“It’s staggering and heartbreaking — I don’t know any other way to put it,” said Ken Bernstein, principal city planner at Los Angeles City Planning’s Office of Historic Resources.

In 1866, Havilah became the seat of the newly established Kern County, a title it held for eight years until Bakersfield became the principal city.

She had spent part of her childhood on a family plantation in the Mississippi Delta — she was born in the principal city at its edge, Vicksburg — and her fiction was populated by the gentry that came from that land, in both its urban and rural incarnations.

Even so, I would have guessed neighborhood safety might be a greater concern in metro areas where the principal city has significantly higher violent-crime rates than Seattle.

For example, the homicide rate in Bakersfield, California — the principal city in Kevin McCarthy's district — was more than twice as high as that of San Francisco, represented in the house by former Speaker Nancy Pelosi.