Exclusivity displaces inclusivity

 

Fred Allebach

8/14/24

 

Exclusivity displaces inclusivity

 

Sonoma Valley is a fractal of coastal California where there has been a long-term, land use chess game to restrict growth which is seen as implicitly bad and destructive. In reality, growth has simply reflected the US birthrate. This game has been played by a determined Boomer cohort who emigrated to the suburbs in a tide of white flight in the 70s, 80s and 90s. They came here and to other nice places in the US and now want to build a wall and don't want any more people to come based on cumulative negative impacts to the environment. 

 

This cohort’s wealth and power came about because of the very same growth they decry. This Boomer group is now made up of mostly white, upper middle class, senior property owners whose voices are over-represented in local government and public policy formation, like an oppressive HOA.

 

This group now has a valley-wide coalition galvanized around and against SDC, the Hanna project, and the Springs Specific Plan. CEQA lawsuits and appeals are and have been used to stall and kill projects and plans that address California’s housing supply and demand issues, RHNA, and the state housing crisis, all of which are seen as illegitimate. Environmental issues and impacts are played way up, socials issues not so much.  

 

A Green Checkmate dynamic is created where environmental reasons forestall any pushing of local perimeters but where people in the core urban service area also resist all dense infill. All land use change is fought and resisted. The longer CEQA stalling goes on, the more powerful and entrenched local elites and the Green Checkmate get because smaller fish are increasingly displaced because of super high housing burdens. This is the demographics of displacement. See the new NPOB/ Legal Aid displacement map: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/e69a2477c76542279c910a3ded1f9b65   

 

The results of this aggregate game have their demographic effects. Restricting land use raises prices and ensures that mostly market rate housing is all that can be built. As land and housing prices are driven up by restricted access, valley public policy voices sort to more of the dominant Boomer cohort. This cements their control, and acts to displace disadvantaged communities whose voices are lost. Because of lack of dominant-class political will and money; near all the affordable housing built is from inclusions only, and policy loopholes therein allow even those to be bypassed. 

 

The higher the land costs get, the less able anyone is to build affordable housing. Demographics here are steering here to an elite, high-end, high-resource community where aggregate land use amounts to modern redlining under the guise of environmental protection. A good chunk of this checkmate situation derives from aggregate “local control” policy choices.

 

Centering on and animated by Green Checkmate issues, the local controllers (formerly known as NIMBYs) downplay and ignore local inequity issues and/or set pragmatically impossible conditions to ameliorate them. When rules and policy get made, (urban growth boundary for example) they are tweaked to the advantage of the controllers. The local Latino immigrant community and the essential worker class are having their lunch eaten on public policy and land use issues and for various reasons are not producing self-deterministic community leaders to fight for their interests.   

 

Meanwhile, the US has an aging population shifting to more elderly and less youth. The Boomer generation has accumulated many material and legal advantages but now needs youth and vitality to serve and sustain them in their old age. 

 

In Sonoma Valley there is youth and vitality in the form of the Latino immigrant community, but this cohort is mainly in the unincorporated Springs area that has the least political power and influence in overall Sonoma Valley land use issues. Youth and vitality here are second class citizens.  

 

Sonoma and surrounding valley elite, wealthy unincorporated areas do address demographics in policy but only insofar as it affects their interests. Yet, for overall environmental impacts, higher wealth translates to higher greenhouse gas footprint, more energy use, and more environmental impacts. It is elites, upper middle class and above, who are in fact the most unsustainable, here and in the world. This group wants to have its cake and eat it too in Sonoma Valley, to disproportionately hoard resources in a nice place and then deny any new people the same opportunity. Exclusivity displaces inclusivity.  

 

Fire evacuation and perceived water shortages are more than pawns in the land use chess game here, they are bishops and knights. Wealth and CEQA appeals and lawsuits are the queen. In local land use policy we see alternative universes of facts colliding; the elite cohort floods the media with their views, over-representing their policy flavors, interests, and rationales to the detriment of overall inclusivity and equity.

 

State housing laws are increasingly under attack by this dominant class. Broad-spectrum housing advocates, renters, and housing burdened constituents support these state laws and want results. The message to housing burdened lower middle class and essential workers get when officials trash state housing laws is that local elites are not fighting for them, not looking out for them, this is the sort of dynamic that tips the working class to populism and Trumpism.

 

The more the renter cohort, near 45% of county residents, hears local gov’t and property owners get on the anti-state housing law bandwagon, the more renters see them as out of touch with their issues and interests. These laws, after all, are designed to break logjams of too much local control that has prevented the building of adequate housing supply. Too much local control in Sonoma Valley has stifled growth and has tipped housing prices to an unsupportably high level.

 

Local upper middle-class controllers see themselves as fighting a good fight against capitalism, corporate power, growth, developers, and perceived corrupt state housing laws and to save the environment. In this struggle, those below them in the pyramid of society are forgotten and are maybe thrown a few noblesse oblige crumbs to prevent an all-out revolt.

 

For these reasons, the lower-income cohorts struggling to get by don’t see much difference between political parties. All politicians talk and promise but the fundamental inequalities of society never change. No one gives up advantages. Politicos are voted in by the powerful, even in districts designed to share power with protected classes. Given that people cling to power, the local Boomer cohort will not move over gracefully and let the young share power, be included, and decide their own fate in Sonoma Valley.

 

Checkmate. 

 

Fred Allebach is a member of a number of county and Sonoma Valley government commissions and committees.