Density is Not a Four-Letter Word

by: Robert Cruickshank

Sun Mar 09, 2008 at 17:59:35 PM PDT

David Lazarus is showing to Southern Californians what Bay Area readers already knew: the man really understands the problems facing working Californians, and is not afraid to write about them directly and engagingly. In January he took on Prop 13 and called for it to be revamped, if not scrapped. Today he has shifted his focus to the struggles renters face in LA.

As any of us who have lived in the area realize, rents are nearly unaffordable in the urban center of LA - the place where it's easiest to live without a car. Lazarus opens his column with the story of a single mother who makes $38K as an admin assistant and who can only afford a rental way out in Lancaster. This is a familiar story to me - I know a LOT of Californians who make a similar commute. And as oil prices soar toward $4/gal, it is becoming more difficult for working Californians to get around.

For the last few decades, Californians have been told the solution is more of the same - more sprawl, more freeways, more commuting. The obvious solution - to build more housing in the urban core - is opposed by those who believe, as a USC professor lamented in Lazarus' column, "density is a four-letter word."

Lazarus helps explain why the anti-density movement is blocking what I described last summer as the redefinition of the California Dream for the 21st century - that unless we invest in greater urban density, we will inscribe inequality permanently on the urban landscape.

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Redefining the California Dream for the 21st Century

by: Robert Cruickshank

Tue Aug 07, 2007 at 11:24:03 AM PDT

For nearly a hundred years, the "California Dream" has had a particular meaning: owning a detached single-family home with a bit of land around it, being able to drive anywhere you need or want to go without encountering traffic, and with enough money left over to spend on soaking up the sunshine. The cheap and widely available Model T crystallized this dream in the 1920s, combined with cheap and widely available land. The Depression wound up intensifying the dream, as Californians in bread lines and rural relief camps yearned all the more strongly for that dream they glimpsed in the Roaring Twenties. World War II provided the jobs and savings to make it a reality, and by the 1950s and 1960s the California Dream was in its Golden Age. Any white family that held down a steady job could buy a home and have more than enough left over to fill its garage with cars and its rooms with consumer baubles.

In the 1970s and 1980s the Golden Age had dimmed, as roads became crowded and housing became expensive. In response Californians tried all kinds of methods to prolong this version of their dream, from Prop 13 to NIMBY activism against new projects that were seen as ruining the detached suburban paradise, to reasserting the automobile and the freeway.

Here in the 21st century, though, this California Dream seems to have finally run its course. In Southern California especially - always the true home of this dream, its Bay Area expressions notwithstanding - cheap and available land simply no longer exists. Roads of all kinds are hopelessly clogged and new freeway lanes fill with traffic as soon as the ribbons are cut. Housing prices are beyond the reach of most Californians; only creative and ultimately dishonest lending supported real estate these last five years.

It's fitting then that as the 20th century California Dream is dying, the 21st century Dream is slowly being born. And as two important articles in Monday's Los Angeles Times suggest, SoCal is the birthplace of this new dream. But the old attitudes die hard, and in their meeting lies the root of the political battles that will define our adult lives.

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