Authoritarianism: Alive and well in Sacramento

Forty years ago, it was decided by the Sierra Club and environmentalists that California must “re-imagine” how and where people live. The dream, if it can be called that, was to rebuild the cities and towns of the Golden State so people did not have to drive to work or to shop.

The suburbs would disappear, so would rural living.

How could that be accomplished? First, the zoning model used to guide California for more than 100 years was arbitrarily deemed a failure and a threat to humanity. The dream city would build smaller homes, more like apartments, condos or multipurpose single rooms located next to or above commercial, industrial and business office sites so the people could walk to work or the market rather than drive.

The Sierra Club called it Smart Growth. Who would want to live in Stupid Growth? Just re-imagine your life as never having to leave your own block, never mow a lawn or plant a tree or raise a vegetable.

A little history is required. Zoning laws were designed to protect people’s homes from the intrusion of business and industry, to carve out an orderly, stable community designed to produce a complete and functioning city.

Because zoning determined, in part, the value of land, a city’s general zoning plan was the responsibility of the locally elected city council, or in the unincorporated areas, the county boards of supervisors. Public hearings were held when changes to the general zoning requirements were suggested, and citizens had a say in how their government operated. The public debates would go on and on, sometimes past the midnight hour.

But some 30 years before the Sierra Club Smart Growth master plan, the California Legislature started creating regional government structures run by governor appointees and state legislative leaders. In other words, the power shifted from elected city councils and the county supervisors to regional, unelected, politically control, state agencies.

Names such as the Bay Area Association of Governments, the Southern California Association of Government, the Regional Water Quality Control Board, the Regional Air Pollution Control Board, were making decisions, and residents only became aware of those decisions when it was too late.

Global warming became climate change. Cars were targeted as pollution sources, and government redesigned them. Electrical plants also were designated pollution sources, and those are being closed. The petroleum industry, more important to California than the Gold Rush, was declared nasty and bad, and this year the last major oil company in California moved to Texas.

Every device in your home, from the water faucets to the appliances, heaters, air conditioning units and toilets are designed by, and approved by, state and federal government.

And now, Gov. Gavin Newsom is coming for your home. It is too big. It wastes resource to heat and to cool. It is not sealed against fresh air. For years the state has tried to block all permits to install water wells because the Smart Growth plans call for the removal of “living spaces” in rural areas. The state orders minimized lot sizes and home square footage to save the planet from destruction.

Smart Growth resulted huge complexes of five-story “living spaces” being built at each freeway off-ramp throughout California. Hundreds of acres of rolling Sierra Nevada oak and grasslands hillsides have been covered with homes built so close together one could walk across the roofs from home to home. A natural landscape used since the founding of the state to raise cattle and horses is now an instant slum, jamming the Highway 50 corridor and shutting down freeway lanes. There is no way to avoid the traffic. There is no room to plant trees to minimize the ugliness.

This has been 40 years in the making, but now Newsom is in charge.

The governor is now directing the state to file lawsuits against cities when those cities reject state plans to build housing for the homeless within middle class and wealthy areas in a city. What that means, simply, is the state can destroy a family’s most important financial asset, the value of their home, without any regard to local city government, local zoning, common sense, or your wishes.

Gov. Newsom has issued 13 press releases since Oct. 1 extolling his housing initiative, not just for homeless, but also for people who cannot afford housing on their own.

According to his own PR, some $40 billion has been thrown at public housing. One such press release involved 248 “affordable housing” units in South Lake Tahoe. The same process was instituted for projects in Napa and Huntington Beach. There apparently are no homeless in Mojave or Barstow. From the mountains to the sea, the homeless get to chose where to live by where they pitch their tent.

In the last month, Newsom has bragged in multiple releases that the state has filed lawsuits against cities, and won those cases, forcing the city governments to surrender local zoning controls and general plans. The City of Norwalk, Newsom declared, had ignore repeated warnings from the state, so it revoked the city’s housing element compliance. In non-bureaucrat-eze, the state now requires local communities to surrender authority over housing to the state.

Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta filed the lawsuit against the City of Norwalk to “overturn its unlawful ordinance banning the establishment of new homeless shelters and other housing. … No community should turn its back on its residents in need,” Newsom pontificated.

The state order to submit or be sued came from the California Department of Housing and Community Development. The local city ordinance had established a moratorium on emergency shelters, single-room occupancy, supportive and transitional housing.

Another team Newsom complaint was that Norwalk had issued permits for 175 new housing units, and the state Regional Needs Allocation requires Norwalk to approve 5,043 units.

The same legal process was used to force submission by the cities of La Habra Heights and Huntington Beach. These lawsuits are described by Sacramento officials as test cases. Clearly, the goal is state control of where and how we Californians all live.

Newsom’s own figures indicate that since taking office, $40 billion has been spent to “produce” housing and $27 billion more “invested” in community efforts to house the homeless. The Housing Accountability Unit takes credit for 7,513 units through enforcement of state regulations and state housing law.

On Oct. 29, the governor announced 37 new grants totaling $827 million in more than 100 communities.

If you want to relocate to South Lake Tahoe, buy a tent and pitch it near Sugar Pine. Newsom will make sure you are housed according to his determination of your need … or something like that.

Newsom is using the homeless crisis to destroy local government. Now he is off to Washington to beg for dollars before President-elect Trump takes office, and he will use those dollars to oppose everything Trump proposes, from stopping the flood across the California/Mexico border to protecting existing middle-class residential areas. For Newsom personally, it is his four-year plan to make sure he is not overlooked for the Big House again. This man drools on the sidewalk when the presidency is mentioned.