To live in California is to experience the cryptic phrase that George W. Bush once used to describe the invasion of Iraq: “Catastrophic success.”
The economy here is booming, but no one feels especially good about it. When the cost of living is taken into account, billionaire-brimming California ranks as the most poverty-stricken state, with a fifth of the population struggling to get by. Since 2010, migration out of California has surged.
Across my home state, traffic and transportation are a nightmare. Child care and education seem impossible. The problems of affordable housing and homelessness are a dystopian showcase of American inequality.
In San Francisco, Nancy Pelosi’s city, one of every 11,600 residents is a billionaire, and the annual household income necessary to buy a median-priced home now tops $320,000. Yet the streets are a plague of garbage and needles and feces.
Homeless veterans are surviving on trash from billionaires’ mansions. Wealthy homeowners are backing a legal effort arguing that a proposed homeless shelter is an environmental hazard.
At every level of government, our representatives, nearly all of them Democrats, prove inadequate and unresponsive. California lawmakers recently used a sketchy parliamentary maneuver to knife Senate Bill 50, an ambitious effort to undo restrictive local zoning rules and increase housing.
It was another chapter in a dismal saga of NIMBYist urban mismanagement that is crushing American cities. Because the largest American cities are populated and run by Democrats – many in states under complete Democratic control – this is a particular shame of the left. Yet aside from Elizabeth Warren, Democrats on the 2020 presidential trail rarely mention their ideas for housing affordability, an issue eating American cities alive.
Then there is the refusal on the part of wealthy progressives to live by the values they profess to support. Creating dense, economically and socially diverse urban environments ought to be a paramount goal of progressivism. Dense urban areas are the real America. They account for almost all national economic output. They are the most environmentally friendly way we know of housing lots of people. We can’t solve the climate crisis without vastly increasing urban density.
Yet where progressives argue for openness and inclusion as a cudgel against President Donald Trump, they abandon it on Nob Hill and in Beverly Hills. SB 50 would have erased single-family zoning in populous areas near transit locations. Areas zoned for homes housing a handful of people could have been redeveloped to include duplexes and apartment buildings that housed hundreds. For the first time, California’s wealthy homeowners would abandon their restrictionist attitudes and let us build some new housing.
Instead, Anthony Portantino, a Democratic state senator whose district includes the posh city of La Cañada Flintridge and who heads the appropriations committee, announced that he’d be shelving the bill until next year. In an interview with The Los Angeles Times, he worried that the law would spur lots of people to move near residential bus routes, which he suggested would alter the character of enclaves like his.
Reading opposition to SB 50 and other efforts at increasing density, I’m struck by an unsettling thought: What Republicans want to do with ICE and border walls, wealthy progressive Democrats are doing with zoning and NIMBYism. Preserving “local character,” maintaining “local control,” keeping housing scarce and inaccessible – the goals of both sides are really the same: to keep people out.
Farhad Manjoo is a columnist for The New York Times.
