Editorial Opinion

Not too long ago, when I was a young man growing up in southern California, the state had a lot of wide open spaces. We could find desolate places to be alone, to explore the vast wildernesses of the mountains, valleys, and deserts, or to have an evening campfire on an isolated beach. Orange County consisted mostly of orange groves and long sandy beaches. Cities such as Oceanside, Carlsbad, San Clemente, and San Juan Capistrano were quaint little seaside villages that catered to weekend tourists from Los Angeles. Away from the immediate coast, there was square mile after square mile of grazing and farming lands reaching up into the hills to the east, and on to the Sierra Nevada. The eastern deserts beyond the Sierra were a far country rarely explored.

Since then, California’s population has soared from under 10 million to over 40 million people, and we are planning for 50 million people in the near future. During these past 50 years, communities in California have been building new housing at a furious rate. First went the bean fields of the San Fernando Valley and the orange groves and coastal sand dunes of Orange County, along with the broccoli and cauliflower fields around San Francisco Bay. Then the flower fields and strawberry fields of northern San Diego County. It seemed like new housing developments, shopping centers, and roads were springing up relentlessly all around us. Traffic congestion mushroomed, and formerly laid-back Californian drivers became frustrated and angry commuters, just like their East Coast counterparts.

When all of the cheap flat coastal lands had been graded and paved over, developers moved over the hills to what is now known as the Inland Empire, building and building and building. East of Los Angeles, the high desert was paved over in places like Palmdale, Lancaster, and Adelanto.

Up north, after the lands around San Francisco Bay and down the coast had been lost to development, the developers moved over the hills to Tracy and on to Fresno, up the coast into Marin County, and down south of San Jose clear to Monterey. Sleepy little towns suddenly became major bedroom communities. Hundreds of miles of new freeways were paid for by California residents so that workers could commute 2-3 hours each way, each day from cheap but distant tract housing to major employment centers in San Francisco, Santa Clara, San Jose, Los Angeles, Irvine, and San Diego.

Now the Governor and State Legislature – spurred on by the Building Industry Association and other pro-development groups and their lobbyists – tell us there is a shortage of affordable housing, and we need even more housing units to solve the problem. Governor Newsom wants California to build 3.5 million more housing units by 2025 – just six short years from now!

It should be obvious after 50 years of rapid growth that, just as adding new lanes to a freeway does not noticeably improve traffic congestion, building more housing will not suddenly make housing more affordable. It will further enrich developers – who are eager to help us out of this latest “crisis” - and lead to the loss of our last sizable open spaces, but it will not substantially bring down housing costs for a meaningful portion of our population.

If we build it, they will come. Providing discounted “affordable” housing for a future projected population of 50 million or more residents is a self-fulfilling dystopian prophecy. And California – already the most populous state in the U.S. – simply cannot accommodate everyone who wants to live here. In the process of attempting to do so, however, we are losing what once made California a wonderful place to grow up.