Then move.

Any place within California will do, though it would be great if you could relocate to a city or county near yours. Or, even better, stay in your own neighborhood and make the leap to a different apartment or house nearby.

Why am I asking you to go through the hassle of boxing and unboxing, and the emotional challenges of leaving one place for another? Because moving serves both private and public purposes. It often improves your circumstances—finding a place that better fits your needs, or helping you take advantage of a job or educational opportunity. And a state full of people in better circumstances is a better state.

California needs you to move now because our state, which once prided itself on perpetual motion, is stuck in neutral. Californians have never been less mobile than they are right now. In the near term, our increasing tendency to stay in place means our housing market is gridlocked, with too few vacancies. In the long term, our stasis may leave us in a disadvantaged position as our climate, our economies, and our demographics shift.

Our current lack of mobility is a failure of both government and culture. As a matter of policy, California actually discourages moving.

Californians and their representatives have long clung to a tax system based on Proposition 13, which discourages owners of homes and businesses from selling by keeping their taxes relatively lower the longer they hold onto their properties. Meanwhile, state and local governments decry an exodus of people and jobs—and in response, routinely waste millions in subsidies to rich California enterprises, including Hollywood production companies and Silicon Valley start-ups.

But the premise is all wrong. As the indispensable Orange County Register columnist Jonathan Lansner tirelessly points out, we Californians have the lowest outflow rate of residents of any American state—which means a lower percentage of population moves out than anywhere else. California’s real problem is that it’s the worst state at attracting new residents.

You might say our democracy has become a stay-ocracy, with our leaders relentlessly devoted to keeping people right where they are.

California progressives often oppose actual progress because of their desire to help Californians stay where they are. Housing and community activists routinely protest against badly needed new housing because it might replace existing residents. Momentum is building across the state for new rent controls or anti-eviction policies that privilege existing renters over those still looking for places to live. And then there’s the latest extension of let-them-stay logic: some Californians argue that shutting down dangerous homeless encampments, and coaxing camp residents into more stable housing, constitutes a “war on the poor.”

California’s many protections for existing residents may be well-intentioned, but they come at a high price, and not just in property tax discounts to elderly homeowners. California’s tendency to address its problems by keeping people in their existing housing actually makes the housing shortage worse.

Why? Because fewer people moving creates gridlock, according to a recent paper from USC scholars.

Mobility, and the vacancies created when people move, are essential to a functional housing market. Each move creates a chain of vacancies, which allows other people to move and find housing. For example, an older person who moves to a retirement community puts their house up for sale, which people who had been renters buy, leaving their previous apartment open for another renter—and so on.

This churn is far more important to mobility than new construction. The USC study estimates that over the course of a year, turnover of existing housing stock supplies more than 14 times as many vacancies, with the opportunity for a move, as those derived from new construction.

Vacancies are at a premium in California and across the country. Back in 1985, one in five families moved each year. But now fewer than one in 10 do. And over the past decade, mobility has slowed to a crawl at the local level—meaning that far fewer people move within their own neighborhood or city.

There are many reasons why people are staying put. Housing construction came to a standstill during the Great Recession, creating a shortage just as large numbers of young adult Millennials entered the housing market. With more people chasing fewer homes, vacancies plunged and have stayed low, while rents and home prices keep rising. Those people who want to move often can’t find anything affordable, or anything at all—so they just don’t move.

One obvious answer to this predicament is to build much more housing, which the state is starting to encourage. But it will take many years to make up for the shortage. In the meantime, California should stop subsidizing people to remain in their homes and instead devote more energy and money to making it possible for more Californians to move.

That means ending the tax discounts and other subsidies that keep older people in homes that they no longer need. (It also means building more housing for seniors who are departing their home.) Let’s take the state’s surplus funds and money saved from ending Prop 13 protections, and use it to help more people move from renters to buyers, with low-interest loans and down payment assistance. Let’s also subsidize both the rent and moving costs of lower-income people so they have more housing options.

Such subsidies should be exclusively for current Californians. (If someone moves in from out of state, they don’t create a vacancy chain here). Subsidies should also be more generous for people moving within their own city and county, because such local moves produce longer vacancy chains.

Creating a system that encourages more Californians to move could have benefits far beyond today’s housing needs.

In his new book, Move: The Forces Uprooting Us, the international relations expert and FutureMap director Parag Khanna foresees a future where moves aren’t a choice but a necessity. Khanna argues that, as climate change, political upheaval, economic crises and technological disruptions challenge existing communities and structures, we all may need to move to more livable places. That will require governments to have “collective resettlement strategies” for the world population.

“We can no longer afford to be passive observers of how human geography unfolds,” writes Khanna, adding that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be stuck in place anymore. After all, “a staggering share of our personal and professional lives hinges on mobility. Society only functions normally if we can move. Once you stop pedaling a bicycle, it quickly falls over. Our civilization is that bicycle.”

The post Let’s Pay Californians to Move appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My answer: In the same place everyone should—the backyard.

My little shrine’s location honors one of contemporary California’s crazier contradictions. Even as state government regulates more and more of our lives and livelihoods—even the straws through which we drink—it has embraced a historic deregulation of the spaces behind our homes. And even as Newsom has intruded more deeply into daily realities than any previous governor, he has become, improbably, the great liberator of our lots.

That’s the man-bites-dog context behind the governor’s recent signing of a package of bills including SB 9, the California Housing Opportunity and More Efficiency (HOME) Act. By allowing most homeowners to build a second home in their backyard, or turn their lot into a duplex, the HOME Act may spell the end of single-family zoning in California.

SB 9’s approval comes on top of 2019 legislation that Newsom signed to give homeowners more freedom to build accessory dwelling units (ADUs), or granny flats, in their backyards, and in place of garages.

What explains the transformation of our ruling San Francisco technocrat into our very own Backyard Bolívar?

The short answer is that the horrors of the housing crisis, with ever-escalating real estate prices and a resulting surge in homelessness, has overwhelmed longstanding opposition to housing from environmentalists and NIMBY groups. Building backyard housing is cheaper than other forms of affordable housing (construction for an ADU often runs between $100,000 and $150,000, versus more than $400,000 for a new affordable unit in an apartment building in urban California). And because homeowners rather than taxpayers bear the building costs, it’s an attractive way to create desperately needed units.

The longer answer is about the special power of the backyard in the California imagination.

The idea of a patio or backyard space for living has its roots in our Spanish past, and the haciendas that included shaded outdoor spaces to keep interiors cool. The California backyard also owes a debt to the 20th-century designer Cliff May, who is considered the father of ranch house. The California dream became associated with homes that linked the indoors and the outdoors, creating patio, pool, and backyard spaces where we spend most of our time.

There was an irony in California’s rapid adoption of this mode of living. Local governments approved the building of these homes with large outdoor spaces—but limited what you could build in those spaces. Guest houses, granny flats, and additions were often banned, particularly on smaller lots. The stated justifications for such limits often involved parking and traffic; the unstated justifications were to keep out the sort of people—poorer or non-white—who might be more likely to rent your guest house.

Today’s backyard liberation sweeps aside those restrictions on building. This particular mode of deregulation has won some progressive support because it uses private space to a solve a public problem—our lack of housing.

But in this shift lies a new irony: freeing homeowners to build in their backyards also threatens the very existence of the backyard. If people seize this opportunity to build out back, it could change California’s culture and landscape forever.

To the bad, some of our pool parties and barbecues will become things of the past. To the good, it’s healthier and safer for elderly Californians to live out their days in granny flats in their kids’ suburban backyards than in exurban cabins in the path of wildfires. Plus, denser living can be more energy-efficient, and fewer backyards means less outdoor watering.

More important, an embrace of backyard building could produce more housing. If one out of eight California homeowners used their new backyard freedom, we’d have more than 1 million additional housing units. But this new housing won’t necessarily make our divided state more equal.

Backyard freedom benefits those of us lucky enough to have backyards. It makes our single-family homes more valuable, since we now have the right to build more. And it’s already creating more opportunities for builders and fledgling modular home companies. But it also provides openings for financial institutions (and even internet companies) to buy up large groups of homes, add units they can lease, and gain even more control over the state’s rental market.

As a homeowner, I’m one of the potential winners. But I don’t have the cash to build my own ADU, and there are as yet no common financing instruments for such projects. When I called the out-of-state firm that holds my mortgage to ask about how to do an ADU, they had no idea what I was talking about. And even if I could borrow the money, I don’t have the time or skills to manage such a project. Surveys suggest most California homeowners can’t or won’t build an ADU.

But it sure would be nice to have rental income to help with the mortgage, especially since journalism is a less than sturdy profession. And an ADU might save money if it could become a home for my elderly parents or disabled relatives.

For now, I mostly enjoy looking at my small backyard and imagining what I might build some day, if I ever got my act together.

I also like how backyard freedom has put my own small city in its place. A few years ago, a city planning staffer responded with suspicion and hostility when I asked if I could replace my decrepit garage with a shed or small house. But, just last week, the city sent homeowners a letter offering to legalize any previously unpermitted guest houses or additions, and providing a link to the virtual planning desk for anyone with backyard building ambitions.

So, yes, I’m not ashamed to say that I put together a small shrine to the governor in my backyard—and not just because the neighbors can’t see it there. It has a couple of photos from his 2019 signing of the ADU bills, the text of SB 9, and a copy of his jargon-filled 2014 book, Citizenville.

Now I’d like to add a small bust of the governor (though those are harder to find than a cheap California house) and some candles (the battery-operated kind, of course), which I’d happily light in gratitude to Newsom and the rest of our backyard gods.

The post Will Granny Flats Replace Green Lawns in California’s Backyards? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Most Californians agree that housing is the state’s biggest crisis. But we have nothing resembling a consensus on how best to address it.

Up in Sacramento, our leaders have come up with all manner of housing ideas, but few have attracted broad support or advanced to become reality. And few of us want to be the first to try out a new way of meeting our housing needs. We fear that any new housing idea, put into practice, will disrupt our lives.

What California needs then is a housing laboratory, an experimental setup for new housing concepts. But labs need lab rats. Since no one else will volunteer, I modestly suggest a small but influential subset of Californians as our guinea pigs: the 120 members of the state legislature, leading members of the Newsom administration, and their top staff members.

Who better to represent us in trying out our housing future than our representatives?

Just imagine the possibilities if we required lawmakers and policymakers to live their own ideas, before applying them to the rest of us.

State Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco is certain that Californians need the power to override local zoning to produce taller, denser housing in transit corridors. But it’s hard to know how this will play out. So why not let Sen. Wiener find out by moving his family, his staffers, and the co-sponsors of his housing legislation, SB 50, into the tallest apartment building that can be found along a transit corridor in Sacramento? Of course, we’d need to bar Wiener’s team from driving—giving them the opportunity to wait outside their building for buses that run chronically late, a routine experience for Californians who rely on our underdeveloped transit systems.

We can conduct a similar experiment for legislative supporters of building new housing for the homeless. The state and local governments have budgeted billions to such housing, but how can it be made to work? One way to find out is to have a few lawmakers live in the homeless units themselves.

Of course, very little of this housing has been built. So, to give legislators the full experience, they should sleep in tents on the Capitol grounds until the homeless housing projects the state has funded are actually realized. This might encourage state lawmakers to put real pressure on localities to produce such housing—and fast. And that would make the housing cheaper, since delays of five years for approving housing projects—a typical delay for California—can add more than $150,000 to the cost of a unit.

One possible way to reduce construction costs is to build new, cheaper forms of housing. So let’s push lawmakers into truly new housing models.

Take micro-housing, the super-tiny units being touted across California. One such 160-square-foot can SmartSpace apartment squeezes in a sofa bed and a “smart bench” which can become a table or an extra bed. I, for one, would love to see a Bay Area legislator, State Sen. Jim Beall of San Jose, a leader on housing issues, squeeze into one of those micro-homes. Beall is among many California politicians who propose spending big money to produce very small numbers of conventional affordable units, at relatively high prices. Maybe these pols could get behind more and cheaper housing if they lived in tiny places.

Modular and prefabricated homes, another cheaper alternative, should also be foisted on our legislative guinea pigs. Why not put up a bunch of prefab homes in Capitol Park, for lawmakers and staff? Yes, some will call such homes an eyesore—just as they do wherever they’re proposed elsewhere in California—so let state leaders experience the visual consequences themselves.

The same logic should apply to “granny flats,” or accessory dwelling units, which the state has tried to make easier for homeowners to build. Any lawmakers who own homes should be required to add a granny flat on their property. They’d learn the ways local governments try to stop people from building them, and the high costs of constructing even small places. I’d also make the legislator-homeowners pay their own construction workers the very high prevailing wages—essentially union wages—that they demand of other home builders.

By the same token, all lawmakers who are landlords—at least 25 percent of the members of the legislature, according to CALMatters—should be made to follow rent control regulations. Many Democrats have been pushing rent controls as a way to address the cost of housing, so let them live under such rules. Those lawmakers who are tenants should also gain rent control protections. That might seem like a perk at first, but pretty soon, they’ll share the experiences of those of us who have lived in rent-controlled apartments—landlords who won’t fix anything and do whatever they can to force you out.

Experience is the best teacher, and there may be no better learning experience in housing than having your home taken by the state by eminent domain. I’d suggest that each year—for their own edification—5 percent of the legislature (or six out of the 120 lawmakers) have their home taken by eminent domain. Then they can deal with all the legal headaches and spend many years waiting for compensation.

But why stop with the horror of eminent domain? Major disasters offer a great opportunity for legislators and staffers to move into devastated communities. Why not deed a few abandoned, rubble-filled lots in the town of Paradise to lawmakers and staffers? They could pitch tents and deal firsthand with endless rebuilding delays. They’d only have to stay in the tents until construction is complete. How long would that take?

Learning doesn’t just have to come from destruction. The “Yes in My Backyard” legislators keep calling for massive new building of homes—and Gov. Gavin Newsom wants 3.5 million new homes as part of his housing “Marshall Plan.” I think that’s great, but all that construction can cause headaches, so why not require Newsom and his young family to live wherever housing construction is moving at the fastest pace so they can feel the impacts firsthand?

Now, any grand experiment requires a control group. A number of legislators oppose virtually all efforts to address the crisis. Some of these housing deniers should be forced to move in with parents or relatives—sleeping on sofas, not in spare bedrooms. Others should be required to negotiate at least 50 miles of traffic jams to get to their offices. For example, when State Sen. Anthony Portantino, who blocked this year’s most ambitious housing bill, is working in Sacramento, he should have to stay in either Vacaville or Stockton, and drive himself the 50 miles to the Capitol along busy freeways during rush hour.

Some lawmakers and staffers will want taxpayers to help subsidize their experiences in housing reality. But we should resist such subsidies. Indeed, it should be a requirement that at least half of all lawmakers’ income gets devoted to housing, leaving them poorer when it comes to meeting other needs. That would give them a taste of what life is like for so many Californians, especially the one-in-three renter households who spend at least half their income in rent.

Would feeling the various pains of the housing crisis firsthand really inspire lawmakers to find consensus on housing and take action that makes a difference? I’d hope so. But even it didn’t work, at least those failing to address the crisis would be suffering along with the rest of us.

The post Want More Affordable Homes? Make Politicians Sleep in Their Own Plans appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You are far too kind: I never imagined a bureaucratic nightmare this cruel, absurd, and surreal.

I don’t know exactly how I got to California, or even how I came back to life. But I appeared here some weeks ago, in the form of an insect, like my protagonist in The Metamorphosis. And I’m glad I did. If I’d known weather like this in my lifetime, I might not have died of tuberculosis in Prague in 1924, shortly before my 41st birthday.

In my prime, I was a master of conveying oppressive and intangible systems that trap humans and defeat attempts at reform. California, and its housing markets, do indeed fit that bill. But I never had any idea that a dystopia could be as beautiful and wealthy as yours.

Indeed, California’s talent for self-deception and absurdity leaves me in awe. You know, I thought I portrayed myopia pretty scarily in The Trial when my character K goes into the dark cathedral and can see only one piece of the painting, leaving its true meaning in pitch black. But I couldn’t have conceived of a fantastically rich place of 40 million people that claims it is open and welcoming to the whole world, while refusing to house people.

You Californians talk a big game about how you support the environment. But by a surreal trick, the laws that supposedly protect the environment also make it so difficult to build housing—especially near your transit hubs—that people are forced to live and work on the periphery, where the environmental costs are actually higher. You have enough land—and the right zoning—to have housing, but you give NIMBYs and lawyers all this power to stop housing and development even where it’s legal.

While I am proud of my ability to create nightmares of labyrinthine illogic, I never managed to dream of anything so diabolical as your California Environmental Quality Act, which you call CEQA. One lawyer, Jennifer Hernandez, who has written about this CEQA with scary flair, put it this way:

Imagine spending five years and $5 million to defend against a lawsuit challenging a plan for where to put transit improvements and other infrastructure, and critically needed housing and related public services—and then to get sued again, and again, and again, and again, for trying to implement the plan…. And then imagine that the reason for this “process” is a handful of construction trade leaders who don’t care a bit that their workers can’t live near their jobs, and can’t afford to buy a home anywhere within 2 hours—along with enviro advocates who define the “environment” as the view outside their kitchen window. And then imagine that the lawsuits can be filed anonymously, at a near zero cost, and without an iota of legal merit [and] can kill a project for 3-5 years by ending access to financing.

That surpasses my most chilling passages!

Californians have forgotten just how fundamental housing is—not merely as shelter from life’s cruelties but as a place that creates space to rest and think. As I once wrote, “It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.”

I portrayed the paradoxical isolation of an overcrowded city in The Trial, which, by the way, starts in a lodging house (the sort of housing your state could use more of). Your state is reminiscent of that, but at a scale—of escalating homelessness and housing prices far beyond the median income—that exceeds my horizons.

And oh, the terrible price you pay! I had some real health problems in my life—not just tuberculosis but migraines, insomnia, constipation, and boils. Modern scholars have concluded I also endured clinical depression and social anxiety. But your housing crisis is making you sicker than I ever was.

Millions of you have moved far from your jobs to find affordable housing that suits your family, but now your commutes are ruining your health. I know about commuting, too—while writing timeless works of literature, I had a day job with insurance companies—but I couldn’t imagine the traffic you endure or the hyper-crowded buses and BART cars you squeeze into.

All these pressures can put households in, well, Kafkaesque predicaments. I know about families—I had a tyrant of a father, and lost my two younger brothers to childhood disease. In my story, “The Judgment,” a father won’t make any room in the world for his son, who at the end hops over the railing of a bridge and plunges to his death.

But younger Californians have it worse: They can’t even have a child. So many of you are delaying marriage and child-rearing because you can’t afford a home that your state’s birthrate just fell to the lowest ever recorded—even lower than during the Great Depression.

Even those of you who have housing often have to do without very important things—like education—to pay for a roof over your heads. My father didn’t provide me much, but I got sent to good German schools, and got a law degree. You live in a 21st-century world where education is even more important, and yet your education levels are stalled, and not enough of your people can afford college.

Worse still, your schools don’t capture the full value of this huge run-up in housing values because you have limited your property taxes. When I buzzed about this to Californians, they started talking about how you all worship a strange and immortal god named “Prop 13.” And people think my stories are weird!

In this and other ways, your housing crisis has turned your sunny state into a prison I never could have conceived of in gloomy Prague. Now, I did once describe an apartment as a prison in my unfinished novel Amerika. But, by not building enough housing, you’ve created a run-up in prices that traps people in your own homes. Millions of you—perhaps most of you—live in places that you could not afford to buy or rent now if they came on the market. So you can’t move and follow prospects for jobs, education, and love.

And yes, I know that many of our civic and political leaders are proposing ways to address the crisis. But so many of the ideas (Mandatory solar! Higher affordable housing requirements! Rent control!) would only add to the costs of housing. Your local leaders don’t approve housing because politics and financial incentives run against it. And instead of changing the calculus by encouraging them to do the right thing, your state legislators suggest new laws to coerce them.

When listening to those lawmakers, I thought of an old line of mine: “It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.”

Do I have any suggestions for you? Nothing that isn’t obvious. As I once wrote, “start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.” Creating enough housing, whether it’s in Prague in the 1910s or Pleasanton in the 2010s, requires creating enough housing.

If you don’t, I fear you Californians will lose your taste for your very sweet land, just as the salesman-turned-insect in The Metamorphosis loses his taste for his former favorites of bread and milk.

I’d suggest that all Californians pick up my final, unfinished, and posthumously published novel The Castle, in which the protagonist K arrives in a village but struggles to get the permission to live there.

I never wrote the ending, but I planned to have the village grant him the right to make his home there only when he was on his deathbed.

California, do you really want to come to an end as Kafkaesque as that?

The post Even Kafka Couldn’t Dream up California’s Surreal Housing Crisis appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s the real import of the more than 100 bills that have been introduced in the legislature to change housing policy in various ways. None of the current proposals is up to the task of getting the state to build sufficient housing. But the varied legislative activity—proposals to cover production incentives for builders, rental assistance, streamlining regulations, new regional planning initiatives, increased enforcement of state housing laws, and even taxation of second homes—clearly signals the state’s intention to take a leading role in how California houses itself.

The prospect of a Sacramento intervention is usually worrisome. But this one should be welcomed. The threat of the state seizing power may be one of the few levers that could prompt the biggest obstacles to new housing—local governments—to get out of the way.

One can hardly blame state government for aggressive meddling in housing. California has a nasty history of destabilizing calamities: from the run-up in housing prices in the 1970s that produced the Prop 13 backlash; to the debt-fueled mid-2000s increases that led to the housing crash and the Great Recession.

Today, California’s crisis is rising prices resulting from a profound failure to create enough units to meet the population’s needs. While the state needs an estimated 180,000 new units a year, it has been getting less than half of that. By one estimate, the resulting shortage is a $140 billion annual drag on the state economy. Companies and individuals leaving the state most often cite housing costs as their top reason. Home ownership is at the lowest rate in California since the 1940s.

The crisis also represents a public health issue. Millions of Californians pay so much for housing that they have less to spend on health care, food, education, and transportation. Housing costs force Californians into long commutes that damage our health, infrastructure, and environment. And housing prices are one big reason why California suffers from the greatest homelessness and the highest poverty rate of any state.

Adding to the difficulty is the bewildering mix of federal, state, and local policies that affect housing. Federal and state programs support people who seek housing and those who wish to provide moderately priced housing. But such programs are tiny compared to the need for subsidies in expensive California; the Legislative Analyst’s Office found that most low-income households receive no assistance with housing, and that nearly twice as many households are on waiting lists for housing vouchers as there are available vouchers.

Local governments add to the shortage by passing and enforcing limits on housing development, density, and sometimes rents themselves. This local hostility to new housing is fueled by NIMBYism, environmentalism, and a state fiscal system that encourages local governments to pursue retail development (which produces sales tax for local coffers) instead of housing.

The state has a great deal to do, but its goal should be straightforward: more housing. That should mean more assistance to those seeking housing, more incentives to produce more housing, and fewer regulations that limit housing. But the politics are wickedly complicated, even by California standards.

The debate is already dividing key interests that must come together to pass ambitious laws. Labor is split on housing, as building trades unions oppose reforms to lower housing costs, a change that would benefit working-class members of service sector unions. There also are divides among environmentalists (between those who embrace denser development and hardliners who oppose any growth at all), advocates for the poor (between those who want to revive poorer communities with new housing and those who fear new housing will merely displace poor people), and even among Republicans (between those who want to protect older people and their housing values and those who want more housing for the young families in their inland communities).

“I’m not super optimistic about the state being a positive force in housing yet,” says Chris Hoene, executive director of the California Budget & Policy Center. “The number and range of proposals suggests that there isn’t consensus yet among state leaders and housing advocates about what levers to pull.”

Some of the more than 100 housing bills could make things worse, by adding to the costs of housing, or creating disincentives for local governments to approve housing. It’s also difficult to make even small gains in encouraging more housing for poor and working-class people.

State Senator Toni Atkins of San Diego, for example, has built a formidable coalition behind a bill to provide a dedicated funding stream to support below-market housing. Politically, such funding would be a major breakthrough. But the legislation would produce just $250 million a year, a fraction of the tens of billions in affordable housing needs statewide.

And subsidized housing reflects only a fraction of the California housing market. The Legislative Analyst’s Office has called for a focus on encouraging additional private housing construction in high-demand coastal areas. Shortages there, the legislative analyst said, have rippled across the state, sending people further inland in search of cheaper housing, and driving up housing costs for everyone in the process.

The crisis is urgent and has been years in the making, and the state’s legislative efforts to gain power over the problem could take many years, with hiccups and mistakes. Is there any way to go faster? Perhaps, but it would require the politically difficult step of empowering developers.

One model, with roots in Massachusetts, gives private developers, nonprofit organizations, and local authorities great powers to challenge land-use regulations that prevent housing development. The developers get an especially free hand in localities that fail to meet state requirements on housing. The Massachusetts model thus puts local governments on the defensive. They can no longer say no to housing projects; they either must make plans for housing, or watch as developers do as they please.

Such pressure from the state may sound extreme. But so are the consequences of our housing shortage.

The post Aggressive State Meddling Could Fix California’s Housing Crisis appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Dig deep enough into any of California’s biggest problems, and you’ll eventually hit upon a common villain: our court system.

California’s housing shortage, its poverty, its poor business climate, and its failing infrastructure all are explained in no small part by the failure of our underfunded, delay-prone courts to provide anything resembling timely justice. But in public narratives of what’s wrong with the state, we have mostly let the courts dodge responsibility for their many crimes against California’s future.

This is, in part, because, our courts have been broken for so long that we’ve stopped expecting them ever to work. In the meantime, we have become lazily addicted to blaming our favorite perpetrators—our regulators, our politicians, our media, our unions, our businesses, and, more recently, President Trump—for our collective failure to build a state that meets its population’s needs.

But the biggest reason why we’ve allowed the courts to skate responsibility involves a public lack of understanding of the courts, and a resulting underestimation of their importance. State government has been treating the courts, which account for less than 3 percent of state spending, as a small problem, distinct from the state’s other maladies. But the courts’ impact is far larger than their budget imprint, making them a dangerously faulty foundation for our state’s economy and government.

If you want to block a project in California, your best bet is to get it into the courts, where you can delay for years until the project’s supporters can no longer afford to go forward. This happens regularly in California’s housing battles. But rather than blaming the courts, real estate types routinely blame a law—CEQA, the abbreviation for the California Environmental Quality Act—for the state’s struggles to build sufficient housing and infrastructure.

At a recent conference at Chapman University in Orange County, Emile Haddad, the chairman and CEO of FivePoint, the largest developer of mixed-use communities in coastal California (from the Great Park Neighborhoods in Irvine to Candlestick Point in San Francisco), pointed to the courts instead.

“I’m one of those probably odd developers who say they love CEQA,” he said, praising environmental laws that protect communities and add to quality of life and the value of housing.

The real problem, he said, is “the entire legal system.” He recounted a project that got local government approval in 2003, but still hasn’t happened, as his company is now litigating the project’s 30th lawsuit.

With each challenge or problem with permits, he loses even more years, Haddad said, because “I have to go through the same courts that have approved me already … because I cannot go directly back to the Supreme Court or the appellate court and tell them that I’ve done what they needed me to do.”

Such legal delays bear a heavy responsibility for our historic housing shortage and add to housing costs that are more than twice the national average. In turn, costlier housing is a huge factor in California’s highest-in-the-nation poverty rate and its high incidence of homelessness.

Poverty is now highest in coastal areas with the most development restrictions, which produce more litigation and costlier housing. And the clogged courts make it harder for poor people to challenge evictions from housing, or mistreatment by people and financial institutions that prey on the poor.

The same court-related delays and resulting costs also plague any number of transportation and water projects, and of countless attempts to launch new businesses. The most high-profile example is the state high-speed rail project. While the state authority in charge of the project has drawn withering coverage for its mistakes—construction remains at an early stage, nearly nine years after voters approved the bonds for it—most of the delays involve the courts.

The state itself has a long history of using the courts to delay meeting even its meager funding obligations to schools and health programs. The state courts so utterly failed to resolve California’s prison overcrowding problems that federal receivers and the U.S. Supreme Court had to step in.

Meanwhile, the courts are being asked to do more with less. Newer reforms on criminal justice resources (Governor Brown’s realignment), sentencing (Propositions 47 and 57), and recreational marijuana (Proposition 64) have created new questions and petitions that boost court workloads.

At the same time, the Great Recession and budget crises were particularly tough on the courts. Thousands of court staffers have lost their jobs in the last decade, and more than 50 courthouses and 200 courtrooms have been shuttered. Delays have more than doubled; it now can take more than five years to have your civil complaint heard by a judge or jury. (One prominent lawsuit, by California local governments against lead paint manufacturers, is now 17 years old.)

Flat pay and a heavy workload have led to walkouts by court workers, and sparked bitter infighting among state judges. Court officers in 49 of 58 counties warned in a February letter to Gov. Brown that without more money in this year’s budget, they’ll need to cut existing levels of service.

The pressure on the courts would be even worse if the total number of court filings hadn’t declined by 25 percent over the last decade. But that may be bad news. Almost all the decline has been in small claims, challenges to infractions, and minor civil cases. Regular Californians have simply given up on seeking justice in our courts.

“Inadequate funding and chronic underfunding of the courts is just one way a justice system can become unjust,” warned California Supreme Court Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye in a recent speech, noting that since 2011 the state has added 6,408 laws while the judiciary budget lags.

I recently walked three blocks from my office to the Stanley Mosk Courthouse, the state civil courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. Like other central courthouses in California’s increasingly glittery city centers, the court building stands out as an eyesore, its exterior scars clashing with the new park and federal courthouse next to it.

Inside, nothing—from bathrooms to Wi-Fi—works particularly well. Lawyers receive trial dates that are usually more than two years in the future, court reporters are scarce, and overworked clerks scramble to keep things from breaking down. A lawyer acquaintance who took me around quoted Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, a 19th-century novel about the delays and injustice of England’s Court of Chancery.

Broken courts, Dickens wrote, promote a crippling fatalism through a society, “a loose belief that if the world go wrong, it was, in some off-hand manner, never meant to go right.”

It’s way past time for California to pull itself out of this Dickensian muck. Yes, fixing our court system—making it the fastest and most efficient in the country—would be challenging politically. But it also would be relatively cheap, just a couple billion more dollars a year in a state with a $150 billion budget and a $2.5 trillion economy.

Justice delayed is justice denied. This budget season, let’s return timely justice to the courts, and stop this crime against California’s future.

The post The Verdict Is in—California’s Dickensian Courts Are Failing Us appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Perhaps it’s because all of the proposed solutions—more construction, sprawling construction, denser construction, granny flats, affordable housing mandates, new forms of financing and exemptions from regulation—are built on the same flawed premise: that housing must exist solely on land.

And on land, California’s high costs, environmental regulation, restrictive planning, anti-density NIMBYs, anti-growth local governments, and Prop 13’s protections for older homeowners, taken together, form a giant kludge that stops needed housing from being built.

What if there’s a way around all that? What if the future of California housing is on the sea?

If you haven’t heard yet of seasteading—that’s the ocean form of homesteading—don’t worry. You soon will.

Because where else does California have to go?

Floating cities are an ancient idea; Plato’s dialogues reported the sinking of Atlantis. Communities at sea have been a durable cultural trope, from the Kevin Costner film Waterworld to the video games BioShock and Bioshock2 to more recent science fiction, like the floating city Transhumania in Zoltan Istvan’s 2013 novel The Transhumanist Wager.

In this season of comfort and joy, it’s worth noting that the world’s most famous and hardiest seasteader is Santa Claus himself, laboring tirelessly among the Arctic ice floes of the North Pole. And less mythically, a half century ago, L. Ron Hubbard and other leaders of the Church of Scientology, created the Sea Organization, or Sea Org, a training compound that consisted of several ships that was were usually at sea, away from the prying eyes of the authorities.

More recently, seasteading has gained ground among libertarians, particularly those who drink from Silicon Valley’s dream-inducing waters. For a time, techies contemplated how to build cities far out to sea, in international waters, so they could live by their own laws.

At the forefront these days is the non-profit Seasteading Institute, which envisions such communities enabling “the next generation of pioneers to peacefully test new ideas for how to live together.” In 2008, the institute received high-profile backing and funding from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, who preached for ocean communities as an “escape from politics in all its forms.” More recently, the venture capitalist has publicly soured on the idea, and sought an alternate avenue to escape political reality by backing Donald Trump.

In some sense, Thiel’s newfound skepticism is justified. Such experiments have yet to realize the vision of urban ocean realities—it’s costly and complicated to build a city on the sea. Among the Seasteading Institute’s findings thus far: the open ocean is too rough to support a city, but protected coastal waters look promising.

For California, that might be good news: We have 840 miles of coast. While seasteading may sound like science fiction, it’s no less Star Trekian than median housing prices that exceed $1.1 million in San Francisco, Marin, and San Mateo counties.

While previous visions of sea cities have incorporated futuristic aquafarms or novel modes of energy production, more modest cities—with the straightforward goal of providing housing for Californians—might be more viable. One might start with boats providing badly needed housing for the state’s homeless population. This is an idea that recently got a boost from former San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos, who suggested turning the decommissioned USS Peleliu into a shelter for his city’s homeless.

Of course, California’s many land-based regulators and environmentalists would quickly raise objections to people living in coastal waters. So it’s vital to sell the idea not merely as a response to housing (since the housing crisis demonstrably doesn’t move Californians to action or reform) but as a far-sighted answer to the two problems our state’s leaders care most about: climate change and the drought.

A proponent of seasteading recently suggested to me that off-shore housing could provide a financing base to change the economics of desalination. Plans to turn ocean water into drinking water have long seemed too costly, and inefficient. But manmade islands with desalination plants financed with the proceeds from off-shore housing sales might make the numbers work; the reclaimed water could supply these sea cities, thus offering a live experiment for a more sustainable water future.

Seasteading also could mitigate climate change. Sea-based cities would provide a dry run—okay, a wet run—for the not-so-distant future, when rising sea levels inundate California’s greatest coastal cities, forcing millions of us to learn how to live on the ocean. In this way, cities on the sea would ease today’s housing problems—while furthering our climate change leadership and preparations for a watery future.

It’s hard to overstate how much the ocean can teach us. I’ve always loved a Golden State story from 1965, when a California-born teenager named Robin Lee Graham began a five-year sailing voyage around the world, eventually publishing a book called Dove and becoming a celebrity.

“At sea,” Graham wrote, “I learned how little a person needs, not how much.”

That’s a lesson all of California could learn, if we’re willing to build a future just off the coast.

The post If California Won’t Build Housing on Land, Why Not “Seasteading”? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Please forgive the tardiness of this note. You moved to California more than a year ago, and I’m only now welcoming you. And I still haven’t baked you a cake.

First, a huge thanks to you and your husband Jay Z for taking Gwyneth Paltrow’s advice and relocating here. A move to California by “the most important and compelling popular musician of the 21st century,” as the New Yorker called you, provides a heavy dose of cultural credibility to our struggling entertainment industry.

Already, you singlehandedly debunked the enduring myth that the megarich are fleeing California because of our high tax rates. And unlike so many in your bracket, you haven’t whined about the possible extension of the Proposition 30 tax rates on upper-income people. Indeed, you’ve been so quiet and discreet—no public pouting, no loud parties—that a New York tabloid editorialized against the California versions of you and Jay Z: “We never knew they were this boring.”

The best part is that you moved to raise your four-year-old daughter, Blue Ivy, right when California, at a time of lower birth rates and immigration, needs more children. Los Angeles County, where you live, especially has seen big declines in its number of kids under 10.

But I know that any transition to California can be difficult. We are, after all, the “Great Exception” among states. So out of gratitude for your commitment to California, let me offer some neighborly assistance. Particularly with the challenge that vexes you and your fellow Californians more than any other:

Finding a house to own.

As a Californian, I’m sad and embarrassed to learn, via TMZ and various real estate sites, that, now in your second year here, you are still a renter. Apparently, your first rental home in L.A. got sold for $30 million or so, and you were kicked out by the new landlord. (Who hasn’t been there?) Then you got outbid for one Beverly Hills mega mansion by that Swedish “Minecraft” gamer (who was willing to go to $70 million). So you’re now renting a Holmby Hills palace formerly occupied by a Dodgers owner for $150,000 a month, on a one-year lease that isn’t up until fall.

I realize the fact that California is the state in the nation with the highest housing costs probably is not a direct concern of someone with a net worth of hundreds of millions of dollars. But as you are now experiencing firsthand, the reason for our high housing costs is that we simply haven’t built enough houses for anybody—rich and poor and middle class alike.

With our limited coastal land and development restrictions, there simply aren’t enough mansions for all the superrich people from around the world seeking a safe haven for their families and assets, whether it’s in Carmel, Montecito, or Encinitas. This shortage at the top hurts all Californians—since we’re missing out on attracting rich people whose tax dollars could be put toward building more affordable housing for the poor.

No matter who you are, being a renter can be a real blow to one’s feeling of autonomy. As you taught us in your song “Independent Women”: “The house I live in, I’ve bought it … I depend on me.” Owning would seem to be essential to privacy for someone with your professed love of cooking naked (that was in “Jealous”—I do know all your hits). And as you and your husband indicated in your duet “Drunk in Love,” you need a home with many spacious rooms to accommodate lovemaking that isn’t always confined to the bedroom.

Plus, you have cultivated an image of wealth and ownership that is essential to your career. “Girls Run the World,” you famously sang (that’s why I’m writing this letter to you and not Jay Z, by the way). And your house in that “Partition” video (which, as I discovered in my careful research for this letter, is not safe for work) looks bigger than Versailles.

Given all this, I’m worried that you might throw up your hands and, like too many other Californians, move back to your native Texas, which would be a huge blow to our state’s pride.

The only permanent home Beyoncé has in Los Angeles at the moment is on Hollywood Boulevard.

 
So, Bey, I beg you—say you’ll never let us go. You not only can afford a home here, but also you can play a big role in drawing the attention to the causes of California’s housing problems by finding one. And the subject needs attention. While polls show it’s a big concern for regular people, it’s not a priority of our leaders; Governor Brown didn’t even mention our housing shortage in this month’s State of the State speech.

Give me a moment to elaborate on why it is so tough to buy here, particularly in California’s coastal areas: lack of developable land and our crazy governing system. In a recent report on housing costs, the non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office found that the coastal housing shortage means more people move inland, and drive up housing costs there. And that means longer commutes, which are bad for the health of commuters and our environment.

And, unfortunately for you, rules prohibiting development aren’t going to change anytime soon. The worst NIMBYs in California are found in rich coastal communities where you’re shopping for houses. We have all kinds of regulations and commissions that are used to block housing (it took U2’s The Edge years to get coastal commission sign-off on building five houses in Malibu), and our tax and local finance systems encourage cities to favor commercial developments over housing.

So since you share the same predicament as so many Californians (albeit at a higher price point), your housing crisis represents an opportunity: You would be an irresistible (and irreplaceable) spokeswoman for efforts to expand California’s scandalously small affordable housing programs and strip away anti-housing regulations. How about bringing your alter ego Sasha Fierce out of retirement and sicing her on a major contributor to our housing crisis, the California Environmental Quality Act? CEQA long ago stopped being a force to protect the environment and limit private development; newer research shows it is mostly a way for entrenched interests to block vital public projects, including the replacement of dangerously degraded infrastructure.

Fixing CEQA would empower Californians, and your music is all about empowerment.

Instead of a wardrobe malfunction at next week’s Super Bowl halftime show in Santa Clara, why not slip in a pro-housing political statement into one of your numbers instead?

And as you struggle with your own search for a home, I want you to know that if you ever need a shoulder to cry on, just give me a call.

Yours in crazy, drunk, and dangerous California love,
Joe Mathews

The post Even Beyoncé Can’t Buy a House in L.A. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.