Who says you can’t build anything in California? Huntington Beach is busy constructing a wall of denial around whatever is left of its soul.

The Orange County city has long been associated with the open and outlaw side of California. Named for a railroad robber baron (Henry Huntington), the city grew through oil speculation, aerospace, rapid post-war housing development, and a free-spirited surfing culture inspired by its beautiful beaches.

But in this century, Huntington Beach has achieved a different sort of prominence: As the anti-California, its independent vibe having curdled into a nasty mix of irresponsibility, litigiousness, and conspiracy-mongering.

Surf City USA (the trademark name it won after a fight with Santa Cruz) feels more like Scofflaw Town. Today, Huntington Beach is bitterly defying state policies designed to build housing, protect immigrants, end the drug war, and enhance voting rights and representation.

Behind all this defiance lie questions about the surfing capital’s ability to adjust to new racial realities. While the other three Orange County cities with more than 200,000 people—Irvine, Anaheim, and Santa Ana—now have non-white majorities, Huntington Beach, at 63 percent non-Hispanic white, clings stubbornly to whiteness. And city policies limit the ability of younger, more diverse generations of Californians to gain a foothold in town.

The city government and its political leadership have also positioned themselves as allies of President Trump in his legal battles against the state. Most troublingly, the city has declared war on state sanctuary protections for unauthorized immigrants, arguing in court that California’s 100-plus cities with charters—separate local constitutions—could ignore state law on immigrants. If the city succeeds (and it won an early round before a judge who personally praised Huntington Beach’s police chief from the bench), it would make a mockery of equal protection.

In short, Huntington Beach has dressed up anti-immigrant policies with claims that it’s merely defending local control. That’s head-spinning chutzpah, given that leading Huntington Beach politicians have aligned themselves with the federal government’s attacks on other California localities that chose to protect immigrants rather than support Trump’s mass deportation policies. Huntington Beach also is claiming that it’s protecting public safety by opposing sanctuary policies—even though data show immigrants are less likely to report crimes in places where local authorities cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.

Huntington Beach’s attacks on state policies go beyond immigration—and are often accompanied by claims that the city is somehow a victim of the rest of California. In January, the city sued the state to challenge a new law that forces local communities to streamline housing development. But when the governor and attorney general responded a week later by suing the city for failing to meet its housing obligations, Huntington Beach and its representatives complained, ludicrously, that they had been unfairly singled out.

Resistance to home-building is particularly strong in Orange County. But even in that context, Surf City is a legitimate target. Its tourism and beach-related industries rely heavily on poorer, non-white workers who commute long distances—those are the workers who make the place Surf City—but it has refused for years to do even the most basic planning, much less building, to house such workers. And when city officials tried to address affordable housing earlier this decade, they faced rebellion from residents.

“Huntington Beach’s dismissive approach to housing—claiming there is no problem and that the state should just mind its own business—is Exhibit A for why we have a crisis in this state,” State Sen. Scott Wiener, a state leader on housing policy, said in a statement after the lawsuits.

Huntington Beach’s scofflaw instincts extend to other issues. Take marijuana legalization. In order for California’s legalization of marijuana to work, cities must license and regulate the legal industry, while cracking down on the black market. But Surf City has irresponsibly done the exact opposite: prohibiting the establishment of legal, non-medical marijuana sales and distribution within the city, while doing little to stop illegal operations.

Huntington Beach also has resisted legal demands that it change its election systems to comply with the state’s voting rights act. Specifically, while other California cities have divided themselves into districts and elected council members who represent different neighborhoods (and are more likely to be non-white), Huntington Beach has stuck to at-large elections, which mean council members are elected by all city voters. In responding to a legal demand for the election shift, the Huntington Beach city attorney accused the lawyer seeking the change of pursuing “reverse discrimination.”

Unfortunately, Surf City’s racialized opposition to state norms isn’t confined to the city limits. One Huntington Beach representative, the former state assemblyman and 2018 gubernatorial candidate Travis Allen, is a favorite to become the next chair of the California Republican Party. He traffics in phony Trump-like claims about immigrants and voter fraud. But Allen’s act has so far proved too Trumpian for even Trump; the president endorsed Allen’s Republican opponent, John Cox, in last year’s governor’s race.

Surf City also faces scrutiny about hate groups. Last fall, the federal government charged four members of a Huntington Beach-based white supremacist group, the RAM or “Rise Above Movement,” with inciting riots and attacking counterprotesters at rallies around the country—including the infamous white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. RAM was also linked to violence at a 2017 pro-Trump rally in Huntington Beach.

Huntington Beach has no monopoly on hatred; organizations that track hate groups say white supremacists can be found across California. But after the arrests, news reports referred to previous links between Huntington Beach and hate groups dating to the 1980s, when skinheads were all too visible on the pier and downtown.

City officials responded that Surf City has an unfair and outdated reputation. That reaction is understandable. But Huntington Beach also might have used the arrests as an occasion for reflection—and to reassess the messages the city is sending by defying more inclusive state policies on housing and immigration. Instead, Huntington Beach has doubled down.

Hate’s up, Surf City. Are you sure you want to keep riding this wave?

The post How Surf City USA Became the “Anti-California” appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

No Independence Day was more important than July 4, 1904, when the city held its very first Fourth of July parade. That day saw the arrival of the city’s very first electric passenger train. About 50,000 people were on hand for the event—far more than the population at the time. The train literally opened up Huntington Beach to the rest of Southern California, establishing a crucial link to the neighboring cities of Long Beach and Los Angeles.

This was also the moment that gave Huntington Beach its name. Originally called Pacific City, the area was rechristened in honor of Henry Huntington, who owned the trains. He deserved the honor. Huntington knew that a railway to Huntington Beach would not have enough riders to be consistently profitable, but he built one anyway, on the theory that those people who did take the ride would purchase property that he and others owned in the area. A visit to today’s Huntington Beach is all the evidence you need to know that Huntington was right.

In the 110 years since the railway’s arrival, Huntington Beach has acknowledged this anniversary by building up its Fourth of July parade into an essential Orange County tradition. Since the beginning, the parade has mixed the customs of small-town parades—tug-of-wars, beauty contests, airshows, eating contests, horse races—with more spectacular attractions. One unforgettable such special offering, in the 1930s, featured Fire Chief Bud Higgins, who wore a fire suit, slathered his face with petroleum jelly, covered his entire torso with alcohol and then lit himself on fire—all before diving from a 50-foot platform above the pier into the ocean. Talk about a showstopper.

For a half century, the train powered Huntington Beach year-round. In the 1940s, Los Angeles had more than 900 Red Cars that traveled over 1,100 miles throughout the Southland. In Huntington Beach, there was a big depot located right at Pacific Coast Highway and Main Street. Three lines came to Huntington Beach—the La Bolsa Line, the Santa/Huntington Beach line, and a line that connected to Seal Beach and Newport Beach—and the stops defined neighborhoods.

But by the early 1950s, the car took over Southern California, and the depot was little used. Later, it was torn down. The last Red Cars in L.A. stopped running in 1961.

Today in Huntington Beach, you’ll find remnants of train tracks on the beach, as well as a stretch of “right of ways” (the actual paths that the trains ran on) for the La Bolsa Line. The tracks may be gone, but narrow grass medians mark where the trains once creaked along from First Street and PCH all the way to Ellis Avenue between Gothard and Huntington. To feel what Huntington Beach once was, you can go to the Red Car Museum in Seal Beach or ride an old Red Car in San Pedro, where there’s a 1.5-mile vintage trolley line.

Of course, the best way to understand Huntington Beach, and connect to its history, is to drop by on Independence Day. The trains may be gone, but the parade goes on. Huntington Beach now boasts the longest-running July Fourth parade west of the Mississippi.

The post A SoCal City Born on the Fourth of July appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.