I offer that line not as a jab at the advanced average age of the Coachella Valley’s retiree-heavy population. Rather, it’s a testament to the warmth and wonder I felt while waiting for a recent flight at Palm Springs International Airport.

Pandemic-era air travel in California is typically a miserable combination of unhappy passengers and unreliable service—except in Palm Springs. There, flying still feels like a miracle.

The airport is small, with fewer than two dozen gates, and easy to navigate. Security lines are often short. After your body and bags are scanned, you emerge into an outdoor desert garden, with good coffee. It might be the best waiting room in American aviation.

And, if we’re lucky, sun-splashed, open-air PSP—the code by which this airport is known—will become a model for post-pandemic flight across California, and especially in the smaller airports of our growing inland regions.

PSP is already the people’s choice. While the pandemic has grounded the ambitions of the airlines and the larger travel industry, PSP has soared. 2021 was the busiest summer in the airport’s history. And since last June, the airport has set seven new monthly records for passengers; PSP now serves more than two million people annually.

The commercial air traffic may keep setting new records. Southwest Airlines started service in Palm Springs in late 2020 and now flies from there to eight cities, including Sacramento and Oakland. Six other airlines have added flights, including American Airlines to Philadelphia, JetBlue to Fort Lauderdale, and, just last month, aha! to Reno. The 13 passenger airlines serving the airport now offer 35 different routes—creating more competition and lowering fares, and surely making PSP even more popular.

In local news reports, airport officials have expressed surprise at this pandemic surge; they hadn’t projected a return to pre-COVID numbers until 2023. But this small airport, a former military base that the city of Palm Springs bought and converted six decades ago, has long found ways to succeed, even in hard times.

Indeed, PSP has prospered ever since the Great Recession, even as other airports in California, Nevada, and Arizona have stagnated. One reason has been the large number of Canadian snowbirds buying Coachella Valley properties after the collapse of the housing bubble. That growing Canadian colony created a huge demand for flights from the Great White North. PSP now has non-stop service not just to Vancouver and Toronto, but also to Calgary, Edmonton, and Winnipeg.

Thanks in part to the Canadian influx, Palm Springs established new records for passengers in six of the seven years between 2012 and 2019.

The airport’s growth has been supported over the last two decades by the sort of careful and sustained investment that too many California localities struggle to pull off. Early in the century came a new control tower, runway enhancements, a new and larger terminal, and a remodeling of that outdoor courtyard. More recent years have seen the expansion of the ticket lobby and a new, improved baggage handling system. These additions, carefully designed, have not cost the airport its small and convenient feel.

Palm Springs can’t take all the credit for its growth. The awfulness of flying in and out of LAX, and the horror of driving anywhere from it, have driven customers to find alternatives. And Ontario Airport, the nearest Inland Empire rival to Palm Springs, has been badly mismanaged, shedding flights and passengers for most of the 2000s and 2010s.

When COVID hit, PSP, with that outdoor space, felt like a safe place to visit—not unlike Palm Springs. The Coachella Valley’s great weather, and its tradition of indoor-outdoor living, has made it a popular place to pass the pandemic.

I made my maiden voyage recently on a late afternoon flight from PSP to Oakland, after a tiring day of reporting around the valley.

For the first time I can remember, an airport refreshed me. I made it through security in two minutes, having to wait only for a very polite family of five, all wearing Toronto Maple Leaf sweatshirts. I lay down on a shady bench in the garden, before heading up into the Sonny Bono Concourse to grab a sandwich at an open-air restaurant. While eating, I took in fabulous views of Southern California’s two highest mountains, Mt. San Gorgonio and Mt. San Jacinto. It felt a bit like visiting a desert spa.

Marveling at the scene, I told an airport worker that the only thing missing was a swimming pool. She quickly corrected me—there is a pool, but it’s in the general aviation part of the airport, for those who fly privately.

I’ve heard people compare the look of the airport, with attractive canopies and all that light, to the sets in the NBC show The Good Place, a comedy that offered a sun-splashed view of the afterlife. Of course, we mere mortals have no way of knowing whether PSP really looks like heaven. But Palm Springs does have one advantage on that other paradise: an airport that makes it easy to get in and get out.

The post Am I in Heaven or Just Flying Out of Palm Springs? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s because Palm Springs, like the Golden State, is a modernist project, built by people who broke from old tradition and established cultures, and experimented relentlessly to construct new systems that buried the past. Throughout California, modernism has produced freeways that span the state, waterworks through swamps and deserts, culture-dominating industries from Hollywood to Silicon Valley, and brand-new approaches to art, architecture, literature, philosophy, politics, and religion.

But modernism also damaged California communities, structures, and habitats. So, today modernism is in retreat, with post-modernism ascendant. We worship the past, and tell ourselves we want to go backward and restore it. We talk about taking down the dams and interstates, getting back to nature and repairing the environment, staying off our screens and cracking down on the tech companies, and restoring the lands and traditions of our ancestors.

That’s what makes Palm Springs—and its public devotion to modernism—so distinctive. The city is effectively promoting the creation of the new, by looking not forward but backward into its own past.

Palm Springs has long touted its mid-century modern architecture—those 20th century desert homes, with lots of glass and open spaces, that encourage indoor-outdoor living and have become synonymous with California in the American mind.

In 2006, after some years of holding a Modernism Show & Sale and successful symposia on modern design, Palm Springs created a major event—Modernism Week. It’s grown into a colossus of the February calendar, with home tours, bus tours, walking tours, bike tours, garden tours, films, lectures, parties, concerts, fashion shows, and cars shows. There’s now a second, smaller-scale Modernism Week, in the fall. This year, the pandemic expanded the calendar, with Palm Springs hosting an online Modernism Week in February, followed by an in-person week in April.

All celebrate a Palm Springs modernist aesthetic of—as the designer and writer Brad Dunning told Palm Springs Life—“forward-facing the future with open arms and a martini.”

Modernism Week, of course, is about commerce. Palm Springs’s tourist economy needs visitors, local arts-oriented businesses want customers, and real estate interests need to sell local homes. But the event also taps into what might be called a nostalgia for the new.

Palm Springs is keeping alive a time when Californians could violate old strictures and fashion entirely novel things without having to spend years fighting planning commissions or CEQA lawsuits. But Modernism Week also evangelizes for an updating of modernism, to fit the more diverse needs of today.

This year’s Fast Forward/Designing the Future of Palm Springs event showcased a new and decidedly modernist design for affordable housing by local architect Maria Song. Her design for the 60-unit Monarch Apartment Homes on Indian Canyon Way nods to the renowned work of Donald Wexler, the architect of many of the area’s steel-and-glass homes.

Song’s goal is creating affordable housing beautiful and distinguished enough to be embraced by wealthy neighborhoods. “I want people to understand that there is nothing cheap about affordable housing,” Song told me. “Rents are affordable, but not the materials or landscaping or the quality of the building.” The Monarch proposal, being developed by Fairfield-based Community Housing Opportunities Corporation, should produce “a building that opens minds and that any community would be proud to have as part of its fabric,” she added.

That Palm Springs is a citadel of modernism is both appropriate, and rich with contradictions. Is any California community more defiantly modern? This is a lush city in the middle of a desert valley full of golf courses and swimming pools, in a state plagued by drought. The largest landowner in Palm Springs is actually the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, which in recent years has asserted more of its property rights, frustrating the expansive ambitions of some businesses.

Palm Springs is thus, like California itself, caught in a purgatory, between the urge for the new and the demands of the old. In other words, we Californians occupy a no-man’s land, somewhere between modernism and post-modernism. We know we need to create new systems that are sustainable and climate-friendly, inclusive and anti-racist. But we are afraid of displacing stakeholders, or burying the past, or not respecting our ancestors. For these and other reasons, we maintain nearly insurmountable regulations and obstacles to building anything new.

This conundrum can leave us feeling as though we are trapped in time, not sure which way lies the past and which way lies the future. The feeling is expertly captured in a new installation outside the Palm Spring Art Museum by the artist Gonzalo Lebrija. It is a car that is suspended over a pool of liquid—not going in any direction, frozen. The work’s title is “History of Suspended Time (A monument for the impossible).”

If we take inspiration from Palm Springs, we’ll try to go multiple directions at once. We’ll take the risk of creating modern novelties for our post-modern world. And we’ll recognize that the fastest way to restore the past is to go boldly forward into the future.

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“I mean, it doesn’t get any better than that,” Roy says, surveying his suburban idyll in Orange County’s great master-planned community. “You’ve gotta find your Irvine.”

Nyles, who is in existential despair, is dubious. “I don’t have an Irvine.”

“We all have an Irvine,” Roy says.

The apocalypse, for Roy and Nyles—characters in the genre-bending sci-fi comedy film Palm Springs—is the result of wandering into the wrong cave in the Coachella Valley, after which they find themselves stuck re-living the same day over and over again. Roy, who bitterly blames Nyles for their “Groundhog Day” predicament, at first spends this endless time loop traveling from Irvine to the desert, where he tortures and kills Nyles, over and over again.

But late in the film, Nyles for the first time goes to Irvine, where he finds Roy unexpectedly content. Roy explains that he has overcome his homicidal impulses and learned to accept his strange existence. His peace of mind comes from embracing the chance to re-live the same day with his wife and twin children.

Do we all have that place, our own Irvine? And if so, how can we access it?

Those might be the great questions of this moment. What does it take to find some space and contentment as the world collapses around us? How does one find solace as basic social structures melt down?

It’s hard to be optimistic. After all, few of us could afford the real Irvine—where the median home price is north of $900,000, and the average monthly rent is approaching $2,500—even before COVID scrambled our lives, jobs, and schools. For Californians, the struggle to hold on to whatever meager piece of this state we currently have is an exhausting one.

Indeed, the version of the human predicament that Palm Springs offers us—stuck in a never-ending day of anxiety, phony love, violence, and bad weddings—is frightening, but nowhere near as scary as California’s future prospects.

Earlier this fall, the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto-based think tank, constructed four future scenarios based on workshops and extensive study. The visions are pretty dark.

The map and documents produced by the institute describe California, and American society more broadly, as stuck in its own endless loop. Our public spaces have been privatized and commercialized, undermining the civic sphere. Our educational institutions may produce some skilled workers, but not well-informed citizens. Our culture has been consumed by celebrity, and polarized. The health system is wasteful, expensive, ineffective, and unequal. Skepticism has been weaponized against science. And our political system is devolving into authoritarianism.

The pandemic has exposed these failures, and deepened them, laying bare the underlying fragility of our institutions. Our economic losses have erased the last decade’s growth, and our job losses are likely to be worse than other states’. Inequality is growing under COVID and our social fabric and supply chains are breaking. California’s ability to recover is deeply dependent on a robust and thoughtful pandemic response from our politically divided national government.

Even the more optimistic of the Institute for the Future’s four scenarios are dark.

The “Growth: Saving Capitalists” scenario shows fiscal stimulus restoring much of the economy, but without badly needed structural change. Employment would be slow to recover, in part because companies would turn to job automation rather than re-hiring workers. Educational and income divides would grow, and the benefits of the recovery would predominantly go to rich people and politically powerful sectors, like the tech companies and airlines. Low-wage workers would be shadowed by greater debt, mental illness, and unstable employment.

A “Constraint: Germ Pods” scenario envisions the reorganization of society around data systems and algorithms that entrench existing wealth and racial inequalities, and introduce new inequalities. This would be a segregated health dystopia. Under the guise of protecting people from disease and new pandemics, society would segment into geographic and digital clusters, or “germ pods,” separating those with access to testing and treatment from those without. The resulting discrimination—with separate schools, jobs, and public facilities based on your health status—would be justified on the basis of protecting public health and safety.

That sounds like paradise compared to the darkest scenario, “Collapse: Ungoverning,” in which military-style confrontation becomes routine in our streets. COVID-19 triggers more systemic collapses across the country, and the battle lines are drawn: “Red Hats against Blue Masks, militant police against unprecedented numbers of protestors, armed vigilantes against all calls for unity and a new order.” Mass deaths becomes acceptable, and with Red Hats dominating government, every city sees blue guerilla warfare. Police and military organizations divide, and fight each other.

“By 2030, the union is mortally fractured along political lines: cities, states, and regions are governed not by a single sovereign nation, but by a thicket of tenuous inter-jurisdictional agreements and looming violence,” the scenario map document reads.

The only ray of light comes from the “Transformation: Social Solidarity” scenario, and it feels improbable. Under this scenario, systemic breakdowns during the pandemic inspire a renewed public commitment to broad social agendas, and to greater collective well-being. The mutual aid arrangements of today evolve into new income and health supports, and society begins to transform and redesign its broken systems. Public education is reinvented around experiential learning, while new digital governance structures, including data unions, protect privacy and marshal digital power for civic purposes.

By 2030, a Global New Deal has emerged around “universal basic assets—every human’s right to the core resources that are essential to well-being.”

All four scenarios suggest that the future will turn on how we address our broken systems and faltering institutions. And the Institute for the Future argues for replacement over repair of systems. “Whether we simply shore them up as best we can or make major structural changes, will largely determine whether we see a decade of renewed growth or collapse, a reckoning with long-term limits to growth, or a deep shift in both economy and culture,” reads the Institute’s map of the scenarios.

The next decade, the map adds, “will call on us to find our way through the multiple collapsing systems.” And as these systems fail, “they also open pathways to something new—to truly bold visions of transformation that reinvent the way we work as a society, as an economy, and as friends and neighbors.”

California does have success in creating master planned communities, like Irvine. Now we need a plan for recreating essential social systems. In other words, our Irvine isn’t just sitting out there waiting for us to find it. Instead, we’ll have to imagine and build new Irvines for ourselves.

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If you’re looking for the quintessential Christmas experience, there’s only one place you should go: the Southern California desert.

The Coachella Valley is the Golden State’s very own Yuletide capital—which might make it the capital of Christmas in America, maybe even the world. After all, California popularized Christmas via Hollywood, and still designs it through our toymakers, digitizes it via Silicon Valley, and distributes it through our ports.

Some Scrooges will call this sacrilege, citing our lack of conifers and snow. Leave such people to their ignorance—the desert is already plenty crowded this time of year.

What they don’t know is that Bing Crosby, the man who first and most famously sang “White Christmas,” was a regular in the desert. For a time, he broadcast his radio show from the American Legion Post in Palm Springs, and he even developed Blue Skies Village in Rancho Mirage, according to The Desert Sun. The other signature voices of the American holidays—from Elvis Presley to Frank Sinatra—also had deep desert ties. Frank Capra conceived his holiday classic It’s a Wonderful Life in La Quinta.

Christmas, of course, has been a desert holiday for 2,000 years, since a child was born in Bethlehem, a little town in the Judean desert still remembered for its failure to provide enough lodging. Palm Springs would never make the same mistake.

Christmas is about birth and journeys, and so is this time of year in Coachella. While the rest of the state slows down at the holidays, the desert starts up. Hundreds of thousands of vacationers make pilgrimages to the region, and various seniors and snowbirds arrive to take up residence for the winter months, swelling the Coachella Valley’s population from 200,000 to 800,000.

It’s worth noting that an estimated 450,000 of these winter visitors are Canadians, who know all too well the horrors of a cold and snowy Christmas.

And why wouldn’t you come to Palm Springs in December? The warm daytime weather is perfect for golf or swimming, while the cool nights make it possible for you to put on your Santa suit and celebrate the season without breaking a sweat. And if you must have snow, it’s usually there—on top of Mt. San Jacinto, which is only a hike or tram ride away.

The desert is simply the most transcendent environment in which to pass this season. “If you don’t die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert,” the great Northern California writer and novelist Anne Lamott once observed. “You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young.”

Seeking such uplift on the first weekend of December, I drove from Los Angeles to Palm Springs, a trip that, at 100 miles, is about the same length as the journey Joseph and Mary made (in a caravan of migrants, some historians suggest) from Nazareth to Bethlehem.

During the holidays and the subsequent winter months, the Coachella Valley offers so many festivals—in music, architecture, art, film—that every weekend feels like Christmas. In December, it’s also home to huge light displays, none more awe-inspiring than Kenny Irwin Jr.’s Robolights, which draws so many people—60,000—that the city of Palm Springs is forcing it out of its current location in a residential neighborhood. Irwin is looking for a commercial space for next year.

But I most wanted to see what has quietly become one of the largest holiday parades in California: the Festival of Lights parade in Palm Springs.

It’s a relatively recent tradition—the parade started small in 1991. But it has grown, with city government and corporate support, into a bucket-list event that draws 100,000 people to a city with a population of 50,000, on the first Saturday night in December.

The parade runs for 1.3 miles along Palm Canyon Drive. This year, the crowds were 10 rows deep along the boulevard’s broad sidewalks. There were 84 entries—as many as in California’s biggest parade, the Tournament of Roses in my hometown of Pasadena.

All the participants and floats wear electric lights, including marching bands for middle and high schools, and vehicles from garbage trucks to fire engines to vintage golf carts. Neighborhood groups also inflate and carry giant helium balloons—like the ones in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City—which are lit with spotlights mounted in trucks that ride just in front of them.

In these angry times, the warm and welcoming atmosphere distinguishes the event. While Pasadena merchants have long shut down their stores during the Rose Parade, Palm Springs merchants stay open during the Festival of Lights. Even real estate offices, spas, and law firms along Palm Canyon Drive hold open houses, with some offering food and drink. The parade also provides announcers at a couple different points to offer personal details about the participants (this included an introduction of a parade marshal’s “new lady friend”).

At this year’s parade, the cheers were especially loud for the Palm Springs Public Library Book Cart Drill Team, the Desert Burners Bicycle Brigade, and the Cathedral City High School Ballet Folklorico, whose members danced while wearing a combination of multicolored costumes and multicolored lights that gave new meaning to the word psychedelic.

The audience also appreciated the entry for a local hotel, a lit-up Hummer with a snow-making machine mounted on top, promoting the hotel’s “DRG Brunch Sundays,” a set-price brunch that includes cocktails and a drag show.

“We’re so lucky,” said Ethan Kaminsky, a local video production guy who held a massive potluck party next to an RV he had parked on a vacant lot along the parade route. “We get to live where everyone else comes for Christmas.”

Make yours merry, bright—and dry as the desert.

The post From Bethlehem to Palm Springs, Christmas Belongs in the Desert appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

After all, Canadians already run the place in winter.

Over the past 40 years, snowbirds from the True North have grown into a winter fixture in greater Palm Springs. They get a lot more than an escape from cold winter weather. The California desert is a much shorter flight than Maui, and it offers an array of arts and culture—from the Palm Springs International Film Festival, to the design-focused Modernism Week, to the famous Coachella music festivals in Indio—that Phoenix can’t hope to match.

Over time, the desert has developed a Canadian-friendly infrastructure of restaurants, country clubs, and social organizations. The Desert Sun carries stories about Justin Trudeau and Vancouver Canucks hockey. La Spiga, once a top restaurant in Edmonton, is now open here. In some years, there’s even been a Canada Fest.

Coachella has also developed a Canadian civic life, with leading politicians from western Canada, particularly Alberta, spending stretches of the winter here. The Canadian Club of the Desert, founded in 1982 at the Gene Autry Hotel in Palm Springs, holds monthly breakfast forums “sharing experiences and ideas concerning issues of importance to Canadians.” (Curious Americans are also invited to attend.) The club organizes field trips to Southern California museums, holds tailgate parties before matches at local polo grounds, and hosts both a “Welcome Back Cocktail Party” in early December and “A Wind-Up Dinner and Dance” in late March, at the Canada-friendly Lakes Country Club.

It was the Great Recession that accelerated this Canadianization of the California Desert. In 2008, western Canada’s economy was booming, Canada’s baby-boomers were beginning to retire, and the Canadian dollar was at all-time highs, achieving parity with the U.S. dollar. At the same time, the inland California real estate market was in freefall—allowing Canadians to snap up properties cheaply in a place where your toes don’t freeze in February.

So many thousands did, that, in the first four years of this decade, Canadian buyers accounted for one-quarter of home purchases in the desert. And home sales are just one piece of the crucial stimulus that Canadians provided for a struggling region.

Canada is responsible for an estimated 450,000 visitors to the valley each year; the Canadian government has taken credit for tripling the population of Palm Springs during the heart of winter. The Canadian hordes have provided crucial ballast for faltering businesses; the Palm Desert Country Club and the Tilted-Kilt franchise in Palm Desert were rescued from bankruptcy by Canadian business people. Canadians have also fueled the expansion of Palm Springs International Airport, which boasts direct service to Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Winnipeg.

The Canadian Invasion has stirred only minor resentments. Restaurant servers say they could tip better. Canadians are blamed for—or credited with, if you take a public health perspective—making traffic slower, given their strange national proclivity for obeying posted speed limits.

But the biggest problem with Coachella’s Canadianization is that it isn’t as big and strong as it should be.

The Coachella Valley could get even more of an economic and cultural boost if more Canadians could visit more, buy more homes, and stay longer. But Canadians are welcome here only part-time. That’s because our bullying federal government imposes its complicated tax and immigration systems on you if you spend too much time here.

While the details are complicated, many Canadians in Coachella limit themselves to just 182 days a year, to avoid U.S. taxes and immigration restrictions. Spend 183 days here—more than half the year—and you can be considered a U.S. “resident alien” and be forced to pay U.S. taxes on all your global income.

This hurts California, since our Canadian visitors and part-time residents pay state and local taxes, while using relatively little in services.

A Canadian couple who split their time between Indio and British Columbia (I am not naming them to spare them any federal government hassles) contacted me recently to point out that they have come to the Coachella Valley every year since 1984, and have owned homes here since 2003.

Their California property taxes, they note, are 180 percent higher than those in their home Canadian province. As six-month residents, they spend more time here than they do in Canada, but make no social service demands. They even buy extra travel and health insurance, they said, “to ensure that we can protect ourselves against the bankrupting cost of medical services here.”

So why shouldn’t they be able to stay longer?

“We are welcome here for 182 days, then we become ‘alien,’ and must depart,” they said. “We can own property but not weapons. We can pay every tax but not vote. We can patronize retail merchants but cannot win a prize for responding to surveys …. We commit no crimes. We buy media but seldom appear in it. We are a potential resource, never a threat.”

Recent declines in the Canadian dollar have made them less of a resource; Canadian spending, hotel stays, and vacation home rental all have slipped slightly from their highs earlier in the decade. The California housing shortage, and the soaring home costs that come with it, have made buying here harder for everyone, including our neighbors to the north. (Still, median home prices in the desert are less than half of what it costs to buy in Vancouver or Toronto.)

But this doesn’t mean we should give up on Canadians. To the contrary, California should be making it easier for more of them to come to the Coachella Valley, and to stay longer. Imagine if federal law were changed to make it possible for Canadians to spend nine months a year in California, rather than six months, without triggering U.S. residency rules and taxes. That would be 50 percent more time, and much more spending and sales taxes from Canadians. Building more homes—something California desperately needs to do—would open the door to more Canadian stimulus as well.

Could this happen? Maybe not. The federal government is hostile to policies that benefit California, and the NAFTA agreement that binds together our economy with Canada’s is in jeopardy. But Congressional Republicans are open to tax reform, and President Trump, despite his hostility to immigrants, has indicated he’s more favorably disposed to newcomers from wealthier and whiter countries like Canada.

Perhaps, if the feds won’t make things easier for Canadians in California, the state could step in.

Maybe the desert heat is getting to me, but I can’t help wondering if California might just deed the Coachella Valley to Canada. Not only would we get more Canadians but we’d get a better system of government that has produced an expanding middle class in that country. We’d also get a bit of insurance: If the federal government escalates its ongoing war against California, Californians would only have to drive to Palm Springs to ask for asylum.

A Canadian colony in California might not be paradise. But it sounds pretty good, eh?

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