Miserable VS Magnificent: Stockton’s Dual Personality

by: Kelsey McNickle

Teens posing in front of a billboard in Stockton, CA

 At face value, Stockton is a less than unique city. It has crimes, both petty and deadly. The housing market collapsed when the 2008 bubble burst, leaving thousands in states of foreclosure over the ensuing years and others with value-less homes. It has a handful of minor league sports teams, none of them very successful. And the 105-degree weather in the summer, which some say indicates “nice weather”, makes you sweat. A lot.

None of these elements make Stockton, California very different from the majority of cities across America. Resident Michael Brooking says Stockton is just like all the other cities in the nation: “A mess.”

What does make Stockton unique is the exuberant extent to which these miserable conditions are present, and the abnormal amount of national attention paid to them.

Forbes magazine generates an annual list of “America’s Most Miserable Cities.” The rankings are based on levels of unemployment, foreclosure, housing prices, violent crime, tax rates, commute times, weather, pro sport team success, and corruption of public officials. All factors for this year’s ranking are calculated from 2010 data, except for the unemployment rate, which spans over a three-year time frame.

Official event flier for "Stockton Is Magnificent" Festival

Typically cities awarded a place in Forbes’ “Most Miserable” list take the title with a grain of salt, acknowledging that they live in a less-than-perfect city and resolving to not care one bit about it. This year, however, Stockton, CA has adamantly revolted against the title of the nations #1 Most Miserable City, a position it has graced twice in the past three years.

Many residents and business owners are unwilling to accept yet another diss from Forbes and are making an earnest effort to show Stockton off in more ways than one.

The Miracle Mile, commonly referred to simply as “The Mile,” is a stylish neighborhood of homes and locally owned shops that marks the end of “good” Stockton, and the start of the Southside, notorious for crime. It boasts a historical charm with rows of canopied shops facing each other from opposite sides of a slightly curving street. Christmas lights dot the trees and the vertical marquee of the old movie theater turned music venue and coffee shop flashes “STOCKTON” in neon lights that cut through the orange drenched light seeping from the streetlights.

The Mile underwent a revival of sorts and has become increasingly trendy over the past 5 or so years as the older businesses blended with the new upscale bars, restaurants, art galleries, and boutiques that sprung up all along the Mile. This assortment of businesses caters to a mixed crowd of trendy twenty and thirty-somethings, as well families, making the Miracle Mile the happening place around town.

In April after Forbes’ umpteenth ranking of Stockton on their misery list, the Miracle Mile Association announced that it would be hosting a “Stockton is Magnificent” festival in an unprecedented act of defiance.

Photo by Fritz Chin

The event featured live music, local food and artisan vendors, a stilt-walking balloon artist, and most notably, a picture of all the festival attendees. The image, shot by Miracle Mile Photographer Fritz Chin showed a mob of attendees wearing the bright yellow event t-shirt and holding a banner proclaiming, “Stockton is Magnificent!” The photo was enlarged and sent to Forbes magazine who has not yet publicly responded to this act of protest.

While the media exerted some effort in the past to boost Stockton’s image after the city earned a place on Forbes’ top three Most Miserable Cities for five consecutive years, this year’s outburst has been the loudest, though some say it’s too little too late.

Melchor “Buddy” Sahagun III is one such citizen who calls the recent uproar about Forbes’ ranking a “farce”:

“I understand the sentiment of wanting to highlight Stockton, but this festival didn’t do it,” he said. “They sugar-coated the mile and everything that really happens here and passed off their event as legitimate activism.”

Buddy was the lone protestor present at the event, wearing a shirt stating “Far From Magnificent” as he roamed through the festival. Though he was respectfully and peacefully protesting, many engaged in verbal altercations with him, some telling him that he was “ruining” the celebratory spirit of the festival.

Though Buddy works at the Empresso Coffeeshop on the Mile and is a patron of many other businesses on the street, he believes that the Miracle Mile’s projected image of Stockton is a “horrible misrepresentation.”

"Buddy" Photo by Michael Brooking

“I’ve spent most of my 27 years in this city outside on the streets as a skateboarder, and you see everything. Most people that are celebrating don’t see the grunge and decay of the rest of the city. The Mile is nestled in a bubble of ignorant wealth surrounded by hood. If you walk five blocks down the street you begin to see what really goes on here. Go to the Southside and see the people who really represent this town, fighting through poverty and living off a minimal amount. I skate down the levee and I see tent cities beneath underpasses. Greg Basso and all the other rich white people from the Westside who are claiming that ‘Stockton is Magnificent’… you are not Stockton. You don’t worry about if you’re going to eat or if you’ll get laid off next week. Me, my friends, those that survive on Stockton’s Southside, we are Stockton. That should be represented too.”

The Miracle Mile Association announced that roughly 2,000 people attended the festival, but with a population of 291,707 (according to 2010 census) that means only .00686 percent of Stockton’s population was present.

This percentage is a bit ironic when one considers that Forbes magazine caters to less than one percent of the Nation’s population. The majority of their 900,000 subscribers are wealthy middle-aged men like many of the propagators of this protest against Forbes.

Buddy acknowledges, “Forbes has always been a publication representing a small group of people. I, and most of Stockton are not Forbes’ demographic. The people lashing out now are the people who used to read it.”

Buddy feels that he can be happy despite being miserable. Though he is happy, Buddy says that “doesn’t make it (Stockton) magnificent.”

Stockton hip hop artist Cameron Abbey James King whole-heartedly supports Stockton’s recent rejection of Forbes, but not because he thinks Stockton is magnificent. 

Known by most as Abbey, he proudly wore a shirt stating “F**k Forbes”, (without the asterisks), during a recent photo shoot.

Abbey James "Fuck Forbes" Photo by Michael Brooking

The message on his shirt also doubles as the title track of Abbey’s upcoming album. The song’s music video will be filmed in the neighborhood where he grew up in Central Stockton.

Abbey’s rebellion stems from his distaste for the way in which Forbes magazine passes judgment upon others.

“Stockton’s problems are vast. We are aware of the problems we face because they are in our minds daily,” Abbey says. “Violent crime, foreclosures and high unemployment rates plague our citizens. All of these problems we face are like thorns sticking in us as we walk through the trail of life.”

Abbey believes, “the roots of our problems are based in broken systems and the materialistic viewpoint that we were force-fed since birth.” He claims that Forbes perpetuates this problematic ideology by producing lists about the world’s richest men and articles on achieving economic dominance.

“It’s a hard pill to swallow,” Abbey says, “when the same people who are continually widening the gap between the top 1% of the economy and the rest of us point their crooked finger towards us in judgment. Their opinion on misery is highly influenced by their own delusions of what is important in life.”

View of Stockton's sport facilities and downtown waterfront

Abbey pegs the recent multibillion-dollar Wall Street bailout as the underlying source Stockton’s sudden rebellion against Forbes.  Stockton was one of the cities hit the hardest by the housing crisis and it has struggled to regain any resemblance of stability ever since. Abbey is angered by the fact that Wall Street and other financial institutions are now reaping the rewards of the bailout, while many in Stockton are still suffering as a result.

“Forbes is a dog that pooped in the house,” Abbey says, ”and we are the human getting our noses rubbed in their mess.”

Photographer Michael Brooking also believes that the root of all cities’ problems, not just Stockton’s alone, stem from corrupt politicians and ideologies.

Brooking sees a lot of the different sides of Stockton when he takes photos of the city and its inhabitants.

“Stockton is depressing,” Brooking says. “All the empty buildings, the crime rate is crazy, you see all the street people. Man… all the street people. But that’s no different from anywhere else. Its everywhere, its not just Stockton.”

He believes that the problems affecting Stockton are not isolated issues, but are problems that affect the entire country brought about by government negligence and greed. He calls the government heads of both parties “selfish liars.” In his mind politicians are all the same, and he says the primary problem is, “they don’t give a crap about the people.”

Brooking shares similar sentiments with others both refuting and supporting Forbes, both parties believing that not all of Stockton is bad.

“There are these pits of crap everywhere, but then there’s a lot of good people, good communities in Stockton… and they’re tired of getting bagged on,” Brooking says.

Empresso Coffeehouse and Empire Theater

These nestled pockets of good have their own share of misery. Troy Burke is the owner of Empresso Coffeehouse on the Miracle Mile, celebrated as one of the best coffee shops, music venues, and hang out spots in Stockton. Empresso has patrons of all ages, backgrounds and walks of life.

Pausing from unloading boxes of milk and bags of coffee beans, Burke looks around Empresso and notes, “I can see eleven people right now in this room that have lost their job in the past year.”

Only twenty people sat in the shop at the time, clear evidence of Stockton’s 18.4% unemployment rate.

Most Stocktonians have come to the consensus that Stockton is in fact pretty miserable. However, they learned this on their own from living, growing, working, and surviving in this town, not because a financial magazine nationally defames them year after year.

Two hundred ninety one thousand, seven hundred and seven people live in Stockton, and their resilience and ability to make good things come out of miserable circumstances truly make Stockton unique.