California tyranny, Part 2

In the second installment in an occasional series about the erosion of local democracy in the Golden State, we highlight SB 79, a dangerous bill working its way through Sacramento

California State Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), in an unintentionally perfect picture

Lawmakers in Sacramento recently upped the ante in their ongoing assault on local democracy in the Golden State. Earlier this year State Senator Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco) introduced a bill called SB 79. If passed, it would all but eliminate local authority over zoning, land use, and development. It would place the fate of thousands of neighborhoods not in the hands of the people who live in them and want to live in them, but in the hands of for-profit real estate speculators and the financial class behind them. The bill is part of an assault on the foundations local democracy that, as I wrote two weeks ago, trace their origins back 800 years to Magna Carta itself.

SB 79 would allow real estate speculators to cram five, six, and seven story luxury apartment and condo buildings into single-family neighborhoods and neighborhoods currently characterized by small multifamily buildings (duplexes, fourplexes, and smaller apartments and condos). If a speculator takes advantage of other recent laws, including so-called “density bonus,” they could build 10 or even 20 stories in a single family neighborhood. The only requirement is that the new structures be within one half mile, and in some cases a quarter mile, of a bus stop. That’s it. Doesn’t matter where the bus goes. Doesn’t matter if that bus doesn’t go anywhere near your workplace, your kids’ schools, your local grocery store, and so forth. Just has to be a bus.

What’s more, some city officials are on the same page, hell bent on self-immolation. For example, multiple sources have told me that officials at the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro) have rerouted segments of bus routes and changed the locations of bus stops in order to make existing “transit oriented development” incentives applicable to specific parcels. Some California transit agencies aren’t serving the people, they’re bowing to the whims of for-profit real estate speculators, many of whom aren’t based in California and could care less about neighborhood character or quality of life.

This is how local democracy dies

It’s madness. This is how local democracy dies. Agencies like LA Metro increasingly are in the land use business. This is how mass transit functioned in the Soviet Union, in which housing and mass transit were inextricably linked (because, of course, none but the most privileged and powerful owned their own cars).

It’s almost impossible to overstate the threat SB 79 poses to neighborhoods. It would all but eliminate local governments’ power to control their own communities’ destinies. City councils and boards of supervisors, the members of which most closely reflect the people they represent, would be reduced to bystanders as rapacious developers — many of whom in this context are less than scrupulous — literally bulldoze hundreds of thousands of homes, irreversibly transforming and destroying countless neighborhoods. It’s the state dictating where and how 39.8 million will live. The state dictating to cities what kind of housing they must approve, under penalty of crippling fines, legal action, even a complete state takeover of local zoning, land use, and construction decisions. Sounds an awful lot like tyranny.

Years of government and corporate propaganda

Totally not the same.

The rationale behind the bill, such as it is, is that California’s housing affordability crisis is entirely a result of insufficient supply. Ergo, we need to empower developers to build as many new units, everywhere, as fast as possible.

This argument is, in a word, fatuous. It’s the result of a yearslong campaign that can fairly be called propaganda, ginned up by powerful political and business interests that see immense power to be attained and countless billions to be made developing all those new units. It cannot be said loudly or often enough: The so-called YIMBY movement (“yes in my backyard”) is nothing more than astroturf. Just as Communism was immensely beneficial for the powerful elite, YIMBYism is a gateway toward unchecked power and profit for the well-connected. So what if they have to break a few neighborhood eggs along the way? The new statist capitalists who run California these days have seen the future, and to them it is glorious.

Cue the Russian accent: “You will love life in ideal new state mandated housing.” If the YIMBYs get their way, all but a handful of billionaires and politically well-connected Californians will one day live in small apartments in dense urban cores and be entirely dependent on public mass transit. We’ll give up our suburbs, our yards, our tree canopies, our open spaces. We’ll give up our cars (no more hiking or trips to the beach for you, you privileged elitist). Comrade Newsom and his successors will ensure the trains run on time. Except, of course, they won’t.

Consider: On Tuesday, Politico and other outlets reported that Governor Gavin Newsom has been sending untraceable, pre-paid cell phones (aka “burners”) to a handful of powerful CEOs, with his personal cell number programmed into them. He refuses to name the lucky few he’s granting this direct access. Whoever they are (and it isn’t hard to guess), many of those CEOs and their companies have almost certainly donated lavishly both to the governor and other leading Democrats. The line between government and industry in California has officially been erased. This is how they do things in China. How they did things in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the proletariat average Californians continue to buckle under crippling living costs, onerous regulations, and arbitrary governmental action.

Again, totally different.

Many of those arbitrary new laws and regulations run directly counter to the ways most Californians want to live. SB 79 is intended to herd millions into small apartments. It’s intended to make them dependent on public transit. Never mind that nearly 80% of Californians currently live in single-family or small multifamily homes. Never mind that they include tens of millions of people of all races, backgrounds, identities, and income levels. To YIMBYs, single-family homes and suburbs are exclusionary, elitist, and, of course, racist. Of course. Never mind that 16 million Latino Californians own their homes (in fact, over the last decade Latinos, including immigrants, have become the largest population of home buyers). Never mind that 2.2 million Black Californians are homeowners. Never mind that millions more are single-family and small multifamily home renters. These facts blow up the entire YIMBY narrative, therefore those homeowners must be erased.

Is there anything more racist than erasing the very existence of tens of millions of nonwhite Californians, for the sin of not conforming to the dominant political and social narrative? Is there a more egregious, toxic, and dangerous example of “othering?”

It’s true that there remain discrepancies between Black and Latino homeownership and white homeownership. But the situation is a lot more complex than “single-family homes are racist” (also, how can inanimate objects be racist in the first place?) A significant percentage of California Latinos are first generation immigrants who by definition are less likely to be homeowners. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, 45% of California children have at least one parent who is a first generation immigrant. Both Blacks and Latinos disproportionately attend California’s catastrophically failing public schools, from which they graduate utterly unprepared for the sorts of jobs and careers that support homeownership. Poor schools are another hallmark of totalitarian systems. The powerful want young people to be poorly educated, because that makes them dependent and easier to control.

To acknowledge these realities would be to acknowledge another aspect of California tyranny. Over the last half century, at the very moment in history when nonwhites, and especially Blacks, were finally able to start to realize the American Dream for themselves, lawmakers in California were dismantling the very institutions necessary for them to do so. Our public schools were once the envy of the world. Today many of them wouldn’t pass muster in third world countries. A few years ago the Los Angeles Times — back when it still occasionally committed acts of journalism — interviewed graduating high school seniors in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Many of those graduates needed help filling out a fast food job application. At the same time, thanks to hyper-regulation, financialization, and environmental radicalism, we shipped millions of good-paying manufacturing jobs to other states and other countries.

Another crucial development was that, even as the state’s population grew from 23.7 million in 1980 to 39.8 million in 2022, we stopped building the most important kind of housing: Starter homes. These days Californians primarily have a choice between a home priced out of their grasp, or a small apartment or condo that still somehow manages to be outrageously expensive thanks to factors like rent control, which disincentivizes landlords from adjusting rents to reflect current economic conditions. Lowering rent also deflates property values. At the same time, many modern construction loan documents for apartment buildings include rent floors. Lenders impose minimal rents below which the owner-builder may not charge. Finally, housing construction of all types is outrageously expensive thanks to the costs of land, labor, and materials, which are only going higher. None of these factors has anything to do with race.

The net result is the worst of all possible worlds. A scarcity of the kinds of housing a majority of people want artificially inflates prices for that housing, while a combination of laws, restrictions, and market factors keeps rental rates likewise above where they otherwise would be. Everyone loses except big developers, big landlords, big finance, and the individually affluent and well connected.

SB 79 will exacerbate this problem by adding to the supply of housing that few people actually want. It’s not just that most Californians — like most Americans — aspire to own a house. It’s that modern apartment buildings generally are not particularly inviting places to live. In their headlong rush to give as much of the state away to big real estate as possible, YIMBY lawmakers in Sacramento have eliminated cities’ rights to impose features like setbacks, height restrictions, and architectural features. As a result, the typical new apartment is an unattractive box with no trees, no open space, and no greenery. Developers squeeze pennies wherever they can, meaning that even buildings that aren’t boxes still offer off-the-rack fixtures, low end appliances, vinyl faux wood flooring, and so on. Who wants to pay $5,000 a month to live in a shoebox without so much as a ficus when they can go across town and rent a small house for that much or a little more?

SB 79, should it pass, will result in tens of thousands more of these kinds of buildings. The cost of a house will only go higher, relegating millions of people to overpriced shoeboxes and low quality transit. Tryanny, thy name is YIMBY. Thy name is California.

Sacramento’s assault on local democracy should scare every Californian – and American.