Housing and the California Dream are at a Crossroads

“The Plains of Id, urbanophiles might sniff. Can anything good come from suburban Nazareth? Yes, the suburbanites were responding. Everything good was coming from this Holy Land: a house, a job, the quiet enjoyment of one’s premises …” — Kevin Starr, Coast of Dreams, 2004

For generations, California has offered its people an opportunity to own a home, start a business, and move up, whether someone came from Brooklyn, east Texas, Morelos or Taipei. That deal is still desired by most, but in a state that increasingly sees such activities as socially regressive and environmentally disastrous.

In new legislation, and supporting narratives from the academy and media, what most Californians have long sought out, a home of their own, is being legislated out of existence for all but the very rich and those who, 50 and older, got in when the getting was good.

The green religion and the middle class

The justification for this approach is to combat climate change, instinctively blamed for everything from fires and floods to drought. Californians need to abandon their cars, roomy single family homes and even their blue or white collar jobs, even if it means, as Brown himself has put it, employing “coercion” and “brainwashing.”

In the process, development along the fringe, the traditional “safety valve” for the aspirational classes has been systematically cut off by endless environmental and other wrangling. New supply, even some traditional urbanists admit, would do much to relieve pressures on rents and prices closer to the urban core, as we see elsewhere.

Murdering the dream

The schemes of the climate theocracy and their developer allies hit most those whose rates of homeownership, such as millennials and minorities have fallen the most precipitously. The average age of California homeowners is rising, with the over 55 set, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, accounting for close to a majority of all homeowners in the state…

Read the rest of the article at The Orange County Register.