All But the Dumbest Among Us

by Jim Washburn

A friend from Louisiana saved choice copies of his hometown newspaper, the Houma Gazette. Most were from the 1970s, but they felt like they were written in an earlier, demonstrably unconscious era. Take, for example, a headline relating the death of a resident of the upriver town of Waterproof, LA: “Waterproof Negro Drowns.”

My friend had saved a number of Gazette articles dealing with one rural Cajun who, when his area was incorporated into the city limits, fought tooth and nail to avoid the requirement that he install indoor plumbing. Finally, with a contempt of court order hanging over him, he acquiesced and had the required toilet, sink and such installed, with this final word to the Gazette, “They kin make me git it, but they kin’t make me use it.”

State Senator
Darrell Steinberg

He probably wouldn’t have liked California bill SB 375 either. It’s the latest effort by state senator Darrell Steinberg—this term the Senate president pro tem—to regulate the urban sprawl that’s been paving over what’s left of rustic California. It’s his fifth attempt to get such a law passed, and it might just make it this time, both because he’s modified it to address the concerns of developers and local governments, and because the need for it is more apparent in light of California’s 2006 legislation to limit greenhouse gasses. The farther folks have to commute to their far-flung condos, the more carbon dioxide they generate, and the less the state is now willing to approve transportation funds to support such developments.

Some folks just don’t like regulation. Regulation’s anti-American, they say, it stifles the whole freedom-lovin’ “don’t fence me in” Western way of life. They fight regulation with such a patriotic fervor you’d think they were defending Concord from the Hessians, when all they really want is the freedom to build gated communities willy-nilly in once-rustic canyons, with association rules that’ll fine your ass if your garage door is open more than ten minutes.

I haven’t read SB 375, probably won’t with it logging in at some 17,000 words. The gist is that the $20 billion the state spends on transportation annually would be allocated to encourage planning that would result in denser communities, nearer to workplaces and transportation corridors.

It’s what the City of Irvine and some other cities have been doing on a more modest scale. As originally planned, Irvine is so sprawled out in separate work/play/live/shop regions that you practically need a car just to get to your car. Now they’re going for hi-rise mixed-use communities with good mass transportation linkage, just like a good city of the future should be, minus the flying cars and murderous robots, but maybe they’re working on that.

Unlike Steinberg’s past attempts, it looks like SB 375 is going to become law. It’s passed both houses and Gov. Schwarzenegger is expected to sign it once the budget impasse is passé.

What’s changed? Well, a lot of those 17,000 words were placating ones inserted at the behest of builders and municipalities concerned about ceding too much control to the state. Another reason may be a public mood shift. Having seen what deregulation looks like—via our nation’s recent adventures in food borne-illnesses, housing loans, mine disasters, poisonous toys, fuel hikes, electrical blackouts—maybe people are starting to figure regulation isn’t such a bad idea after all.

Then there’s this: We don’t even know how far it is to the next habitable planet. Wherever it is, it’s well beyond our solar system and a hell of a commute. All but the dumbest among us—Hi, Dana Rohrabacher, Hello, Sarah Palin, your name tags are on upside-down—recognize the seriousness of global warming and humanity’s role in it. People are waking up and smelling the coffee, and noticing that, the way the Arctic’s going, they’ll be growing coffee and sugar cane on the tundra within a decade. So some modest moves to curtail that while making commutes more livable no longer seems such an affront to our freedom-lovin’ sensibilities.

Chances are that some of the people opposed to SB 375’s regulations don’t mind one bit the regulations recently proposed in the city of Santa Paula. (“The Gateway to Moorpark!”) Though the town relies on its citrus crops for its income—and on the low-income workers who toil in the orchards—some of its non-income residents have banded together to petition for a moratorium on low-income housing. The proposed moratorium has an air of permanence to it, since it would ban any new low-end housing until such time as it totals less than 15% of Santa Paula’s housing. That would force many of the town’s workers to live out of town, if anywhere.

Compared to that, SB 375 seems a bold step in the right direction to me, though not nearly so bold as we need. It’s nice to see someone addressing the question of where we’re going to put all the people, but no one at the political podium is talking about where all these people are coming from. When our oceans are over-fished; our land depleted and people fighting over whether crops should be used for fuel or food; when crowding and congestion grow worse by the day: someone really needs to start talking about overpopulation.

Which brings us to Sarah Palin and her five kids, give or take. The days of “be fruitful and multiply” are long gone, folks. Humanity isn’t so reliant on brute numbers to eke out an existence from the desert landscape, nor is infant mortality what it was in the Bible days. When the population of the earth has doubled in some of our lifetimes, it’s time for politicians to have the courage to use their bully pulpit to connect that to global warming and our other terrestrial problems.

Today, anyone with five kids either can’t read instructions or has an agenda that’s incomprehensible to me, like these guys who think it’s their personal responsibility to outbreed the other races, or to make more little sword-carriers for God. Put a condom on it already!

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