* Please watch the interview with Jennifer Hernandez, environmental law and land use expert and former chair of Holland & Knight’s West Coast Land Use and Environmental Group, for insights into the California housing crisis. You’ll be captivated by what she has to say.
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I am a native Californian and was a resident until retirement (2015). Why did I leave? Yes, I did not like the now entrenched and hard-core collectivism of the state. The lurch to the left, and in many cases the far Left, and the one-party monopoly on power, were serious problems for me. But then it dawned on me that all of it was popularly chosen. I was actually fleeing the state’s electorate.
These electoral choices had real world, smack-you-in-the-face repercussions. On many subsequent trips to the coast in the course of my long life in the state (mostly raised in Santa Maria), I noticed something that is really evident to some extent across the country, but is hyper-visible in California. The $70,000 sports car, homes, and the trails on the bluffs above the crashing waves are occupied by the grey-haired. Far more recuperations from hip surgery are evident than the paddle of little feet and strollers. Much of the area is a retirement home writ large.
The ritzy enclaves have a few scattered elementary schools, but I don’t know why. Grey hairs have declining fertility. The young ones are a rarity. Then it dawned on me. The state has chosen, through long-established popular consent, feudalism and its manorialism. Governance is feudal with a ruling and privileged generational “nobility” in a one-party state, and socially and geographically it is markedly divided into exclusive zones protected by gates and walls in some cases and a bevy of law, red tape, regulations, and a labyrinth of agencies in most others – the manorialism. The upshot is a favoritism for those who already have theirs – the Ins – and a suppression of the dreams of the striving – the Outs. Age wise, on the ground, it shows as the grey-haired in their seaside villas and in the driver’s seat of the $70,000 Corvette, while crumbs are left for blue-collars and the young with families.
Frankly, I couldn’t stomach it any longer. It’s more than political. It’s immoral. Each election was an episode of bashing my head against the wall. Nothing changed, and only got worse. Self-harm is not part of my psyche; so, I fled the state’s electorate.
“Socialism is the feudalism of the 19th century”, a quote loosely attributed to thinkers far afield as Adam Smith and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (see #1). A modern reformulation of the quote would read, “Socialism is the feudalism of California of the 21st century.” A heavily socialized economy, and oriented political system, produce a few winners (Ins) who have constructed the means to protect what they have acquired and enjoy at the expense of the Outs, the young seeking upward mobility.
At the top of the list of causes is the infatuation with environmentalism, a freezing in amber of the natural setting, with its continual invention of new eco-crusades such as climate change. Agencies, regulations, laws and lawsuits are exploited to preserve their playground by targeting the biggest threat, new housing. It’s been happening for decades.
The Boomers went from the Summer of Love and Dead Heads to nest eggs, great hiking opportunities, and fireplaces beside bay windows overlooking the ocean. The fallout was a housing shortage for the most vulnerable, the young who need the economy to grow to make room for them. That’s not compatible with the vision of the good life as defined by the eco-fatuations of the one-party state’s political constituencies: white-collar public sector unions; the keyboard demography (in Hernandez’s words) of entertainment, the education establishment, financial services, administration of all kinds, and Silicon Valley; and the litany of government-loving and ever-evolving transgressive victims’ groups who are closely allied to the above. Mom and dad and kids, and people who make things in the trades, have no place in this world. They are an afterthought.
A civilizational legacy is similarly an afterthought. No realistic consideration is given to the needs of future generations. The kids are ignored. The way that life is constructed in the state resembles a looting expedition. Use it up; let it crumble; I won’t be around anyway. Sucking it up so the young have opportunity and the simple necessities like shelter is inconceivable for those who already have theirs.
It’s not that this generational California aristocracy doesn’t care; it’s that they don’t know how to care. Their beloved command society which created the mess, and is geared to preserving their assets, is now directed to solve the housing crisis by of course . . . command. They actually think that more commands, diktats, will grant to the serfs what they need and not threaten their loot and position. Stack the plebes in “five-over-ones” (five floors above the parking) in $1 million units at a cost of $8,500 in monthly rent, all made “affordable” by subsidies, in a few plots limited to “transit corridors”. Commanding “affordable housing” doesn’t mean that it happens. No one can afford it, not the taxpayers nor the beneficiaries. It’s a joke. Don’t think for a moment about pruning the eco-zealotry or the NIMBY access to the Leviathan and their supportive nest of eco-vipers.
The return of a housing free market would be a godsend. Standing athwart is the enemy of free markets, big government. In an all-expansive state government, such as in California, the rats scurry about exploiting cracks and openings in the mammoth governmental maze to halt development, forever on the lookout to quash their hated “sprawl”, or anything that can endanger their property values or vistas. This is popular sovereignty, of a sort, but one with an open hostility to property rights. Their notion of property rights is their property and their “right” to extend a sphere of control that encompasses miles beyond their deed.
They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and it shows in ungodly housing prices, which is great for them but an impenetrable iron curtain for anyone stretching to reach for the next rungs to the good life, usually the young or anyone with insufficient funds to break into the exclusive club. Besides being a boon for U-Haul, this colossal regulatory contrivance is symptomatic of a solipsistic personality (very self-centered or selfish), a character flaw, written into the mode of governance. Imagine that, a character flaw as a governing principle.
The maiming of the housing supply is only one avenue for solipsism to sprout. It’s no secret that the huge majorities in the state are elated about not giving the young the slightest chance for a slice of the American dream by preventing them from exiting the womb in the first place. Abortion is wildly popular. But honestly, post Dobbs, the inner abortionist has been unleashed almost everywhere, even in red states (Montana, Ohio, etc.). However, a special ecstasy for it thrives in California. They’ve proudly legislated themselves as a “sanctuary” for ending unborn life.
Not only that, they are an official “sanctuary” for the young who managed to avoid the suction tube at the start of their life to mutilate themselves in “sex transition”. Those governing super majorities actually believe that they can outlaw chromosomes, or at least by law declare them subordinate to an adolescent’s erratic emotional state. It’s breathtaking, and shocking, shocking for parents made powerless in the face of government functionaries who are empowered to nurse and coddle the vulnerable and impressionable behind the backs of those who brought them into the world.
The whole state appears to be in an open state of war against the young, or anyone in those family-formation years clawing a path to the good life. The state is a bloody gauntlet for the young and blue collars, the Outs. And guess who is holding the clubs? Why, of course, it is the Ins. It’s more than a collectivistic state. It’s a solipsistic one. The two go hand in hand.
RGraf
Sources:
1. A general history of the statement is explored in Britannica at “Feudalism: Development in the 19th and 20th centuries” at https://www.britannica.com/topic/feudalism/Development-in-the-19th-and-20th-centuries
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