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A California City Drops Houses On Gavin Newsom’s Bullet Train

Once Phase One of Phase One of Phase One is complete, the state will begin thinking about connecting high-speed rail to Bakersfield, which will constitute Phase Two of Phase One of Phase One.

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It just shrank again.

Last September, during a San Francisco press conference about energy prices, California Gov. Gavin Newsom took a moment to express relief about the state’s long-delayed high-speed rail project. After years of planning and property acquisition, he said, all of that early stage stuff was finished: “We’re on the other side of all of the acquisitions.” The route is state-owned, clear, and ready for construction. Now it’s just time to finish it all up.

Over the summer, though, a small city in California’s Central Valley did a remarkable thing, and they did it in an important place. As the Fresno Bee first reported on August 21, officials in Shafter have approved a large housing project in the middle of what was supposed to the route of the high-speed rail line. Here’s the map the Shafter City Council saw at the meeting to approve the new housing tract:

See the red lines? That’s Gavin’s train.

Here’s why Shafter is such an important place: In 2008, California voters approved a bond measure to fund a 494-mile high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco, with a Phase Two that would extend the system to Orange County, the Inland Empire, and Sacramento. In 2015, active construction began, and state officials shifted to a focus on a smaller Phase One of the........

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