The first in an occasional series about the erosion of local democracy in the Golden State

The American people have heard a lot over the last decade about tyranny and facism. Don’t look now, but the state of California, home of the alleged “resistance” to Trumpian fascism, has been practicing its own version of not-so-soft tyranny. Over the last six years — which not coincidentally coincide with the Gavin Newsom era — Sacramento increasingly has wrested control from cities over a range of issues, including education, environmental protections, and transportation. Most significantly, thanks to a tsunami of more than 400 new laws passed in just the last few years, the state has all but usurped authority over a foundational responsibility of local government: Where, how, and what kind of housing gets built in their communities.

The political cover is the so-called “YIMBY” movement, which stands for “yes in my back yard.” This is in contrast to their sworn enemies, people they disparage as “NIMBYs,” or “not in my back yard.” A NIMBY is basically anyone who likes their neighborhood and wants to preserve its character. To YIMBYs, this basic human impulse is beyond the pale. The notion that millions of Californians work hard to live in a neighborhood of their choosing is anathema. This is where we see the seeds of tyranny begin to sprout: Take something that is fundamental, even essential to human life, and warp it into something that must be exterminated.

The YIMBYs have gained enormous influence and power in Sacramento. When it comes to housing, they are the only game in town. Never mind that they are an astroturf movement funded by some of the most powerful special interests in real estate, finance, and tech. They could not care less about housing affordability, much less quality of life. They have particular animosity for suburbs and single family homes. Again, they demonize. Single family homes, they say, are exclusionary and, of course, racist. In this way they are the biggest racists of all: They erase the three quarters of a million Black homeowners and and the seven million Latino homeowners in the state. Talk about “othering.”

Their hatred of houses is perverse. For most of human history most human beings have lived in single family homes. What is a teepee if not a single family home, a Mongolian yurt, an Inuit igloo, or an African thatched hut? The technology to build large communal structures like apartment buildings is a relatively recent innovation. The YIMBY world view is breathtakingly narrow. That’s equally true of their understanding of western history.

Upending eight centuries of legal tradition

Local control over land use and housing literally traces its origins to Magna Carta. As England coalesced into a monarchy in the 150 years after the Saxons’ victory at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the large landowning class of dukes, earls, and barons, who traditionally had exercised unfettered control over their parcels, and the clergy, freemen, peasants, and serfs who lived on them, grew increasingly resentful at the crown’s authority. 

This discontent came to a head in the early 13th Century during what was known as the Tyranny of King John. King John’s reign was marked by unpopular policies, including heavy taxation, arbitrary arrests, and disregard for traditional laws and customs. He lost territory to France and was seen as a weak leader, further fueling discontent among the nobility, particularly the barons (though they were the smallest landowners, the barons were also the most numerous). As the land thawed in the spring of 1215 they mustered their forces and marched on London, demanding that the king negotiate. Events culminated in June, when King John and the rebellious barons met at Runnymede, a meadow near Windsor, where Magna Carta was negotiated, and signed on June 15.

While the barons primarily sought to protect their own interests, Magna Carta became a symbol of liberty and the rule of law, influencing legal and political thought for centuries in Great Britain, Europe and, eventually, the United States. It served as a foundation for the development of English common law and inspired later movements for liberty and democracy, including the American Revolution and the drafting of the U.S. Constitution. 

Almost exactly eight hundred years later, in the mid 2010s, the ruling class in Sacramento set about reversing Magna Carta’s foundational concept, local and regional authority over land use. Swap “Gavin Newsom and the legislature” for “King John and his court,” and “California cities” for “English shires,” and the pattern reversal is clear. The crown in Sacramento is wresting back control from the mayors and city councils of the state’s 482 cities, towns, and villages. After all, what’s eight centuries of western legal tradition when there are countless billions to be made reshaping the shires to the crown’s satisfaction?

Sacramento’s secret police enforce arbitrary state mandates

To ensure localities comply, King Gavin created a “Housing Strike Force” (HSF), comprised of dozens of state attorneys and their staffs, who are charged with monitoring city councils, boards of supervisors, and planning departments to ensure they comply with new state housing construction mandates. Like the king’s spies they attend local meetings and hearings unannounced, on zoom and in person, alert for any hint of noncompliance, which is quickly reported back to their superiors.

A fundamental aspect of tyranny is its arbitrariness. The Dear Leader wakes up on the wrong side of the bed one morning, and by sundown a million citizens are on their way to the gulags. The politburo find themselves dissatisfied with grain production, and by the end of the month a million farmers have had their land collectivized under state control. In particular, communist and socialist dictatorships are infamous for imposing absurd requirements on everything from grain production to industrial output and, yes, housing production.

For example, at the end of World War II, when much of the western Soviet Union lay in smoldering ruins, the country struggled to rebuild. By the early 1950s the housing crisis remained acute. As a result, in 1953 Nikita Khruschev and the politburo seized what remained of local control over land use and housing construction. Khruschev declared that local soviets (city councils) lacked the resources, ability, and will to rebuild desperately needed housing. The result was the state mandated and controlled construction of over 13,000 pre-fabricated three, four, and five story apartment buildings called Khrushchevkas.

In particular, Khruschev and the politburo declared that previous housing construction under Josef Stalin had focused too much on aesthetics and elaborate architecture. In contrast, Khrushchevkas prioritized speed of construction, with some going up in as little as two weeks. Local soviets had virtually no say in where these apartment buildings were built, and no say over what they looked like. City life in the Soviet Union, which before the war was organized around the traditions in neighborhoods and localities, would never be the same.

Top row: Soviet era Khrushchevkas. Bottom row: Modern “stack and pack” apartments in the United States. Bully if you can tell the difference.

To mix political metaphors, these days Chairman Newsom and the Sacramento politburo are pursuing a similar policy, enforced by their own version of the secret police, the HSF. Pause for a moment and ponder the unsettling implications of the government of the world’s fifth largest economy creating a “strike force” aimed at its own cities, tasked with enforcing housing laws and mandates that are demonstrably arbitrary and without basis in reality, concocted by a vanishingly small number of lawmakers in a state capital that is remote from the vast majority of citizens, and implemented by an even smaller handful of unelected bureaucrats in that selfsame capital, who have the sole discretion to determine whether cities are sufficiently in compliance.

The new housing mandates are assuredly arbitrary. For example, the state Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) is mandating that the City of Los Angeles construct 203,927 new units of housing by October 2029, the vast majority of which would be Khrushchevkas and skyscrapers. Multiplied by the City’s average household size of 2.8 people, that’s enough new housing for more than 570,000 people, or 15% of the entire population. Where are all those people going to come from? What’s more, HCD refuses to disclose the methodology by which it reached its housing mandates. That’s very likely because there is none.

Next thing you know, Sacramento will mandate that Los Angeles produce 827,962 bushels of wheat and 2,326 main battle tanks.

One was a Communist, the other is a YIMBY. Again, bully if you can distinguish the two when it comes to housing.

State control is nearly complete

If L.A. doesn’t meet its mandate, the state has the options of imposing crippling fines, litigation, or even a complete takeover of the city’s planning and land use. These punishments can be imposed on any city in the state upon the whim of that handful of bureaucrats, none of whom will so much as visit the affected cities to see conditions on the ground. What could be more tyrannical than that?

Like their Soviet forebears, California’s political class engages in magical thinking and punishes the people for not complying with their whims. They demonize their political opponents as racist and bigoted, for the sin of wanting to decide for themselves where and how they live. Your single family home is the product of historic injustice, you see, and so it must be destroyed. Your suburb must be bulldozed and returned to a state of nature, while you and your family move into a glorious new apartment in a building that looks like all the others in your Utopian urban core. You will give up your decadent car and rely on the state to whisk you about in gleaming, ultra clean buses and light rail cars. Except, of course, for the hundreds that are overdue for maintenance or replacement.

Their goal is nothing less than the radical transformation of civic life in the state, to the financial and political benefit of the ruling class. Whether your historical analogue is medieval England or the Soviet Union in the 20th Century, the shoe fits disconcertingly well.

California’s political class have done the politically unthinkable: They’ve married socialist state capitalism with supply side Reaganomics. Both Karl Marx and the Gipper are spinning in their graves.

In the next installment I’ll discuss the real causes of California’s housing affordability crisis, which contrary to state propaganda have virtually nothing to do with supply.