I was contemplating this week S.B. 50, the legislative sausage of Scott Weiner (D-SF) which would grant the State of California supremacy in local zoning decisions. If enacted, single-family homes could be razed in favor of 4-5 story apartment buildings anywhere within a half mile of a transportation corridor. Much of Los Angeles would qualify under its jurisdiction. Van Nuys, but for a few pockets, definitely would. Weinerhausing would be like a reverse Prop 13 in its abrogation of property rights, only more significant in its political fallout.
Weiner is the first apostle of the YIMBY movement. As a Gen Xer, when I contemplate the gross inequality between my parent’s housing price point and my own I’m sympathetic, broadly speaking, to YIMBYism.
My parents obtained 80 acres of rolling pasture land and mixed forest in Mendocino County in the 1970s for $18,000. Only they didn’t pay that. That would have cost them about $100 a month, which would have meant taking a day job. In the Era of Boomer Land Abundance, this would not do. No, no, no. Much too much. In lieu of labor, they recruited a relative to join them in their endeavor and an in-law to underwrite them as a silent majority partner thereby obtaining a Homestead Act portion of Hippie Splendor for …$25/month, and this is no embellishment, I assure you.
Need I mention they were living in a sprawling Victorian at the time, three blocks from Cal Poly while existing on public assistance? That their property hunt consisted of a drive north in which they stopped on the 101 to use the bathroom, smoked a fateful joint, pointed at a random hillside and said that’s so pretty. I wonder if anything is for sale there? There was little which wasn’t, as the timber companies and aging ranchers were unloading their inventory as fast as bandido real estate agents could subdivide it, frequently without road easements.
Many years later they would be obliged to buy out the silent partner, the dreaded $100 payment waiting for them like an appointment in Samarra, and oh, oh, the wailing. My mother would circle the room flailing her hands over her head in despair, as though wolves were nipping at her heels. A hundred dollars! The land payment! Lillian Gish lashed to the ice floes! I would come home from college and point out I was paying four times that sum for a cubicle in a dingy student rental and they would look at me like I was speaking Swahili. You need to get your money trip together they would reply before resuming their sorrows with renewed vigor.
Mr. and Mrs. UpintheValley…once they got their money trip together…paid more in a down payment for churro-eating Van Nuys than the entire purchase price of my parent’s extensive wine country holdings. Our monthly nut, the non-negotiables only, is greater than their annual income for much of my childhood.
And yet, how advantaged we are to own anything in California. Our house has tripled in value in 15 years. I could applaud myself for all the renovations I’ve done…a super-ant amidst the grasshoppers…but sadly, this has only nudged the equity needle. Move our house to Cleveland and it would lose value annually, no matter the effort we put in. A Zillow surveillance of Rust Belt cities shows just how little a Pinterest-worthy 1920’s two-story colonial commands in a market with inverted demography.
California home values are predicating on zoning, and for this reason we would not be able to repurchase ours today. No one we know can afford the house they are living in, which brings us to a unique inflection point in history. Who will come after us? What provision have we made for them to buy in?
The boomer plan was no plan but to withdraw as much land as possible from development. Protect it all! Especially the meadow right down the street from me… Then open the gates to the world…and reap the unearned generational advantage of zoning. Theirs was a different California, white, entitled and lazy. Grilled cheese sandwiches, Der Wienerschnitzel and Sambo’s, and the graft of other people’s labor. Wine country for me, Van Nuys 2.0 for my kids, alternative housing for the millennials: trailers, pods, tree houses, bunk beds, shipping containers…
S.B. 50. would indirectly address generational inequality. That would be the seduction, though not the intent. In practice, it would look like this.
What would be exempt from upzoning? Marin County, home of the silent partner. Two miles from SF and to this day mostly rural. Santa Cruz, where I went to college, where the $400 student rental is now $1200. All the coastal counties …but LA, SF, Orange, and Ventura. Cities with a population less than 50,000, exempt. Historic Preservation Zones. Neighborhoods with low-frequency transit.
See where this is going? The most privileged precincts would extend their zoning advantages, and their monoculture, by manipulating transit routes and schedules, subdividing, creating protections for favored neighborhoods. They would down-zone themselves out of the very societal obligation S.B. 50 was intended to enact. The regulatory burden would fall, as it always does, on those regions divided by language, class, and culture.
It’s not really about housing. It’s about making the little people ride the bus.
California is nothing if not an experiment the wealthy perform on everyone else. And I was so ready to buy Scott a beer…
*Bart Housing illustration by Alfred Twu