual community.
 
Vallejo is bar none the dodgiest town I have ever been to. And I used to live in Ballymun.
I haven't been there in many years. But it didn't strike me as being any different from any other mostly blue collar city.

I was there for 15 minutes waiting for a bus and weird stuff happened...
I would say therein lies the problem. If you want to get acquainted with the "weird" part of any town or city, just try using the public bus system. Or better yet, spend a couple of hours in the bus terminal. Americans use cars as their form of transportation for the most part.

What occurred in Vallejo with the base closure has happened in countless northern cities when unionized corporations fled to the South, and more recently with so many auto plant closings in Michigan. It is a terrible predicament to have only a handful of very large employers in a community.

OTOH Orlando is an example where nothing really happened when the US Navy closed down their huge training facility there. There were enough other diverse employers so that there was little or no economic upheaval.

The same thing occurred in Silicon Valley. It created a temporary spike of high tech job seekers. But the vast majority simply got jobs in the commercial sector, or they relocated to areas where there were still defense jobs.

The biggest problem in the case of many smaller or medium-sized cities like Vallejo is that many of the residents don't want to relocate. They have frequently spent their entire lives there and that often goes back many generations.

When the US finally gets around to dramatically downsizing the military, which will likely make the 90s downsizing loook miniscule by comparison, this is going to occur in a handful of other cities.
 
Wrong analogy. Its more akin to having troops in a city helps out happiness, decreases unrest, thus it helps out city productivity as well.

What happened to no martial law in a demo?
Yeah, I like role-playing a democrat...:lol:

Make that a politician in a major US political party.

***

I hear Michigan is seeking to enact some emergency measures for the municipal funding problems they have there.
 
I would say therein lies the problem. If you want to get acquainted with the "weird" part of any town or city, just try using the public bus system. Or better yet, spend a couple of hours in the bus terminal. Americans use cars as their form of transportation for the most part.

Yeah very true.

As naive European types we took public transport everywhere.

We had to go through Vallejo on a series of buses to get to the Six Flags just north of SF. It was bizarre to us that there wasn't a proper public transport link to something so big. We stayed until the park closed and waited at the bus stop outside to go home, hundreds of people streaming out of the park for the day. The only other people waiting for the bus were two other Irish people! Crazy. :lol:

When was this?

Summer 2009

Mass Transit doesn't have that kind of creepy stuff anymore. OTOH Vallejo now has a thriving homosexual community.

As far as I could tell, mass transit was full of weirdos in the States. Vallejo just took the prize as weirdest.
 
Outside of major metropolitan areas, the only people you will typically see using buses are domestics, the young, and the elderly.

And I can't believe you actually took buses to get to Six Flags! That must have taken forever!
 
Yeah it did. Much puzzling over google maps was done and it was the only way short of getting a lift, and that wasn't available.
 
Yeah it did. Much puzzling over google maps was done and it was the only way short of getting a lift, and that wasn't available.
Walking from a bus stop?
 
When I was in Iraq one of the other reservists was a cop in Vallejo. I've also done more then a bit of the water and soil sampling at the old base.
 
Your buses don't reach affluent parts of town? I call shenanigans
Sure they do, at least to some extent. Domestics have to have some way to get at least reasonably close to their final destination.
 
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