16 November 2019 (Washington, DC) – The Golden State is on fire, which means that an idea of American utopia is on fire, too. Utopias are the good places of our imagination, while dystopias are the places where everything goes terribly wrong, where evil triumphs and nature destroys her own. Frequently utopias and dystopias are the same place, because perfection may not be possible without someone suffering.
Ursula LeGuin writes about this paradox in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” a story about the moral dilemma of living in a city called Omelas whose prosperity is made possible by one child’s pain. As the story’s title makes clear, most people don’t walk away from the beautiful place, even when its secret is known. California often finds itself the Omelas of the American imagination. For some, it’s the beautiful place where having it all means shafting someone else, as in Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown,” about Los Angeles’ theft of water from the Owens Valley. Or as in the magical theme park, Disneyland, which substantially underpays some of its workers.
The novelists Octavia Butler, Edan Lepucki, Karl Taro Greenfeld, Paolo Bacigalupi and Claire Vaye Watkins are among the many who have imagined the Golden State as a dystopian novel. In their novels, California is either on fire, in extreme drought or both. They all picture California’s descent as a combination of climate crisis and social unrest.
There are several books-in-progress about California, one by Gerard Baker, the British writer and columnist. The following is from this weekend Sunday Times and I have been given permission to republish it.
Dark days lie ahead in the dystopia of California
With blackouts, crippling taxation and unaffordable housing,
the Golden State is a feudal society of super-rich and serfs
Gerard Baker
The SundayTimes
16 November 2019
Fifty years ago, in her song California, Joni Mitchell captured the universal appeal of the eponymous state, a land of endless sunshine and golden opportunity. Contrasting her adopted home with the sheer greyness of life elsewhere, she wrote: “My heart cried out for you, California/ Oh California, I’m coming home”.
Coming home to California is not what people are crying out for these days. It may once have offered a kind of litany of platonic ideals of human happiness — opportunity, entertainment, wealth, innovation, sunshine, palm trees, movies and technology — but today, that litany would more likely be power cuts, forest fires, homelessness, crippling taxation, unaffordable housing and drought.
Up and down California this month businesses are closing early, shoppers are stocking up on non-perishable foods and smartphone users are going without their precious devices as the state’s electricity company imposes rolling power cuts to reduce the risks of forest fires.
The blackouts come on top of a homeless crisis that is among the worst in the country: almost one in four of the nation’s homeless live in California, though the state accounts for only about one eighth of the national population. A continuing drought has exacerbated California’s water shortages. The state remains perennially exposed to earthquakes and other natural perils. It has the highest petrol prices in the nation and among the very highest tax rates.
People have been voting with their feet for years. In the ten years to 2016, six million people left California to live elsewhere in the US, while five million came into the state. The population is still growing because of immigration from abroad and high birth rates — it’s now almost 40 million — but many Hispanic immigrants now choose to live in Texas.
The state’s woes are so manifold it’s hard to enumerate all the causes properly. The largest is housing, which has become almost unimaginably unaffordable for most Californians. The median home price in California is $614,000, almost three times the national average. The California Association of Realtors’ housing affordability index estimates the percentage of households that can afford to purchase the median-priced home. For California that number was 31 per cent in the third quarter of this year. For the US as a whole it was 56 per cent.
This is an entirely man-made debacle. Twin policies aimed at tackling climate change and restricting development in cities are responsible for creating a massive shortage of housing and driving up prices.
In cities such as San Francisco, where, thanks to the tech boom of the past two decades, renting a one-bedroom apartment can cost upwards of $5,000 a month, old shopping malls and warehouses sit empty awaiting redevelopment while builders fight with the bureaucracy over planning rules. Laws aimed at reducing carbon emissions from overuse of cars forbid housing construction in vast swathes of the state, and require instead concentrations of high-density development in and immediately around the big cities to encourage public transport use. But these areas are already among the most expensive and have limited development opportunities. Silicon Valley added almost 700,000 jobs in the past eight years but the various municipalities in the region have added only 160,000 units of housing.
Another self-inflicted wound is taxation. California’s top rate of tax is 13.3 per cent. That’s on top of the highest federal rate of 37 per cent. With other taxes for Medicare and social security, that means top earners pay well over 50 per cent of each marginal dollar earned in taxes. And those higher rates kick in at a much lower income than in most states, so Californians on average incomes pay significantly more than residents of other states.
These growth-killing policies are the result of the one-party state that California has become in the past decade. The Democrats control the major statewide offices, the state assembly and most of the big cities. Backed by powerful public-sector unions and up against a Republican Party weakened by migration out of the state and an unpopular president, Democrats dominate.
Tax burdens fall heavily on the richest Californians: the top 1 per cent pay more than 50 per cent of revenues. A sizeable share of the population pays no taxes and in fact receives substantial subsidies and benefits. Caught in the middle are those struggling to get by in jobs paying average wages.
Joel Kotkin, an academic at Chapman University who has studied urban decay and regeneration, describes modern California as a reimagining of medieval feudalism. At the top are the very wealthy, the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, investors, lawyers and entertainment types. There’s a state bureaucracy, largely financed and controlled by these wealthy elites, who promote policies designed to reinforce their status: high taxes, climate change laws and other regulation. There is a contemporary clerisy which controls people’s belief systems; in this case, the academic establishment and the media, propagating the ideology of the ruling classes.
Underneath it all are the modern serfs, who can barely afford the land they must rent from their masters. They have few assets, no stake in their economy and, thanks to prohibitive housing costs, have limited mobility. “Independent, small business owners, a property-owning class, key to the success of democracy always and everywhere, are systematically being wiped out,” Kotkin says.
California has always been eyed as a signpost to the future. The dystopia there might be a warning to voters everywhere.
