Liberals at Each Other's Throats as Calif. Housing Crisis They Created Takes Hold
Shortly after Donald Trump was elected to the highest office in the land, liberal Californians began floating the idea of a Calexit — essentially seceding from the United States and taking its 55 reliably-Democrat electoral votes with it.
Plenty of Americans were willing to say bon voyage to the Golden State, but it quickly became apparent there was no reasonable way the state could survive on its own. California is a dumpster fire of over-regulation, fleeing businesses and debt. And then there’s the state’s housing crisis.
Now, as reported by NBC News, the crisis has liberals at each other’s throats.
“A median-priced one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco rents for nearly $3,300 a month. In the Silicon Valley community of San Mateo, the median home will set you back almost $1.4 million,” NBC wrote in a story published last week. “Even in semi-rural Petaluma in Sonoma County, at least an hour drive from the city, rent for a one-bedroom can reach $2,000 and more.”
Now, NBC noted that the battle is between the Yimbies and the Nimbies. And no, even though California is a fantasy land, this isn’t a Dr. Seuss story.
“The drive to build more housing units, particularly along bus and light-rail lines, has been spearheaded by members of the fledgling Yimby (for ‘Yes, in my backyard’) movement,” NBC reported.
“The Yimbies have spread not only across California but to cities around the country — like Austin, Texas; Boston; New York; Portland, Oregon; and Seattle — where the amount of housing has not expanded to meet a surge of new jobs,” the story added.
“The Yimby newcomers, many of them millennials, have run smack into old-guard liberals, often baby-boomers or older, who cut their political teeth during an era when one could be staunchly progressive and adamantly ‘slow growth.’ The collision has not been a happy one.”
And that’s not just hype. Take two representatives of the Nimby and Yimby movements that they talked to — 78-year-old Becky O’Malley and 35-year-old Brian Hanlon.
“I think they are a combination of dumb and venal and maybe equal parts of both,” O’Malley, a Berkeley lawyer and journalist, said of the Yimbies.
Hanlon, the director of California Yimby, claimed that people like O’Malley are the height of baby boomer hypocrisy.
“They are the masters of hypocritical progressivism,” Hanlon told NBC. “They have created what amounts to natural retirement communities. And now people like me can’t get a toehold.”
O’Malley, meanwhile, called Hanlon “an entitled young white boy.” As opposed to an entitled old white woman like herself.
Of course, neither group really recognizes how to solve the problem, which is to get government out of the way. Last fall, Gov. Jerry Brown signed three new bills that, as Reason reported, attempt to “boost supply by throwing tax dollars at high-density low-income projects.”
“One bill reduces some regulations — but only for certain projects that pay inflated union wage rates,” Steven Greenhut wrote in the libertarian publication last October.
“It will help a little and then hurt a lot. As someone who has long covered local government, it’s clear the main problems are city hall and your neighbors. Whenever I write about housing, people send nasty notes. They are tired of congestion and don’t mind squelching new development.”
So, local governments are over-regulating and state legislators in Sacramento think the answer is … more regulation.
This is why we encourage Calexit. In fact, let’s build a wall around the new nation. In five years, when they’ve all killed each other or left over unrestrained over-regulation and taxation, we can come back in and resettle the region. And hopefully, we can all then build houses without an officious government getting in the way.
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