How Democratic Socialism Created California’s Housing Crisis

In 2017, Scout Sheys, a resident of Berkeley, California, attended a town council meeting regarding a proposed housing development for a two-story building next to her house. As she spoke, she hoisted a zucchini above her head and waved it for the council to see.

“I brought a zucchini,” she said, “because I love to garden, and in order to garden you need sunlight. The [environmental impact] report says that the shadow impacts have been made nondetrimental because the shadows are cast on my yard, but this zucchini exists because I don’t have a big, two-story house next door.”

If “democratic socialism” means anything distinct from historic socialism, this must be it. Socialism is the abolition of private property rights, with control of property absorbed by the state. Democracy, of course, is mob rule, with private decisions being socialized across the wider populace. Under democratic socialism, then, private property rights must be outsourced to the community, with the state acting as the enforcer of the collective will.

In California, it has become common practice to involve the broader community in property rights questions, such as whether a developer should be permitted to build a two-story home on land it owns. In many cities, including Berkeley, they are required to invite neighboring residents to review hearings to weigh in on matters such as the “shadow pollution” that the zucchini lady (as Sheys has been dubbed) complained about.

The consequence of this democratic socialism has been an unprecedented housing shortage in one of the country’s wealthiest states. In Berkeley today, the median sale price of a home is roughly $1.5 million. In neighboring San Francisco—the paragon of this form of socialism—the median home now sells for more than $2 million.

So how did California get this way? We can best understand this question through three books published in the 1960s.

The Democratization of Urban Planning

Jane Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961 in response to urban renewal, a federal program that funded the demolition of low-income housing to make room for more tax-lucrative projects, such as the St. Louis Gateway Arch. The federal government supplied grants to cities to raze slum neighborhoods, displacing hundreds of thousands of poor families in the process. Jacobs, to her credit, wanted to put a stop to that.

Her idea was for low-income communities to organize to protest the demolition of their homes. San Francisco’s Western Addition Community Organization (WACO), formed in 1967, reflects this movement. They used Saul Alinsky tactics, such as sit-ins, picket lines, and lawsuits to stop the federal bulldozer in their neighborhood.

As Jacobs’s idea gained steam in California, it expanded into planning departments in major cities. Los Angeles’s planning director, Calvin Hamilton, led the movement to bring neighborhood groups into the planning process, saying, “A valid plan must reflect the needs and desires of citizens.” He facilitated the formation of a citizens’ advisory committee (CAC) to collaborate with the planning department, and many other cities followed suit.

The problem was that the CACs were not formed out of the groups protesting demolition. Instead, they consisted of people who had the time and means to participate in the planning process—mostly middle- and upper-class residents with time on their hands, such as retirees and housewives, who wanted to preserve their community as it was. Their first priority was blocking the construction of highways, such as the Golden Gate Freeway, which remains unfinished today due to the efforts of San Francisco’s CAC in 1966.

The CACs were a crucial turning point in which neighborhood groups pivoted from protesting destruction projects to protesting construction. This change in focus expanded to other types of development and continues to this day.

Politicizing Environmentalism

The second book that paved the way for California’s housing crisis was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962. Silent Spring was a diatribe against the pesticide DDT, which included many (now debunked) demagogic claims about how the chemical would wreak havoc on the environment. Although a book about pesticides seems disconnected from the housing crisis, it had the effect of politicizing environmentalism.

The Sierra Club embodies this change. Before the publication of Silent Spring, Sierra Club activities primarily revolved around things like nature hikes and litter cleanups. After Silent Spring, they joined forces with neighborhood groups to protest highway construction in the name of environmental preservation.

The Sierra Club also became a powerful lobbying group in Sacramento, alongside other environmental lobbies that formed after Silent Spring, such as the Planning Conservation League. Together they helped secure a slew of state-level environmental laws that continue to impede housing construction today. These include, among others, the 1969 Porter-Cologne Water Quality Control Act and the California Coastal Zone Conservation Act, which use water regulation to stop development.

The greatest environmental barricade, though, was the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), signed by Governor Ronald Reagan in 1970. Much like the National Environmental Policy Act that President Richard Nixon signed the year prior, CEQA required developers to produce an environmental impact report for proposed projects. Initially, the law only applied to public works, but a neighborhood group calling itself the Friends of Mammoth sued to stop a planned condominium development near Mammoth Lake. The state supreme court sided with the Friends of Mammoth, declaring that public status applied to any project that required a discretionary permit, since those permits could only be issued at the discretion of a public official.

Discretionary permits allow government officers to approve or deny permits on subjective grounds, even if the development is otherwise compliant with the regulatory code. By contrast, ministerial—or by-right—permits are issued automatically for any code-compliant project. In most areas of the country, discretionary permits are rare, but roughly one-third of California cities have ordinances that allow city planners to reject projects based on subjective criteria, such as deviations from the architectural style of surrounding properties. San Francisco is even more extreme, subjecting all construction projects to discretionary approval by default. CEQA thus became the primary vehicle through which neighborhood groups block, shrink, or delay unwanted development.

The Malthusian Dilemma Resurrected

The democratization of urban planning and the environmental movement certainly affected housing construction, but they were not explicitly aimed at that outcome. This would change with the no-growth movement that launched following the Sierra Club’s publication of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb in 1968.

The Population Bomb resurrected the Malthusian dilemma, which posited that human population growth would become unsustainable and lead to mass famine and a global war for resources. Like Thomas Malthus’s original argument in 1798, Ehrlich’s apocalypse never materialized. Both Malthus and Ehrlich failed to recognize that capital investment and human innovation under capitalism would lead to a more efficient use of resources, which has actually rendered food less scarce and lifted billions out of poverty.

Yet the myth of overpopulation was popular in California, and the state’s progressive residents decided that the best solution to global population growth was to prevent local population growth by limiting housing construction. Initially, cities tried placing an outright moratorium on new housing permits, but the courts ruled this tactic unlawful. So instead, city governments resorted to roundabout methods of blocking housing, such as withholding utility connections.

Although the specific strategy differed by locale, Marin County provides an illustrative example of how the no-growth movement brought all three themes together. In the early 1970s, Jane Jacobs–style community groups defeated a bond measure to build a new aqueduct, which the county needed to keep up with its growing population. Then, they elected a Sierra Club member to the water district board after he campaigned on an explicitly antigrowth platform.

The result of this manmade water shortage was that private property owners in Marin County were refused permits to build homes on undeveloped land. By 1979, according to one resident, their lives had been “controlled by the water supply for the last seven years.” But control of the water supply, of course, was merely the mechanism by which the democratic mob asserted its authority over the private property rights of individual citizens.

NIMBYism Versus Property Rights

These three movements—the democratization of urban planning, the politicization of the environmental movement, and the no-growth movement—came together to erect enormous barriers to housing construction in California. In the 1970s, they triggered the “permit explosion,” with construction projects facing dozens of new permit requirements before they could break ground. The 1980s saw a wave of downzoning ballot measures, which imposed new regulatory burdens on housing, such as parking requirements, minimum lot sizes, building height restrictions, and more.

With all these reforms now secure, the 1990s saw the neighborhood groups evolve into the modern Not in My Backyard (NIMBY) movement that took direct action against unwanted development through environmental lawsuits and even waving zucchinis in front of town councils to protest the shadow pollution that new homes would produce. Private property rights in California have been effectively socialized under the mantle of democracy.

If this is not democratic socialism, I would like to know what is.