Segregation and housing in Sonoma Valley
Jared Diamond was asked by a New Guinea native, why are you white guys so far ahead of us? Why do you have so many advantages and we don’t? Diamond was sufficiently piqued by the question to then write the book Guns, Germs, and Steel. The same question can be asked about why suburban America is so uniformly white and segregated? In a country that espouses ideals of justice and equality, how can whites accept, live with, and even justify a reality so far off the mark? This pamphlet will explore segregation and exclusion in Sonoma Valley, the differences between race and class, and examine how regional and local housing laws support local segregation.
I’m starting with an assumption that the lower Sonoma Valley, as a discreet planning area, has a fair share of area median income housing that it is obligated to produce. This fair share is one that accounts for the capacity of the urban service area, and geographical location, and also accounts for including the actual proportions of racial and class groups in Bay Area society.
The way things stand now in the lower valley, Sonoma is segregated, with lower classes and brown-skinned residents confined to the west side and to the Springs. Sonoma has some of the highest wealth in the country, right next to Springs areas that are among the poorest in the country. Something is woefully out of balance, and that is the de facto segregation we have all learned to accept and live with.
Type of analysis and Miles Law
Housing and social equity issues can be broken down on two levels: race and class. It’s easy enough to ignore race and collapse all issues into a class-based analysis. Class analysis has been a way for liberals to elide the existence of racial prejudice. Conservatives on the other hand, have been happy to work, inflame, and preserve racial issues. In many instances, class and race coincide, and in others, they are not automatically synonymous. Alternately, a free market-type analysis assumes there are no historical precedents or structural limits on a person’s choices and everyone is free to act on the same level playing field.
Ralph Nader said that the only difference between liberals and conservatives is how fast they get on their knees for big business, and following on that point, I have come to see that what Nader said is true, Bay Area liberals are not really that strong on social justice. In an area known for liberalism, the focus is way more on economy and environment than on social justice.
The sustainability paradigm is a transcending remedy, one that is able, and seeks to bring social, economic and environmental forms of analysis, and pragmatic, full cost accounting fixes, all together. Sustainability, with its indicator-based, triple bottom line framing, is the perfect method to use to conceive of reducing the imbalance of unjust segregation noted above.
It is said housing is a “very complicated” issue. It is complicating that people have different perspectives that produce policies, plans, projects, and tensions to have to work through. People are not always transparent about their biases, or they are just plain knuckle-headed and not willing to be open-minded; and to get people to agree upon and come clean about the nature of their interests regarding housing, and finding common solutions, is hard.
I maintain that understanding people is fairly simple if we follow Miles Law, which is that people stand where they sit, which is to say, their economic, cultural and ideological baselines guide and determine their interests and what they advocate for. When push comes to shove, people are concerned with their own bottom lines, and congregate into groups of common interests. What “the facts” are, then relates back to the type of analysis brought to bear to represent and justify peculiar interests. This is why we have different universes of facts colliding on many public issues, especially land use: different interests are at stake.
The path to finding housing solutions, is through transparent advocacy, good will, and determination to find just, equitable, viable, and sustainable options. At some point, differing interests need to look for win-wins, and to get there, all the cards have to first be laid on the table, for all to see.
Primatology, evolutionary psychology, game theory, Enlightenment rationalism, Machiavellianism, and political strategy all assume that people act on the basis of their interests. This is a consensus pragmatic view. For housing overall in Sonoma Valley, whose interests are at stake and why?
Racial segregation as US housing policy
Segregated neighborhoods, backed by zoning protectionism, and refusal by banks to provide loans, and by real estate industry redlining, are all a legacy of racial discrimination in the United States. In Sonoma Valley, this history is ignored and forgotten but the legacy remains: blacks are effectively purged, Chinese excluded, and today, Latinos marginalized to certain tracts in the Springs, and increasingly displaced. On top of this dishonorable history of slavery, Jim Crow, and nativism, is layered the current housing crisis. The city of Sonoma and adjacent Springs manifest the whole pattern in a pointed way.
If valley residents believe that racial segregation occurred by accident and was not a product of conscious government policy, then they will also believe that government has no role in making a remedy. This is a serious mythology problem because the existence of past and current, government-sanctioned segregation is not admitted by some as evidence. This is what ignoring history and biased spin get us, refusal to acknowledge the obvious.
The obvious? The tentacles of slavery are long-lasting and pernicious. Whites have systemic advantages they are loath to admit. A hidden element of white privilege is the ability of whites to choose when to care about and address racial issues, if at all.
To prove we are not looking at accidental segregation, look at these examples. The New Deal created the Home Owners Loan Corporation. In 1934, the National Housing Act created the Federal Housing Administration or FHA. The FHA makes mortgage loans, and the HOLC made loads to homeowners facing foreclosure. The legacy of both of these agencies has been to “suburbanize the entire nation on a whites-only basis” (1) The FHA Underwriting Manual spelled it out, and states were directed to uphold federal segregationist policy, not just the South. If municipalities and developers did not comply, no loans, no funding.
The Bay Area, a very liberal area, has and has had, segregation in spades. If the legacy of segregation exists here, it is reasonable to see the phenomena as currently nationwide. The current regional housing authority, the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), and its Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA), is a direct descendent of HOLC and FHA practices. RHNA stipulates what a municipality’s “fair share” of housing is. Is it an accident that such a fair share makes no mention of remedying the US history of racial segregation, and that it is always the low end of the housing spectrum that never gets built, and that any high-density housing projects proposed bring cries of loss of property values along with a host of other racial dog whistles, and that CASA (1) hangs the poor out to dry again? A real fair share would make mandatory the housing inclusion of all races at their regional representative percent, and would include the full area median income spectrum, in all projects.
A real fair share approach to housing would seek to heal the unsustainable wound of segregation, and restore society to the health of integration and inclusion. The US Constitution got rid of slavery, and does not sanction separate but equal.
Interesting research project, what neighborhoods, housing projects, and homes in Sonoma Valley have deeds that say “whites only”?
If the current ABAG and RHNA system makes a real fair share policy, why are suburbs so uniformly white? Why is white Sonoma right next to areas of extreme poverty in the Springs? The answer is that history is being ignored and that the accidental theory of segregation is bought into. Housing policy rides upon a veneer of ignored segregation. The municipal government arrangement here, both county and city in Sonoma Valley mostly serves segregation, with Sonoma and adjacent Springs low density zoned area residents protecting privilege, and the city and county trying to address housing imbalances through the city’s Housing Action Plan process, the Springs Specific Plan process, and with high density housing projects. Different housing plans and strategies will be addressed below.
A putative Fair Share Act, in a perfect world, would dis-incentivize whitewashing, and reduce homeowners mortgage tax entitlement deductions proportional to how much low and very low income housing remained unbuilt in suburbia. Unfortunately, ABAG and RHNA, and adherence to them, set what is a fair share at levels that serve and allow the maintaining of suburban whiteness. RHNA is an effective cover against actual fair integration, for both class and race. RHNA does not remedy core problems based on the real history.
Perfect storm of class-based segregation
Now that I have introduced race as a factor in local housing, let’s look at class. The 2008 mortgage bundling fiasco and the 2017 fires opened the doors for speculators to run market rate housing prices up to untenable levels for all area median income or AMI residents. A purely AMI-type analysis, tends to flatten all off as “AMI”, all as the same class. Being able to mix class and race, is an “intersectional” view.
Half or more county residents are rent burdened, i.e. paying a disproportionate amount of their income to rent. The stats are there for all to see in Alliance for a Just Recovery’s The State of Working Sonoma and with the data presented with the Hidden in Plain Sight Study. Rent-burdened county residents are predominantly white, followed by Latino, with whites having much comparative economic advantage. For example, after the fires, recovery benefits have gone disproportionately to whites.
Housing, like much of our default economy in American-style capitalism, goes to the highest bidder, and the national and regional 1% and 9% have essentially grabbed the reins of power and priced the rest out of the market, and jacked up the cost of living to make everything here in Sonoma Valley more expensive. This pattern is fundamentally undemocratic. Whites, playing along with this mainstream script, have found the post WW2 economy advantageous. It is maybe not obvious that such advantageousness is the result of unfairly sequestered privilege.
Yes, things are really great here, if you sit in a place where cost is not a burden, and you can choose to care about social justice or not. Unfortunately for many, the Bay Area, Sonoma County, and the City of Sonoma are some of the top most unaffordable places to live in the country. And, while life gets worse for the AMI cohort, property owners don’t mind seeing their real estate values increase; inflated costs to the poor are benefits for the wealthy.
Interests diverge, and with the pace of needed housing change so slow, life goes on in Sonoma in a bubble of parties, fests, events, meetings, and non-profit fundraisers. With the new HHH council, voices for social equity have been heard, but there is still a lot of resistance, and structural impediments, to creating a just society here in Sonoma and the lower valley.
The median and what “affordable” really means
The median point of the AMI is distorted by outlier, super high, concentrated wealth at the top. The median number gets pulled up by a small minority of top earners. The median income is not the same as what 50% of the people actually make, nor is it measured to show racial disparities. Median income is not the same for county white and Latino residents. County blacks and Latinos cluster at the lower ends of median income; this is where race and class coincide. Nevertheless, AMI is the standard measure of what people make and can afford to pay for housing.
County AMI is $68,000 for a family of two and $83,000 for a family of four. This is the current benchmark. The bulk of the county population, white, black or brown, is on a spectrum of AMI earnings, and what people can afford for rent depends on what percent of the AMI they earn. A current measure is, generally: very low (below 40% AMI), low (60%-80% AMI), moderate (100% AMI), and above moderate (120% AMI). None of these AMI designations can afford market rate housing (and food) prices. At 100% and 120% AMI, all that happens is proportionally less rent/ housing burden. Why 100% AMI is “moderate” is maybe because “moderate” and “middle” have the same root meaning.
Median income, moderate income, and “middle class” are now all equivalent to low income, with people of color clustered at the low and very low levels. In the current “hourglass economy”, middle income earners have all defaulted to the AMI level. 100% AMI is 100% middle class. A more realistic measure is of the 1%, 9% at the top, and the 90% at the bottom. AMI people take up the bulk of the 90%.
Upper median income earners, at 120% AMI and above have it tough too, because the more annual earnings, the less health care subsidy. The more you make, the more entities get their claws into you and the more you have to pay. For a family of two to pay full boat for health insurance is over $23,000 a year! This is why provisions to help protect and account for the “missing middle” need to also be part of a comprehensive housing policy, and also why moderate to above moderate earners resent people getting Obamacare. Just when people start to gain a little wealth is not the time to hit them even harder with costs. The upper median deserves its fair share too, in proportion to the rest.
Take home point, affordable housing is AMI housing, and across the AMI spectrum, race and class issues are present.
Externalization and its costs
To remedy the housing crisis, there need to be units the AMI cohort as a whole can fairly afford, and jobs that pay enough to cover the cost of living, or else AMI people are displaced (externalized), and then need to make long commutes back, contributing to untenably high regional transportation GHG or greenhouse gas emissions. (In case anyone hasn’t noticed, unlimited GHG emissions are killing us all.) Alternately, AMI people don’t even come back after displacement, and contribute to a diminishing workforce, a less vibrant economy, and a further segregated, Balkanized country.
Note the limitations of a class-only analysis: blacks have already been displaced and segregated. Sonoma and Sonoma County have very few blacks. County Latino immigrants of the first few generations have already been isolated to Roseland and the Springs. Displacement becomes an issue now that whites are getting the same treatment others have for years.
Humanity as a whole is facing a sustainability crisis. One critical piece of this problem is grappling with how to not allow increasing social inequity to tear the whole house of civilization down. If the poor are simply externalized, that leaves billions on earth to not care one hoot about GHG and other resource consumption impacts. And so, we can’t get to solving environmental problems without addressing social problems, and the economic system that fosters them.
Market rate housing is maladaptive
Market rate housing is maladaptive because 90% of people can’t afford it. For a real remedy, only non-profit developers can build AMI housing at a level of units actually needed to fill the real fair share of demand, but the money needed to realize non-profit housing projects has been severely restricted, by the state with loss of the redevelopment program. Current federal HUD practices follow the same Trump pattern: divide, inflame, sack social programs, vilify the black and brown, ignore the environment, and let big money run wild to its own benefit. To what extent are local wealthy whites complicit if they don’t call this stuff out?
Anyone who says simply, “we need more housing” is missing the point. We need AMI housing, at the full AMI spectrum, with fair share proportions, and on a regionally proportional racial spectrum. Efforts by market rate developers, as with CASA, are a Trojan Horse to deceive people that the real AMI affordability problem is being addressed, that it is simply a matter of supply and demand on an equal playing field. To reduce the housing issue to simple “supply and demand” elides the underlying discriminatory history, and perpetuates the myth that segregation is simply accidental, and guarantees that about 99% of market rate housing will go to wealthy whites.
The market in American capitalism, after all, serves money, not society’s values and needs. The market serves its prime beneficiaries, and it is convenient therein to ignore the history that shows how it exploits blacks, browns, yellows, and the poor of all stripes. Easier to say, “oh these guys just don’t get up early enough in the morning, don’t work hard enough, that’s why they are not in Sonoma.”
Inclusionary ordinances as a remedy
Current inclusionary ordinances only require market rate developers to build 10% to 20% of units for AMI people. In the city, the inclusion is all at the 120% AMI level, very little to none for the low and very low cohort. The recent hospital South Lot project is a perfect example, nothing for low or very low, not even 100% AMI; this is city policy. Since low and very low AMI levels often coincide with race as well, one might conclude that city inclusionary policy is racist. We can at least say the city inclusion actively disfavors the poor. And we can discount race as an issue if we subscribe to the accidental theory of segregation.
If inclusionary units are supposed to be a mitigation for racial and class segregation, they are not working well to address the scale, and they have a built-in displacement rate of 40% to 60%, because that is how much popular, fair share demand gets ignored by current inclusion rates. Current inclusion rates allow the selling of proportionally more market rate units to the 1% and the 9%, and end up making the valley more and more stilted to the rich and white.
The more rich and white, the less social equity is an issue, the more elected representatives are pressured to serve wealth. This is why wealth is a prime indicator of unsustainability: too many resources consumed, in a bubble that ignores inequity and environmental impacts. In many ways, this is the Coastal California way, wealthy, white, segregated, high environmental impact, Marin and Sonoma counties are perfect avatars. When Jerry Brown cut off redevelopment money, he said, “you guys over there in the North Bay don’t want housing anyway.”
Inclusionary ordinances are one piece of the housing puzzle, and if they can’t get close to addressing the scale of fair share housing, then we need to look to other remedies, like non-profit, high density housing to make up the gap. However, if redeveloping existing properties is seen as where the bulk of new housing can and will go, because of local, self-imposed space and urban service restrictions, that puts us back to square one with inclusionary inadequacy.
ADUs
Relying in accessory dwelling units or ADUs, or granny units, to fill the gap is problematic because there is no provision for them to be rented at AMI-affordable levels or even rented at all. This is another reason why the city’s South Lot project failed to address and meet actual, fair share local housing needs. The hospital could have gone the extra mile to see a more affordable project, but it didn’t.
Even with a housing crisis, the city seems in no hurry to prevent future South Lots from happening. It’s painful how slow government can be! And then, how lack of money can be used to justify doing the wrong things.
How to measure displacement?
The whole Bay Area did a great job of externalizing blacks and Chinese, (into ghettos and Chinatowns) and isolating immigrant Latinos to pockets in places like Roseland and the Springs. Now, in a shining example of how the American capitalism market only rips everyone off, white AMI residents are being externalized by market forces too.
Efforts are being considered to include recently displaced locals in any new AMI affordable housing initiatives. However, to try and include recently displaced whites back, means that everyone displaced over time and in US history deserves an equal opportunity to be included back as well. Past segregation wrongs need to be rectified, not just recent, class-based externalization. This all illustrates how deeply embedded the myth of accidental segregation is, that we have no regional affirmative action housing provisions at all.
Are locals are seen as primarily white guys? And what counts as local anyway? As compared to citizen or resident?
How would you count the recently displaced? It would stand to reason that low-income Springs Latinos would have a much higher displacement rate. If there was an accurate accounting of race and class displacement, it would show the gross inadequacy of the RHNA remedy of fair share, which seems to be based on supply and demand presumptions, that by definition ignore history and structural limiting factors. Most realize that the current housing crisis is much bigger than RHNA allows, and that ABAG and RHNA are simply formalities that have to be played along with, as we set our sights much higher, to actual, proportional fair share levels of AMI and race-proportional housing.
RHNA can’t be an excuse for saying all is OK now.
In lieu and impact fees
Just as the city failed to follow through on a minimum wages study for years and years, the in- lieu fee process has languished for an unacceptably long time. Unfortunately for the intent of this small potential remedy, that developers who don’t want to build the mandated 50% housing in their commercial projects pay a per-square-foot-fee to have the units built somewhere else, the fees have been set at way too low a level to actually build the number of units called to be offset. The guys with all the money are crying the fees are too high, when any reasonable analysis shows they are not close to enough to even satisfy a minimum fair offset.
In lieu fees are a smokescreen fiasco of a remedy. It doesn’t really matter that the study has taken an unacceptably long time, the remedy is not efficacious anyway.
Zoning and density
Since the collective valley urban service area, places with municipal water and sewer, is built out to a high degree with low density zoning homes, one obvious way to get the volume of affordable homes/ apartments, to build and to rent, is to make higher density housing. It’s clear that wealthy and relatively wealthy, low density white home owners will not brook high density projects in their neighborhood without a big fight. The South Sonoma group and the Donald Street group are examples of what we will see if any high-density zoning infringes on low density.
And so, is society and government in place to guarantee the investment potential of a segregated area? Or is the goal to be democratic, inclusive, sustainable, and to have a level playing field? See Jason Walsh’s editorial for an examination of the issues at stake here.
This gets us back to the systemic, US legacy of structural racism and segregation by zoning, restricted loans and redlining. Today, instead of the overt racism of the past, we have a system of coded racism. Property values, neighborhood character, rural, and density, are all code for race and class pushback against efforts to include and integrate. Territory has been colonized and there are low density facts on the ground sequestered by certain groups. Any effort to integrate neighborhoods, by class and/or race, meets a full court press of every possible reason against a project, or even an inclusive plan, or even the idea of inclusion…
People against high density housing fall into two categories, one is front line resistors, and the other is high level policy justifiers and policy makers. Collectively, on national and international levels, this is known as NIMBYism, a close cousin of nativism and segregationism. (3) The end result is to justify and fight for white, upper class hegemony. In Jared Diamond’s analysis, this selfishness and greed is not a peculiar property of white people. Wouldn’t anyone given the opportunities and accidents of fate not do the same things whites have done? This points out a flaw in Diamond’s house of cards, the accidental explanation of white superiority elides the facts of conscious white structural racism, cultural prejudice, and flat out economic exploitation.
The Donald group is taking an initial tack that they were unfairly included in the Springs Specific Plan (SSP), that they were not notified or aware of anything about the SSP for seven years, and that their property values have decreased by 100s of 1000s of dollars from inclusion in the SSP. Please see my previous Sun posts on the Donald situation and on deconstructing NIMBYs. It remains to be seen how much spine the county has to hold the line on the SSP zoning map, and how much non-public meeting lobbying will influence the planning process. (With a supervisor election coming up, and most voters being of the white, property owning variety, it’s not hard to see how the zoning cards may fall and be dialed back.) But, if we have very limited land in the lower valley urban service area (USA), and we are prevented from pushing the edge anywhere, and NIMBYs stop higher density remedies within the city and county lower valley USAs, the end result will be the lower valley does not meet its fair share of creating AMI-spectrum housing.
This pattern of NIMBYs on the inside and green protectors on the outside, and not being able to find a suitable location for high density housing, is what I have called the green checkmate.
A current societal presumption is that all should be able to have an American dream, and keep pushing the edge of urban areas in an endless frontier of low density paradise. The only trouble? There are not enough collective resources for all to sequester wealth like that. The US and the world have reached the point of diminishing returns, on a myth of an endless growth and endless frontier. Now we find ourselves more and more in a world of haves and have nots, this built on a past of haves and have nots, increasingly with leaders who play off divisiveness rather than inclusion and compassion. This whole pattern is woven indelibly into US history. These are the tensions we are challenged to bridge, with housing as one sub-issue. The big, historic pattern and its structural ramifications exist isomorphically right here in Sonoma Valley.
Today, divisiveness and racism, and white dominance have come out of the shadows. Trump and his xenophobic cohort want to build a wall, neighborhoods want to build a wall. Cities and suburbs want to build a wall. Why? To exclude the haves from the have nots, to play the racist, protectionist card one more time, all the while pretending it never existed. It’s no coincidence that the rise of white supremacy and white nationalism is so prevalent today; it has been Anglo white people who have dominated the world and taken all the gravy all along. Calling this out is not out of bounds; the truth of white privilege needs to be reckoned with, and that starts with at least talking about it.
Sonoma valley whites, and whites in general have the luxury of entering into the social justice arena when it suits them, rather than having to live it out each day.
Upshot: low density-zoned areas will fight to keep up relative privilege, and the lower valley will be divided into those living in, and protecting, a low-density paradise. By the time existing properties on main thoroughfares are possibly redeveloped at an adequate level for lower valley fair share AMI housing, about all lower income people will already be displaced from the whole valley. Give credit to powerful whites, both liberal and conservative, for creating the checkmate to keep up their control on power.
And, a main reason why white low density homeowners got such benefit, and colonizing preference, is because of past racist housing policy in the US in the first place.
Local plans see white stakeholder pushback
Efforts to have an inclusive plan, like the Springs Specific Plan, (and possibly also Sonoma’s Housing Action Plan) face major pushback, threat of lawsuits, allegations of “takings”, and endless fighting that intimidates public officials and serves to dial down inclusion and preserve the low density, white hegemony.
This leaves high density development to go on major thoroughfares, in three or four story buildings. For Sonoma Valley to include its real fair share of the AMI population (class and race), systemic exclusion needs to be consciously dialed back. By who? By electeds in government. This will be hard, and there will be costs. Electeds’ job is to make the hard calls in favor of our highest democratic ideals, not to represent the lowest common denominator in order to be re-elected. If high density housing projects go on Highway 12, in the city and Springs, this will mean that already bad traffic and parking will get worse, and so traffic and parking can get added to the list of proxy reasons for segregation and exlusionism. Too much traffic will ruin the character!
Yes, traffic and parking are really bad, but guess what? There’s no room to keep pushing the edge, there aren’t the resources for everyone to have the low density American dream. Social problems don’t go away because we can’t see the Central Valley poverty from here. The real green checkmate is that we are on the verge of unsustainability for our whole system, and fixing it starts with requiring/ asking for sacrifice by the current “haves.” Eternalizing and ignoring social justice issues does not make them go away, it just means you don’t see them from your back yard.
Time to stand up for values of justice and equality
Anything worth getting is worth fighting for, and equality and inclusion are worth fighting for even if it means that some who have had more get less. Sharing and including is the moral way to go. Hoarding and excluding only leads to war, strife, and unsustainability. Doing nothing here only preserves an unjust and inequitable world.
Sonoma Valleyans did not come upon their housing opportunity prosperity by accident; it came part-ways at the cost of denying others their chance. This systemic imbalance is deeply masked and easy to ignore. Here in this essay, I ask the reader to look at these covert racial housing disparities, and consider remedies for them. Consider what it takes to acknowledge and address white privilege; take a heart and mind transformative step.
Major kudos to the HHH council for pushing an expedited $15 an hour minimum wage! If there is to be any desegregating, and addressing a service-sector Plantation/ feudal-type economy, it won’t mean anything without economic opportunity and ability to pay rent and meet the local cost of living. We can be gratified that Sonoma has voted for HHH, and that in general they have a merit-based sustainability agenda; this is a great start, and a great anti-Trump local statement, but they can’t do it all alone, nor just in Sonoma. Changes to the county supervisor majority need to be made to more actively address rent control, tenant protections and county affordable housing issues. We need changes from the feds on down. With HHH, we are starting from the bottom up, in the best of democratic traditions.
Those who want to do good in the word today, and think globally and act locally, can support high density zoning, non-profit high density housing, and very high inclusionary rates (50% at least) wherever they are proposed in, or close to, valley urban service areas, because that is the only way we will ever get close to accepting a full cost accounting of the housing needs and to the proportional housing fair shares of our local society.
The lower valley housing plan area should be on an axis from the sewage treatment plant northwest to the SDC. Anywhere urban services can be connected on this axis is not sprawl, but rather, connecting the dots of the legitimate, facts on the ground area we have to work with.
Preserving our back yards, adjacent green spaces, wild life corridors, and UGBs, while externalizing the poor (AMI race and class people), will only make Sonoma Valley into a short-term appearance of sustainability, as the foundations of all life will be torn down by all the unaccounted for externalized costs at the edges of this locally sequestered paradise. As Jared Diamond said in his book Collapse, Why Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail, the wealthy only buy themselves the privilege of dying last. Automation, robots, and high paying tech jobs will only be short-term measures on the road to county collapse, if decision makers don’t take the reins and consciously remedy past wrongs, and create a just and sustainable society today.
What are we going to do about the millions in the US and billions in the world who are suffering? Ignore them? It’s not right, nor pragmatic to focus only on environmental issues, as the environmental costs of social inequity are very high. Focusing on AMI affordable housing, and doing the most we can, rather than the least, is doing our part.
Efforts by groups like Sustainable Sonoma, Sonoma Valley Climate Coalition, and Sonoma Valley Democrats are pointing the way for how to reconcile real tensions and arrive at a just sustainability.
Yes, the remedy does imply some “takings” from the haves. Voluntary sharing from the haves would be better, at least in terms of equitable land use and housing policy. This is all only in service of creating a just society. We’re here now, it’s on us to get the job done. A big part of knowing what to do hinges on knowing where we came from and why. It is not easy to admit we whites have a privilege that we didn’t ask for, but are still responsible to bear and come clean about in a just way.
If county poor whites, and blacks and Latinos are excluded from sharing the benefits of society, and relegated to second, third and fourth class status, what incentive do they even have to work for any larger good on climate and environmental issues? If we want to address the inter-related set of issues that make up the sustainability paradigm, we can’t selectively choose to ignore primary wrongs.
1: In CASA and other initiatives, big money interests (real estate, landlords, wine industry) have effectively controlled the votes, at state, county, and city levels, to not have many if any tenant protections, no rent control, no just cause eviction etc. The same people are against an expedited $15 minimum wage an hour. Why the rich keep getting richer and the poor poorer, is a perfect case of follow the money. The people in charge in government tend to follow the money, nominally liberal or not.
2: The Color of Law, A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein
3: Environmentalism is wielded in the same ways, to attempt to limit the most egregious tendencies of top white consumers and resource exploiters. Thus, environmentalists and social justice advocates have seen clear to make common cause inside the sustainably paradigm
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