Own Your Home? You are Evil

So you want to mow the lawn.

And have a place for you and your spouse and your kids and maybe enough room to have the occasional backyard grillstravangaza during which one your neighbors – predictably – gets a bit too drunk but is actually really funny when he does (just keep him away from the tequila.)

No matter political party, gender expression, religious preference, etc. (that’s actually true,) people eventually want a regular normal single family home on its own lot. In California it may have to be a rental (unless you make at least twice as much as median take-home pay) but the point is that it is your home.

Your own home.

How dare you?

How dare your desire to live the American – and specially California dream (post-World War II builders  literally pegged mortgage payments to average salaries – again, really).

Do you not know that is racist, colonialist, exclusionary, and generally evil? 

From, of course, the Los Angeles Times, quoting a city planning department report:

“Past planning and housing policies have too often prioritized the concerns of the White middle class over the marginalized, denying communities of color access to resources and excluding them from wealth-building opportunities,” reads the report, which was written by the firm Architectural Resources Group and academics affiliated with UCLA and USC. “Exclusionary policies of the past persist today, perpetuating patterns of segregation, displacement, inequity, and exclusion.”

It is true that past property covenants – NOT ZONING PLANS, by the way – led to certain groups being shut out of certain developments,  Jews and Blacks and Asians and Catholics of all stripes were barred from living in certain areas.

But the concept of single family home zoning had nothing to do with that, despite what Times and advocates claim.

“The argument is that the majority of the residents need to accept a greater disruption to their lives so the minority of residents, who are disproportionately wealthier and whiter, can continue to keep their neighborhood as it is,” Mahdi Manji, director of public policy at the Inner City Law Center, told the Times.

What brings this issue to the fore is the state’s demand that Los Angeles find enough space for at least 250,000 new – mostly “affordable” – housing units over the next few years. The city planning department commissioned a report (here it is again – by the way, a bunch of USC and UCLA professors helped write it) that blamed every evil-ism on the lack of proper housing stock in the city. All too white, all too privileged, all completely forgetting that the millions – no matter their color – who moved to southern California after the war came from the tundras of Iowa and factories of Chicago and were just looking for a good job and nice home.

Last Thursday, when presented with the report, the city’s planning commission properly, well, kinda passed on it. Most of the city’s neighborhoods currently zoned as “single family” will stay that way.  Of course, additional dwelling units (ADUs) will be allowed, but most neighborhoods will remain as is..ish.

The ADU concept – and the idea that every single family home lot could have up to four units – was pushed by the state and by development community (buy a house, create four units on the land, get a 25% return…duh) so that is still in the table.

But the push to “solve the house crisis” by jamming as many units as possible into every space possible seems to be off the table for now.

That push is driven by “housing advocates” who claim the lack of housing is why the city has so many homeless people – that is beyond not true. Methhead Joe is not on the street because there is not enough housing.

So what does this mean for LA and, eventually, everywhere else?  Maybe some reality is setting in about housing – developers build more expensive home because the profit margin is higher – and that demanding that people who chose to live in a regular single family home neighborhood should be respected for that decision is not inherently terrible.

Serving on the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) Borders Committee I came across a very interesting poll. I was Riverside County’s rep to the  board and the folks at SANDAG couldn’t quite figure out why people were willing to drive three hours a day to go to and from their homes in Temecula, Murrieta and even my lovely home of Lake Elsinore.

Every poll taken showed the same thing – No matter the personal demographic, they were doing it to be able to afford a place where they could  mow the lawn.