Off The Record

THE AVA has been looking all over Ukiah for a room or affordable apartment to rent for our ace reporter, Bruce McEwen. Nothing out there. Even the most flea-ridden fleabags demand upwards of $200 a week, and rooms in extremely oppressive homes — “No smoking, no drink­ing, no visitors, no nothing” — go for more than $500 a month. We thought of Willits, where flea bag motels are even more common than Ukiah, but even these dumps run about $200 a week. Use to be there were cheap rooms, bathroom down the hall accommodations every­where in the land. Remember downtown Ukiah a few years back? I knew a guy who lived for years above the old Paul’s Rice Bowl on North State. Paul owned the whole show, including his and his wife’s restaurant on the ground floor. Drove an old Cadillac and undoubtedly died a multi-millionaire. Call him a slumlord, but I’ll call him a one-man poverty program. He housed people that no one else would — drinking people mostly — and often received only partial rents from tenants whose first priority was the bottle. Fed them, too, at cut rates in his restaurant. Then there was a fire and that was that. We all know that homelessness is a large and growing prob­lem in every community of any size in the country, and a big part of the reason is the absence of affordable shelter, especially for difficult persons. Here in the bucolic Anderson Valley, for instance, as in every area of Men­docino County, whole families occupy one-bedroom, done-over motel rooms, and that’s the high end of the rental market for families whose income hovers about ten thousand short of the official poverty line. Single people are likely to remain shelter-free. Circa 1970, there were still permanent residents living in the old Boonville Hotel, as Eddie Carsey can tell you. He tended bar downstairs and, as I recall, owned the place. Anyway, if you have a rental for one of the best writers in the coun­try, please call 895-3016.