Tabla de contenidos para July/August 2020 en The Texas Observer

Rethinking Suburbia I agree that maligning the suburbs (“Rocking the Suburbs” March|April issue) is wrong, but as a development model, I don’t think they’re sustainable. Higher density is the future. City life may be expensive, but cities generate the bulk of the tax revenue our society depends on to sustain infrastructure. The suburbs can’t do it. Joshua Krause VIA FACEBOOK TEXAS-STYLE SUBDIVISIONS ARE MASSIVELY wasteful. They force all traffic through narrow choke points on major roads, force people to maintain lawns with water and gasoline, and force them to drive everywhere just to live. If people had other choices, many would not live there. Jim Pabst VIA FACEBOOK ‘Essential’ Labor THIS ARTICLE (“WILL GROCERY WORKERS STILL BE ‘Heroes’ When COVID-19 Subsides?” May 1, texasobserver.org) makes the assumption that [grocery workers]…

An estimated 1.6 million Texans have lost their employer-sponsored health coverage during the COVID-19 pandemic. About 30,000 of those newly uninsured would be eligible for Medicaid if Texas—which already has the highest uninsured rate in the country—expanded the program under the Affordable Care Act. State officials are facing bipartisan criticism for a $295 million deal inked with a little-known company in mid-May to manage contact tracing for COVID-19 in the state. Governor Greg Abbott announced Phase Three of his plan to reopen Texas businesses in June, despite a slew of days with record cases and hospitalizations, and despite not meeting targets set by the CDC and Abbott himself. As of June 3, bars, gyms, water parks, museums, sports events, and more could open at 50 percent capacity. Restaurants could run…

WHEN I WAS 20, I WAS arrested by the Houston Police Department. I had taken broken pieces of Sheetrock from a trash pile at a construction site to patch holes in the walls of the house where I lived; it was winter and the dilapidated house my friends and I rented was cold and drafty. I didn’t know at the time that taking trash from a construction site was illegal. A neighbor in the rapidly gentrifying area must have called 911. Shortly after I left with the discarded Sheetrock, Houston police pulled me over, ordered me out of my vehicle at gunpoint, made me lie down on the bed of my truck, and put a gun to the back of my head before handcuffing me. I was scared then, and…

WHEN GARY BLAKE LAUNCHED Creative Solutions in Healthcare in 2000, he started small, opening a single modest nursing home in Granbury. Now Blake runs a nursing home empire. He owns or operates 64 nursing facilities across Texas, from big cities to rural cow towns; Creative Solutions pulls in a reported $282 million annually. But the Fort Worth-based company and other for-profit facilities throughout the state have been dogged by deaths of residents and serious rule violations for years, the Observer and Type Investigations found. And, advocates say, federal and state regulators have done little to hold them accountable. Then COVID-19 hit. Just weeks after the coronavirus was first detected in Texas, nursing homes statewide quickly became the main breeding grounds for the virus as officials struggled to control the spread.…

IN THE DECADE LEADING UP TO 1920, SUFFRAGists in Texas won a series of dramatic victories for women’s voting rights. They organized to impeach a governor, convinced his replacement to partially enfranchise women by promising to support his reelection, and leveraged their new voting power to lobby crucial support for the Nineteenth Amendment—which prohibits denying citizens the right to vote on the basis of sex—in both the U.S. Congress and the Texas Capitol. Despite their importance to the amendment’s eventual ratification 100 years ago this August, Texas’ suffragists remain relatively unknown. For suffragists of color, this is nothing new—their contributions were often ignored and erased even in their own lifetimes. But today, even Minnie Fisher Cunningham, the leader of the late-1910s legislative organizing charge who would go on to run…

Power Politics MAYBE YOU HEARD IT WHEN GOVERNOR GREG abbott critiqued local officials who enforced his pandemic executive orders. Or maybe it was when U.S. Senator John Cornyn said he would support a hypothetical vote on a Supreme Court nominee after spending 2016 blocking Merrick Garland. Perhaps it was over the past two legislative sessions as the Texas GOP discovered it actually didn’t like local control when the locals were turning blue. Hypocrisy in politics isn’t a bug. It’s a feature. There’s no grand umpire or arbiter who punishes elected officials for inconsistency. I’m talking about the word “hypocrite.” The accusation has become a go-to for Texas Democrats watching their Republican colleagues backtrack on stated values and positions the moment it becomes convenient. Here’s an important lesson: Hypocrisy in politics…

“THERE WASN’T ANYTHING SPECIAL ABOUT US,” SAYS THE COLLECTIVE narrator of the title story in Matthew Baker’s Why Visit America. “We were just an average town. Porch swings, wading pools, split-rail fences, pumpjacks bobbing for oil on the horizon.” ¶ That’s Plainfield, a fictional small town in Real County, Texas. You could see it as a thinly veiled version of Leakey, the actual county seat of Real County, except for one thing: Plainfieldians don’t bleed red, white, and blue. “We were fed up with our country … We were anti-government, we were anti-corporate, but mostly we were normal people who couldn’t afford to buy an election and had come to understand that our votes didn’t mean shit.” So residents decide to secede from the United States and declare their town…

On May 26, the New York Times published a story about how COVID-19 has exacerbated food insecurity in San Antonio, where thousands of people form long lines each day at the San Antonio Food Bank. But the newspaper erroneously described San Antonio as “the economic heart of a swath of south-central Texas called the Alamo.” Which of the following Texas geography blunders did not actually happen? a. The Poynter Institute referred to the West Texas town of Marfa as a Dallas suburb.b. Former Governor Rick Perry thought the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez was in Texas.c. Fox News held an immigration-related town hall in Texas called “Battle at the Border” but hosted the event in Austin.d. On the campaign trail, Joe Biden said the site of a 2019 mass shooting…

LUBBOCK // Retired flight attendant Leslie Fylling wanted to move to Lubbock. But when she found her dream house, COVID-19 had made traveling to the city to see it in person untenable. Instead, she arranged to view the house via FaceTime, purchasing it without ever going inside. “I’ve been in real estate over 35 years, and we didn’t have this opportunity when we first started, so this is very exciting,” Linda Day, the real estate agent who sold the home, told KLBK. EL PASO // The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the cadence of the El Paso Opera’s in-person performances, but the show must go on. In late May, the group began a series of community concertos—that is, curbside performances from a truck bed. Residents may request a performance in their own…

IN JANUARY 2017, ROSALIE DOWNING WAS ADMITTED TO MOUNTAIN View Health & Rehabilitation, a low-slung nursing home with four wings in El Paso’s Golden Hill neighborhood. Rosalie had kidney disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes. She used a wheelchair and needed help using the bathroom, bathing, and getting into bed. Her son, Charles Downing, made the tough decision to put her in the nursing home, one recommended by her physician. “Abuse has more headlines, but neglect has more victims.” “She was getting dementia,” Charles said. “She wasn’t able to take care of herself. She was waking up two or three times a night.” One November morning in 2018, Rosalie fell when a nurse tried to move her from the bed to her wheelchair. She fractured her right arm and hip…

Wildflowers bleed yellow and scarlet along the interstate,the sky opens its staring eyes. All is gooduntil the squirrel jumps across the road,and we feel that body’s soft fistunder one wheel. Then the next. A decidedlycompact and visceral death. Next day, squirrels in our backyard grasp the trees.A furred syntax moving along the swerveof oak branches and city wires, a splayed-feetBarnum & Bailey circus. Their genus, Sciurus,derived fromthe Greek for shadow and tail, because they resideunder the shade of their sumptuous tails. Now a squirrelequals for me its umbrella of portable darkness. I am juxtaposed against more than I can keep count of: garden hoses like sleepingsnakes on the pebbled ground, the landlord’s dusty trelliswith one shrunken rose, an unsolved murder/suicide that takes placethree blocks away and I hear of only…